Overview

The human past is unimaginable without the horse. From our ancestors hunting and painting horses in the Upper Palaeolithic, to the earliest riders, the rise of equestrian empires, and the critical role of horses in war, settler colonialism, and modern state formation, human history is undeniably equestrian. Because of the deep and varied entanglements between people and horses, the study of horses of the past is inherently, and increasingly, interdisciplinary. However, scholars often do not understand the methods or know the research outside of their discipline. This book corrals a herd of specialist authors from seventeen countries that explain their disciplinary approaches and provide case studies of human-horse relationships in the past, including archaeology, history, classics, art history, literature, and veterinary medicine. This ground-covering volume overviews key methods, theory, period, and area studies. Aimed at scholars wanting to understand and incorporate research outside of their speciality, or those who wish to undertake collaborative projects, it is also designed as a starting point for students and non-specialists to pursue the study of horses in the past.

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Kate Kanne is an anthropological archaeologist investigating the evolution and bioarchaeology of domestication relationships, including agropastoralism, the origins and spread of equestrianism in the European Bronze Age, and the development of mounted warfare, in order to interrogate their effects on the long-term trajectory of sociopolitical and anthropogenic change. Helene Benkert completed her MSc at the University of Sheffield with a specialisation in zooarchaeology. Her PhD thesis (2023, Exeter) investigated horse stature and morphology in medieval Europe, in collaboration with the AHRC-funded Project “Warhorse – A medieval revolution?”. After a Master’s degree at Sorbonne Université (France), Camille Vo Van Qui completed a PhD in medieval studies at the University of Exeter (UK), on the topic of “The breaking-in and training of horses in medieval France (1250-1550).” This interdisciplinary project used methodologies from the field of animal studies and a combination of historical, archaeological, and iconographic sources and focusses primarily on French translations of Jordanus Rufus’s De medicina equorum (c. 1250).

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