First Dogs

First Dogs provides the first comprehensive overview of the relationships between humanity’s best friend (and oldest domestic animal) and hunter-gatherers.

The book uses archaeological and anthropological evidence to explore the hunter-gatherer/canine relationship from the beginnings of the domestication process to the present. As well as looking at conventional case-studies from the Global North, it also uses examples from Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. The result is an understanding of how hunter-gatherers have lived with dogs that is novel in its thematic reach, its temporal span, and its global range. Having situated previous work on dogs and hunter-gatherers within the broader fields of archaeology and anthropology, the book first explores how, when, and where grey wolves became dogs before tracing their dispersal beyond Eurasia into North America, the tropics, and beyond. Four thematic chapters then consider their roles as hunting aids and transport technologies, as well as how they have been fed, cared for, and thought about by hunter-gatherer populations worldwide. A further chapter explores the canine dimension of European colonialism’s impacts on Indigenous peoples since 1492. The emphasis throughout is strongly interdisciplinary, drawing not only on archaeology and anthropology, but also on work in genetics, history, ecology, and linguistics.

First Dogs offers an up-to-date account of all aspects of the relationship between hunter-gatherers and their canine companions aimed at academic and non-academic audiences alike.

Peter Mitchell read Archaeology and Anthropology at Cambridge and obtained his doctorate from Oxford in 1987. After teaching in Cape Town and Wales, he returned to Oxford in 1995 where he is Professor of African Archaeology and Tutor and Fellow in Archaeology at St Hugh’s College. Along with a longstanding interest in the prehistory of southern African hunter-gatherers (which has involved extensive fieldwork in Lesotho) and Africa’s past more generally, he has written extensively on the archaeologies of dogs, donkeys, and horses. He is a past President of the Society of Africanist Archaeologists and co-editor of the journal Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa.