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.