From Butchery to Belief: Neo-Taphonomic Approaches to Faunal Practices and Multispecies Ecologies in Northeast India

Atashi Maitra

In exploring human–animal relationships, this study examines the spaces animals occupy within human life-worlds, and the diverse forms of interaction humans maintain with them – social, cultural, economic, and ecological. Among the indigenous ethnic communities of Northeast India, environmental and animal domains are not viewed as separate but as integrated and mutually interdependent within multispecies traditional ecologies. Moving beyond subsistence-centred interpretations, the paper re-examines how animal embodies social organisation, ritual behaviour, mobility patterns, and belief structures of indigenous hunting-foraging communities of the North Cachar Hills (Dima Hasao). Employing a multispecies ethnoarchaeological framework, the study investigates how animals are embedded within systems of traditional ecological knowledge, belief structures, and community organisation. Practices such as hunting, rearing, feasting, exchange, and conservation are analysed to understand how faunal practices articulate mobility patterns, dietary strategies, and social hierarchy. Integrating ethnographic fieldwork with social-zooarchaeological and controlled actualistic butchery experiments, including the documentation of cut marks, burning traces, and deposition patterns. The research generates interpretive models for understanding animal remains beyond their dietary function. By bridging material evidence with indigenous traditional ontologies, the paper argues that faunal assemblages function as cultural and ecological archives, material signatures of identity formation, symbolic meaning, behavioural adaptation, and collective memory. In doing so, the study contributes to broader debates on multispecies ecologies and the interpretive potential of faunal data in reconstructing human social worlds in Northeast India.