Issues in archaeozoology

The study of fossil bones and other animal remains has a long tradition in the geological sciences. The related modern field of paleontology now borrows heavily from biological theory and, depending on its subject matter, also from zoology. A special direction of paleontological work was early associated with prehistorical excavations, and many nineteenth-century archaeologists had paleontological backgrounds. During the first half of this century, paleontologists were rarely involved in excavation; instead, they were relied on to identify selections of the more interesting bones retrieved. Commonly published as appendices to archaeological reports, such limited and often unrepresentative data were widely treated as if they provided a true spectrum of the wild animals living in an environment or the wild and/or domesticated animals eaten by a prehistorical group.

During the 1960s, many archaeologists began to appreciate that animal remains can provide as much economic information as the artifacts recovered from a site. The far-reaching implications of this realization were impressed on Americanist archaeologists by the work of White (1953–4) and subsequently reinforced by the Mexican Tehuacán and Oaxaca projects (Flannery, 1967, 1968; MacNeish, 1967, 1972). In any event, there has been rapid development in zoo-archaeological research facilities and training since the late 1960s (Burgess, 1980). The new generation of zoological archaeologists in North America will now complement similar groups already functioning at the universities of London, Groningen, and Munich.