Beastly Questions - by Naomi Sykes (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Zooarchaeology, the study of ancient animals, is a frequently side-lined subject in archaeology. This 'important and provocative' volume, now available in paperback, provides a crucial reversal of this bizarre situation - 'bizarre' because the archaeological record is composed largely of debris from human-animal relationships (be they in the form of animal bones, individual artifacts or entire landscapes) and many disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, and geography, recognise human-animal interactions as a key source of information for understanding cultural ideology.

By integrating knowledge from archaeological remains with evidence from texts, iconography, social anthropology and cultural geography, Beastly Questions: Animal Answers to Archaeological Issues seeks to encourage archaeological students, researchers and those working in the commercial sector to offer more engaging interpretations of the evidence at their disposal. Going beyond the simple confines of 'what people ate', this accessible but in-depth study covers a variety of high-profile topics in European archaeology and provides novel interpretations of mainstream archaeological questions. This includes cultural responses to wild animals, the domestication of animals and its implications on human daily practice, experience and ideology, the transportation of species and the value of incorporating animals into landscape research, the importance of the study of foodways for understanding past societies and how animal studies can help us to comprehend issues of human identity and ideology: past, present and future.

Review Quotes

A typically sideways, very personal, look at the study of animal remains from archaeological deposits, offering a new approach centred upon understanding the full, complex relations between people and the animals around them. Students will appreciate this as a source of information and ideas, academics will welcome a gust of fresh air through a dusty subject, and the general reader will enjoy a lively, often irreverent, book on a fascinating topic.

Naomi Sykes begins Beastly Questions thus, 'Zooarchaeology has begun to bore me.' That is not really true. What troubles her greatly is the sterility of a certain kind of zoöarchaeology which identifies, measures, orders and quantifies animal remains but fails to interrogate them as traces of the co-constituted social and cultural relations between humans and other animals in the past. Beastly Questions is a feisty, imaginative, academically thorough and extremely readable exploration of the potentials and possibilities of a new social zooarchaeology. From mere bones Sykes fleshes out the animals and reconnects them to human worlds. Bored? Not at all! This is a powerful reanimation.

This volume provides an important and provocative contribution to the zooarchaeological literature. Naomi Sykes demonstrates that zooarchaeology can do much more than simply provide appendices to archaeological site reports. She shows that faunal remains can answer a range of interesting questions about human-animal relationships in the past.

About the Author

Naomi Sykes is Senior Lecturer in Zooarchaeology at the Department of Archaeology, University of Nottingham, UK.