ABSTRACT
Forty years ago animals had little to do with archaeology, except in artistic representation, and the relationships between and animals, if thought about at all, were classed as anthropology or biology. To the non-biologist, wild animals were ferocious beasts to be shot on sight, nature was red in tooth and claw, and natural history was pursued with a butterfly net. Over the past 40 years great progress has been made in the understanding of human history and its interlocking with the animal world. Archaeology is no longer only the study of sherds and flints, and a whole new field of work, archaeozoology, has become an essential part of the subject. Sloan describes the exploitation of shellfish in northern Europe during the Mesolithic, and suggests that the abundance of food available from this source enabled settlements to survive in one place for very long periods.
