ABSTRACT
This chapter provides sets of possibilities to assist people as excavators, academics and craft practitioners to think through the animal based relationships of materiality for sites, regions and periods, and then to integrate these with other parts of the missing majority, the plant materiality. Macroscopic features are usually recorded for yarns as breadth, twist direction and angle along with played structure details. Textile analysis includes these aspects but usually measures the thread count for both directions of woven textiles. Animal fibres are more resistant to fire whereas cellulose fibres in the form of charred cloth were often used as tinder. Fish skins are one of the most neglected aspects of material culture possibilities of the past. The range of ways in which animal materials can be processed into useful and expressive material culture items is nothing less than stunning.
