ABSTRACT
In a review of Northrop Frye’s book The Stubborn Structure, novelist Stephen Vizinczey asked: “Is it possible that I am not alone in believing that in the dispute between Galileo and the Church, the Church was right and the centre of man’s universe is the earth?”1 Archaeologists would accept this as an excellent question, for the earth-and particularly the plants and animals that inhabit it-shapes human cultures. Without knowledge of the environment in which a group of people lived, archaeologists can never hope to fully understand those people and their world. For that reason, among others, identifying the flora and fauna that surrounded and were exploited by the people inhabiting an archaeological site is an important facet of any archaeological research project. Unfortunately, many floral and faunal remains do not preserve well in the archaeological record, and identifying and studying them is extremely complicated. For those reasons, archaeologists have to rely on specialists-archaeobotanists (also known as paleobotanists or paleoethnobotanists), who study plant remains, and zooarchaeologists, who study animal remains-for most analyses. Because floral and faunal analyses are such specialties, we will only scratch their surface here, as we briefly consider the variety of floral and faunal materials that archaeologists collect and the kinds of analyses done by archaeobotanists and zooarchaeologists. Before we get to that, however, let’s first consider how archaeologists collect plant and animal remains.
