Transdisciplinary Approaches to Past Human-Animal Relations

Dear Colleagues,

The entangled lives of humans and non-human animals have long and complex histories. We have lived in multi-species societies for at least 15,000 years, and our relationships with animals remain one of the fundamental aspects of modern culture. Our understanding of the history and cultural impacts of human-animal relations is grounded in a number of disciplines, including archaeology, bioarchaeological sciences, anthropology, philosophy, history, historical sociology, psychology, literature, and art history. However, these disciplines do not have an equal voice in knowledge production or syntheses, or in representations of animals and interspecies encounters in museums, heritage sites, academic publications, educational materials, or popular media. There may be a number of reasons for this, but one factor is the challenge of working across disciplines, both for researchers and for those in the education and heritage sectors working to integrate and translate research for a wider audience.

This Special Issue focusses on transdisciplinary research efforts to understand and/or represent different aspects of past human-animal relations, in order to place a spotlight on the methods, challenges, and benefits of higher level syntheses integrating two or more disciplines. Both original research papers and reviews are welcome on any transdisciplinary approaches to understanding the tangible or intangible heritage of human-animal relations of any time period(s) up to the present day. This may include, for example, the understanding of particular practices, attitudes and beliefs, shared spaces, places and landscapes, or material culture that was/is used to mediate human-animal relations.

Dr. Karen Milek
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Heritage is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• interdisciplinary animal studies
• tangible and intangible heritage
• the ‘animal turn’
• bioarchaeology
• zooarchaeology
• ethnozooarchaeology
• geoarchaeology
• representations of animals and interspecies encounter