Regional zooarchaeology and global change: Problems and potentials

Zooarchaeology is a potentially critical tool for the reconstruction of past regional landscapes. The sub-field is increasingly being asked to contribute to long-term studies of human interaction with the environment associated with national and international investigations of past and future global change. Inter-site comparison of animal bone collections (archaeofaunas) is central to such regional approaches. However, zooarchaeologists have identified many factors of deposition, attrition, recovery and analysis that might appear to make such comparisons problematic. Using selected examples drawn from the North Atlantic and Eastern Arctic, this paper suggests that, while inter-site comparison is not a trivial problem, it may be possible to compare animal bone collections effectively if we carefully match our research questions to our data resources.