ABSTRACT
Domestication is necessarily the first stage in a process. It is not itself a process; domestication is the beginning of symbiosis, the result of domestication is the domesticated animal, and animal husbandry implies a higher category which follows domestication. Bokonyi writes, 'domestication can be seen as a gradual and dynamic, though not always irreversible, process'. When Bokonyi states that animal husbandry is a highly specialized phase of domestication, he does so only to explain the difficulty in differentiating, within a bone assemblage, domesticated animals from wild ones. Bokonyi's 'classic definition' probably applies most successfully to domestication from the Neolithic and later periods. Bokonyi's 1975 definition seems, however, to open up useful perspectives for more ancient periods during which humans appear to have deployed novel methods of exploiting nature. Archaeozoology is an observational discipline, where experimentation is not often used and where the most convincing idioms are reputed to be closer to the truth.
