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.

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Part 1: Thinking with Animals
  • Chapter 1: People with animals: a perspective of ethnozooarchaeology
  • Chapter 2: Can anatomically-modern humans be used as analogues for Neandertal foraging patterns?
  • Chapter 3: Killing (constructed) horses – interspecies elders, empathy and emotion, and the Pazyryk horse sacrifices
• Part 2: Living with Animals
  • Chapter 4: Manure: valued by farmers, under-valued by zooarchaeologists
  • Chapter 5: ‘Seasonal rhythms’ of a rural Kurdish village: ethnozooarchaeological research in Bestansur, Iraq
  • Chapter 6: Canis Pastoralis and Maremmano-Abruzzese: zooarchaeological and ethnographic parallels in ancient and modern livestock guardian dogs
  • Chapter 7: The killing season: ethnographic and zooarchaeological perspectives on residential mobility in Bronze Age Mongolia
• Part 3: Subsisting with Animals
  • Chapter 8: Ethnozooarchaeology of professional butchering in the Mahas Region, Sudan
  • Chapter 9: To fish, or not to fish? using observations of recent hunter-gatherer fishing in the interpretation of Late Pleistocene fish bone assemblages
  • Chapter 10: Reinterpreting the use of garfish (Lepisosteidae) in the archaeological record of the American southeast
• Part 4: People with Animals
  • Chapter 11: People with animals – perhaps the end of the beginning?