This book has had a long gestation. Its origin lies in a course I taught first as a visiting professor at UCLA some 15 years ago and several times since at Cornell. I had come to feel that zooarchaeology was ignoring many aspects of human–animal relations. In the course I sought to bring ethnography and other disciplines to bear on these issues in a more systematic way than I had begun to do in my research. The first outing of the course convinced me that this material needed to be developed into a book.

At first it seemed like a simple idea to point out the many roles that animals have played in human societies and how they might inform zooarchaeology. Only as I began writing did I realize that this task involved surveying zooarchaeology from around the world and in all periods, as well as the human–animal literature in other disciplines. Therefore, this book has come together slowly, the more so because although when I started there was very little zooarchaeological literature on these topics, as I was writing, what has come to be called social zooarchaeology flowered, eventually to the point where I could not include it all. What began as a cry in the wilderness has become a synthesis of exciting recent work and an attempt to plot a way forward.