Placing Animals in the Neolithic: Social Zooarchaeology of Prehistoric Farming Communities Book

"The emergence and further development of European Neolithic societies was a multi-scalar and highly diverse process. This book provides a detailed account of hitherto unexplored domains of relations between early farmers and their animals intertwined with the construction of Neolithic social and ritual space and landscape to assert social identity. It is ethnographically informed, grounded in recent approaches in social anthropological and archaeological theory. It incorporates developments in their topical themes: agency, identity, community, household, landscape and place, particularly focusing on the historically contingent relationship of space and identity." The book also provides an approach refreshing for a zooarchaeological work, being the first work to fuse recent theoretical advances in social archaeology and animal remains into a new approach to studying past communities. It deals with cutting-edge issues of archaeological analysis and interpretation, including the link between everyday practice and multiscalar analysis of faunal remains as social data. It is theoretically sophisticated, covering topics such as non-economic roles of animals, animal categories, consumption modes, feasting and structured deposition.