ABSTRACT
Animals provide an enormous range of raw materials that can be processed and used in a variety of ways to make items such as a horn comb, bone needle, ivory carving, antler harpoon, feather arrow fletching, fur clothing and a hide container. The most obvious raw materials are those parts of the skeleton that can be fashioned into a wide range of tools. Antler, ivory and horn are the other skeletal products that have often been utilized. Because skeletal elements are durable in many types of deposits, they have attracted considerable attention and generated a substantial literature. The soft products of animals are a different matter, but no less important: the skins and often fibres of animals have immense importance in the ethnographic present and were doubtlessly important in prehistory. The kinds of materials and the ways these can be processed and used are divided here into hard products, soft products and animal substances. Shells have been included with the hard animal products and feathers and felt are added to the softer animal materials. The first examples give a whole animal approach in order to emphasize the way in which animal resources would have occurred in the past, often providing both food and materials.
