People with Animals emphasises the interdependence of people and animals in society, and contributors examine the variety of forms and time-depth that these relations can take. The types of relationship studied include the importance of manure to farming societies, dogs as livestock guardians, seasonality in pastoralist societies, butchery, symbolism and food. Examples are drawn from the Pleistocene to the present day and from the Altai Mountains, Ethiopia, Iraq, Italy, Mongolia and North America. The 11 papers work from the basis that animals are an integral part of society and that past society is the object of most archaeological enquiry. Discussion papers explore this topic and use the case-studies presented in other contributions to suggest the importance of ethnozooarchaeology not just to archaeology but also to anthrozoology. A further contribution to archaeological theory is made by an argument for the validity of ethnozooarchaeology derived models to Neandertals. The book makes a compelling case for the importance of human-animal relations in the archaeological record and demonstrates why the information contained in this record is of significance to specialists in other disciplines.
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Part 1. Thinking with Animals
1. People with Animals: A Perspective of Ethnozooarchaeology
Lee Broderick
2. What Can the Fauna Tell Us of Neanderthal Subsistence Behaviour?
Benjamin Collins
3. Killing (Constructed) Horses - Interspecies Elders, Empathy and Emotion, and the Pazyryk Horse Sacrifices
G. Argent
Part 2. Living with Animals
4. Manure: Valued by Farmers, Under-Valued by Zooarchaeologists
Lee Broderick & Michael Wallace
5. ‘Seasonal Rhythms’ of a Rural Kurdish Village: Ethnozooarchaeological Research in Bestansur, Iraq
R. Bendrey, J. Whitlam, S. Elliot, K. Rauf Aziz, R. Matthews & W. Matthews
6. Canis Pastoralis and Maremmano-Abruzzese: Zooarchaeological and Ethnographic Parallels in Ancient and Modern Livestock Guardian Dogs
Elan N. Love
7. The Killing Season: Ethnographic and Zooarchaeological Perspectives on Residential Mobility in Bronze Age Mongolia
Jean-Luc Houle
Part 3. Subsisting with Animals
8. Ethnozooarchaeology of Professional Butchering in the Mahas Region, Sudan
Elizabeth R. Arnold & Diane Lyons
9. To Fish, or not to Fish? Using Observations of Recent Hunter-Gatherer Fishing in the Interpretation of Late Pleistocene Fish Bone Assemblages
Hannah Russ
Reinterpreting the use of Garfish (Lepisosteidae) in the Archaeological Record of the American Southeast
T. Peres & A. Deter-Wolf
Part 4. People with Animals
10. People with Animals – Perhaps the End of the Beginning?
Terry O’Connor
"Framing animals beyond material purposes is far from an easy task… to such an end, books as [People with Animals] will no doubt pave the way."
Arturo Morales-Muñiz
Orbis Terrarum
(19/11/2018)
"Anyone who is interested in these topics, and wishes to continue or extend his or her perspective in the field should have this book. After all the price of £38 would certainly not make me hesitate to add it to my own bookshelf."
Julie Daujat
Landscape Hiostry
(16/05/2017)
"Successfully demonstrates the varied roles that animals can play for human societies and the ways in which study of human-animal relations contributes to deeper understanding of those societies. Moreover, it clearly shows the usefulness of analogy for generating insight and avenues for research into past cultures, while acknowlkedging the constraints and importance of context when analogising."
Kristopher Poole
Medieval Archaeology
(02/02/2017)
