Bones and Identity: Zooarchaeological Approaches to Reconstructing Social and Cultural Landscapes in Southwest Asia

Nimrod Marom · Reuven Yeshuran · Lior Weissbrod · Guy Bar-Oz

Jul 2016 · Oxbow Books

About this ebook

Seventeen papers demonstrate how zooarchaeologists engage with questions of identity through culinary references, livestock husbandry practices and land use. Contributions combine hitherto unpublished zooarchaeological data from regions straddling a wide geographic expanse between Greece in the West and India in the East and spanning a time range from the latest part of the Palaeolithic to the Middle Ages. The vitality of a hands-on approach to data presentation and interpretation carried out primarily at the level of the individual site – the arena of research providing the bread and butter of zooarchaeological work conducted in southwest Asia – is demonstrated. Among the themes explored are shifting identities of late hunter-gatherers through interactions with settled agrarian societies; the management of camp sites by early complex hunter-gatherers; processes of assimilation of Roman culinary practices among Egyptian elites; and the propagation of medieval pilgrim identity through the use of seashell insignia. A wealth of new data is discussed and a wide variety of applications of analytical approaches are applied to particular case studies within the framework of social and contextual zooarchaeology. The volume constitutes the proceedings of the 11th meeting of the ICAZ Working Group - Archaeozoology of Southwestern Asia and Adjacent Areas (ASWA).

About the author

Nimrod Marom is a research fellow at the Zinman Institute of Archaeology at the University of Haifa and lecturer of archaeology at Tel-Hai College. He studies faunal assemblages from Neolithic to early modern archaeological sites, currently focusing on the Bronze and the Iron Ages of Tel Hazor, Tel Kabri, Tel Akhziv, Tel Abel Beth-Maacha, and Zincirli Höyük.

Reuven Yeshurun is lecturer of Archaeology at the University of Haifa. his main research interests are in the Palaeolithic and Epipalaeolithic periods, focusing on the first settled societies of the Near East and especially on the Natufian Culture.

Lior Weissbrod is a research fellow at the Zinman Institute of Archaeology at the University of Haifa. He is interested in the evolutionary relationship between human culture and biodiversity and in reconstructing the environments and palaeoecology of ancient human settlements.

Guy Bar-Oz is Professor of Archaeology at the University of Haifa. His research experience in zooarchaeology includes excavation and analysis of numerous prehistoric and historic bone assemblages from Israel and the Caucasus. His research focuses on the evolution of human hunting and subsistence behaviour in prehistory, the development of complex economic-subsistence systems in the historic periods of the Near East, and human impact on the environment.