OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
The domestic ferret (Mustela putorius furo) offers an unconventional but fascinating and unique opportunity to explore the complexities and dynamism of human-animal relationships. Despite being widely used today as working animals, pets, and subjects in biomedical research, the history of ferrets is widely uncertain, complicated by a scarcity of archaeological evidence and ambiguities within the historic record. What is clear, however, is that ferrets are a particularly striking case of how narratives about where and when an animal was domesticated can be built upon ambiguous and limited evidence. I will reinvestigate these narratives through an interdisciplinary approach which weaves together historical, linguistic, archaeological, and genomic evidence. By harnessing the opportunity to investigate one of few domestication events occurring in the historic period, I hope to demonstrate the value of interdisciplinary research and uncover new insights into the domestication of ferrets – and domestication process more generally.