i swear i'm not a horse girl (but the pazyryks were) - argent's "inked"
Humans will really bond with anything. People get super attached to their houseplants, own pet rocks, mourn the loss of their broken-down old cars, and think the Starships around campus are really cute (who would even think that?? haha ha hah…). It only makes sense that bonds will form between humans and horses, who spend years collaboratively learning and adapting to one another. Argent utilizes her own personal experience with horses, stating that "riding is a 'joint action' (Sanders, 2007) between rider and horse, where both must move in synchrony together, anticipating and predicting the other's actions in order to remain safe" (180).
Horses served a multitude of practical, cultural, and spiritual purposes for the Pazyryk people, making them an undeniably important feature in their lives. Yet overall, "smaller-scale, embodied, emotional interspecies interactions fed into larger social structures and cosmological meanings" (190). Argent points out that these individual interactions are important for archaeologists to consider, especially considering the impact that these interspecies relationships have on human societies as a whole.
I didn’t read the Pazyryk article, but I find it interesting that it is important for them to consider riding a horse as an act of “doing with the horse” rather than “doing to the horse”. Similarly, in the Whitridge article he critiques an analysis of Stonehenge that spoke positively of placemaking in regards to ancient festivals but negatively in regards to modern treatments. He said, “scientist and technocrats are also individuals and members of society, and everyone’s place-making articulates with a common (and limited) material reality” (Whitridge 215). In the same way that riding is collaborative, he describes place-making as not a singular act, but an ongoing interaction between the space and every person who perceives and affects it.

















