Horses and the Human Story: A Global Perspective
Friday, December 6
CU Museum Paleontology Hall
Detailed schedule below
Around the world, relationships between people and horses have had a tremendous impact on the human story, forever changing ways of life from transport to communication, subsistence, and belief. Drawing together leading scholars and thinkers from around the world to share perspectives on the human-horse story, this symposium celebrates the release of the 2024 Eugene M. Kayden Book Prize Award winning book, Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History. This symposium will bring together one external invited speaker and six internal (CU community) speakers to talk about different aspects of horse culture, including three specialists in Asia (Dr. Stephanie Su, Dr. William Taylor, and Dr. Tamar McKee). The book at the heart of the symposium,ÌýHoof Beats, is drawn from my own field research in Asia, and thematically focuses on Asian horse cultures in the deep past.
8:30am Welcome Remarks
8:35am ྟ(rTa)Ìýof Tibet: Tracing the Evolution of Horses on the Tibetan Plateau from Prayer to ProtestÌý–ÌýTamar McKee, Center of the American West
9:00am The Heavenly, the Royal, and the Patriotic: The Changing Symbolism of Horses in Chinese ArtÌý–ÌýStephanie Su, Art and Art History
9:45am The Mounted Warrior: Contextualizing Human Osteological 'Riding' MarkersÌý–ÌýLauren Hosek, Department of Anthropology
10:15am Odin the Horse Master: the Mythic Evidence of a Nordic Horse Cult and its Social ImplicationsÌý–ÌýMathias Nordwig, Nordic Program, Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures
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11:00am Equids in the Old Oyo Empire, West AfricaÌý-ÌýOlumide Ojediran, Department of Anthropology
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11:30am Animal Suffering, Anti-Cruelty Activism, and Equine Ventriloquism During the Great Horse Flu of 1872-1873Ìý–ÌýThomas Andrews, Center of the American West
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12:00pm Seminar,ÌýThe Strongest Riders in the World: Ancient Horsemanship as Modern Sport in Central AsiaÌý–ÌýWill Grant, author ofÌýThe Last Ride of the Pony Express
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2:30pm Panel Discussion with All Symposium Participants, Q&A
4pm Discussant:ÌýHorses and the Human Story, from the Eurasian Steppes to the Great PlainsÌýÌý-ÌýWilliam Taylor,Assistant Professor of Anthropology & Curator of Archaeology at the CU Museum of Natural History, author ofÌýHoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History, book signing
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7:30pm Keynote Lecture,ÌýHoof Beats and the Humans in the Saddle: History, Culture, and Epistemology in a Distant LandÌý-AkinÌýOgundiran, Northwestern University
Free and Open to the Public
Made possible by the Kayden Book Award, College of Arts & Sciences, the University of Colorado Natural History Museum, The Center for the American West and the Center for Asian Studies