People with Animals emphasizes 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 inquiry. 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 Neanderthals. 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.

This book examines how the study of human-animal relations can help us interpret archaeological evidence. An international range of contributors examines fishing, hunting and husbandry, slaughtering and butchering, ceremonial and ritual practices and techniques of deposition and disposal in traditional societies. Topics covered include the theoretical potential of ethnographic research for zooarchaeology, the use of comparative analogies in the ethnographic and zooarchaeological records, the historical developments of ethnozooarchaeology and specific case studies selected from across the world. This broad geographic approach encompasses examples from different types of societies, ranging from hunter-gatherers to urban populations and from horticulturalists to traditional farmers and pastoralists. This book will be of interest to researchers in a range of fields, including anthropology, ethnohistory and zooarchaeology.

Ethnoarchaeology in Action is the first and only comprehensive study of ethnoarchaeology, the ethnographic study of living cultures from archaeological perspectives, and is designed for senior undergraduates and above in archaeology and anthropology. Its geographical coverage is global and the book includes relevant theory, practical advice regarding fieldwork, and complete topical coverage of the discipline. Critical discussions of varied case studies make this a very readable book. It is illustrated with numerous figures and photographs of many leading ethnoarchaeologists in action.

Humans are unique in their ability to inhabit an immense range of physical habitats. This capacity partially results from the need to cope with variation in spatial and temporal distributions of critical resources. Yet factors other than the search for food often impacts relocation. Information gathering, raw material collection, social networking, trade, and mate search each present mobility needs that compete with daily food searches. While physical evidence might explain such human behavior, ethnographic information can reveal how these events interrelate, providing the missing link between human activities and the remains preserved in the archaeological record.

For centuries, the goal of archaeologists was to document and describe material artifacts, and at best to make inferences about the origins and evolution of human culture and about prehistoric and historic societies. During the 1960s, however, a number of young, primarily American archaeologists, including William Longacre, rebelled against this simplistic approach. Wanting to do more than just describe, Longacre and others believed that genuine explanations could be achieved by changing the direction, scope, and methodology of the field. What resulted was the New Archaeology, which blended scientific method and anthropology. It urged those working in the field to formulate hypotheses, derive conclusions deductively and, most important, to test them. While, over time the New Archaeology has had its critics, one point remains irrefutable: archaeology will never return to what has since been called its Òstate of innocence.Ó In this collection of twelve new chapters, four generations of Longacre protŽgŽs show how they are building upon and developing but also modifying the theoretical paradigm that remains at the core of Americanist archaeology. The contributions focus on six themes prominent in LongacreÕs career: the intellectual history of the field in the late twentieth century, archaeological methodology, analogical inference, ethnoarchaeology, cultural evolution, and reconstructing ancient society. More than a comprehensive overview of the ideas developed by one of the most influential scholars in the field, however, Archaeological Anthropology makes stimulating contributions to contemporary research. The contributors do not unequivocally endorse LongacreÕs ideas; they challenge them and expand beyond them, making this volume a fitting tribute to a man whose robust research and teaching career continues to resonate.

A general introduction to archeogaming describing the intersection of archaeology and video games and applying archaeological method and theory into understanding game-spaces. “[T]he author’s clarity of style makes it accessible to all readers, with or without an archaeological background. Moreover, his personal anecdotes and gameplay experiences with different game titles, from which his ideas often develop, make it very enjoyable reading.”—Antiquity Video games exemplify contemporary material objects, resources, and spaces that people use to define their culture. Video games also serve as archaeological sites in the traditional sense as a place, in which evidence of past activity is preserved and has been, or may be, investigated using the discipline of archaeology, and which represents a part of the archaeological record. From the introduction: Archaeogaming, broadly defined, is the archaeology both in and of digital games... As will be described in the following chapters, digital games are archaeological sites, landscapes, and artifacts, and the game-spaces held within those media can also be understood archaeologically as digital built environments containing their own material culture... Archaeogaming does not limit its study to those video games that are set in the past or that are treated as “historical games,” nor does it focus solely on the exploration and analysis of ruins or of other built environments that appear in the world of the game. Any video game—from Pac-Man to Super Meat Boy—can be studied archaeologically.

Ethnoarchaeology, the study of material culture in a living society by archaeologists, facilitates the extraction of information from prehistoric materials as well. Studies of contemporary pottery-making were initiated in the southwestern United States toward the end of the nineteenth century, then abandoned as a result of changes in archaeological theory. Now a resurgence in ethnoarchaeology over the past twenty-five years offers a new set of directions for the discipline. This volume presents the results of such work with pottery, a class of materials that occurs abundantly in many archaeological sites. Drawing on projects undertaken around the world, in the Phillipines, East Africa, Mesoamerica, India, in both traditional and complex societies, the contributors focus on identifying social and behavioral sources of ceramic variation to show how analogical reasoning is fundamental to archaeological interpretation. As the number of pottery-making societies declines, opportunities for such research must be seized. By bringing together a variety of ceramic ethnoarchaeological analyses, this volume offers the profession a much-needed touchstone on method and theory for the study of pottery-making among living peoples.

Stressing the interdisciplinary, public-policy oriented character of Cultural Resource Management (CRM), which is not merely “applied archaeology,” this short, relatively uncomplicated introduction is aimed at emerging archaeologists. Drawing on fifty-plus years’ experience, and augmented by the advice of fourteen collaborators, Cultural Resource Management explains what “CRM archaeologists” do, and explores the public policy, ethical, and pragmatic implications of doing it for a living.

Village Ethnoarchaeology: Rural Iran in Archaeological Perspective discusses selected tangible features of the subject area, noting the differences in households and associated material culture. The book comments among settlement variability, the complexities in relationships among population density, settlement age, area, and function. The text also deals with material correlates of sociocultural behavior, spatial organization, architectural variability, regional patterns, and archaeological sampling strategies. The book presents a study based on three sets of contemporary data: (1) from an ethnographic fieldwork on Aliabad in summer 1975; (2) the census and cartographic documents published by the Iranian government; and (3) a corpus of published comparative ethnographic data. The book notes that among the households in Aliabad, which is neither economically stratified nor markedly heterogeneous, economic variations exist. The text suggests that that material diversity and systems involving socioeconomic differentiation can have substantial time depth in this part of the world. The book can prove beneficial for archaeologists, anthropologist, sociologists, and researchers interested in ethnographic accounts of Middle Eastern communities.

Anthropological archaeologists have long attempted to develop models that will let them better understand the evolution of human social organization. In our search to understand how chiefdoms and states evolve, and how those societies differ from egalitarian 'bands', we have neglected to develop models that will aid the understanding of the wide range of variability that exists between them. This volume attempts to fill this gap by exploring social organization in tribal - or 'autonomous village' - societies from several different ethnographic, ethnohistoric, and archaeological contexts - from the Pre-Pottery Neolithic Period in the Near East to the contemporary Jivaro of Amazonia.