The OUP handbook series has become a publishing mega-phenomenon, with hundreds of volumes on everything from credit derivatives to the psalms. Some two dozen are on archaeology, mostly with geographic or topical foci: ancient Iran, death and burial and the like. Hardly any are on the application of particular methodologies across the full range of archaeology, which is why this major volume marks such a new direction: congratulations to OUP for this adventurous—and highly successful—new departure.

The volume contains an Introduction and 46 chapters, divided between continents: Europe gets 14, Asia, Africa and North America eight each, South America and Oceania/Australasia four apiece. The thoughtful introduction by Umberto Albarella documents the decades-long emergence of zooarchaeology from the backwaters of unread appendices within excavation monographs into the mainstream of archaeology. Peter Bogucki in his foreword makes the nice point that reading the papers taught him at least as much about the archaeology of a particular area as they did about the faunal remains themselves, so “the book is thus an outstanding illustration of zooarchaeology as archaeology” (p. v). A certain very eminent prehistorian once said in the hearing of this reviewer that we have spent 150 years studying stone tools—but how much have we actually learned from it? No reader of this book could say the same about animal bones, despite zooarchaeology's much shorter research history.

Four papers venture back into the Late Pleistocene—Germonpré and Sablin (Russia), Boyle (Western Europe), Cosgrove and Garvey (Tasmania) and Plug (Southern Africa)—but the rest are firmly rooted in the Holocene. There are no early hominin taphonomic studies of the kind so widespread in the 1980s. Breadth of focus varies considerably, from domestication across the South Asian sub-continent (Patel and Meadow), to a single site complex, Kerma in Sudan (Chaix); although when just one grave at that site is surrounded by no fewer than 4899 bucrania, the justification is clear!

Many papers consider topics in the historical period, and show that zooarchaeology can refresh the parts that historical documents cannot reach. The provisioning of seventeenth-century Dutch merchant ships at the Cape of Good Hope was recorded in detail—but the zooarchaeological record reveals that although the ships were indeed supplied with the mutton that the documents record, the people at the Table Bay station themselves largely ate beef, invisible in the documentation (Heinrich). Seventeenth-century Susquehannock people sold furs to Europeans; they therefore increased their hunting of beaver, and concentrated on hunting prime adult deer in the early winter to get pelts of the largest size and in the best condition (Lapham). The Muslim period in Portugal saw sheep deliberately bred for larger size and more meat (Davis). The earliest Vikings on Iceland initially made a lot of use of fish and waterfowl before developing an effective farming regime involving sheep, goat, cattle and pigs. When they tried to replicate this on Greenland, however, it did not work, and they had to resort to ever more hunting, fishing and the procurement of export items, until they themselves went extinct (Smiarowski et al.). The animal cults of first-millennium BC Egypt are well documented, but their sheer scale is revealed by the fact that the Catacombs of Anubis at Saqqara contained nearly eight million canid mummies, with all that that implies for the trade in the natron required to mummify them (Ikram).

In the prehistoric period there is no documentary evidence to mislead us, and zooarchaeology is a prime method of revealing the past. Early and Middle Iron Age communities in Southern Africa relied mainly on sheep and goat, while from the Late Iron Age the emphasis has been on cattle. In recent times, caprines have been associated with matrilineal societies, and cattle with patrilineal ones, so a major societal change towards patriliny is a probable explanation for the change (Badenhorst). On the Northwest Coast of North America, people had developed sophisticated methods of procuring fish and marine mammals from far offshore by as early as 9300 BP (Monks)—no slow incremental progressivism here. In Mexico, the number of species weighing >100kg reduced from 62 to a mere four at the end of the Pleistocene; up to 15 sites in the Valley of Mexico have humanly modified mammoth bone, so new light will undoubtedly be cast on possible human roles in megafaunal extinction (Arroyo-Cabrales and Corona-M). Late Pleistocene people in Tasmania migrated between autumn/winter lowland settlements and spring/summer upland ones, concentrating their efforts on bringing home the nutritious rear limbs of Bennett's wallabies (Cosgrove and Garvey). Brazilian shell mounds have alternating shelly and dark layers, the latter containing human burials as well as many fish, perhaps indicating funerary feasting. The layers of shell may represent deliberate ‘closures’ of burial events rather than simply dietary waste (Klokler).

Microbiological methods, particularly isotopic and DNA analyses, feature in various papers, and it is clear that they have been successfully incorporated into zooarchaeology. DNA has grabbed many headlines in recent years, but this seems to be fading as the ‘low hanging fruit’ big questions have been answered. Such big questions make useful contributions to some papers: the modern water buffalo, Bubalus bubalis, was not, as previously thought, domesticated in the Yangzi Valley because it is not descended from the extinct indigenous buffalo, Bubalus mephistopheles (Liu and Ma); and African domestic cattle, despite early DNA-based claims to the contrary, have been revealed by whole-genome mtDNA to be descendants of animals introduced from the Near East—thus bringing DNA into line with the weight of conventional zooarchaeological evidence (Gifford-Gonzalez). DNA also has the capacity to answer more focused questions, a particularly neat example being the demonstration that domestic pig lineages were introduced to Okinawa much earlier than documentary evidence suggests (Hongo). This reviewer, however, opines that the humble isotope, so long the ugly sister in the archaeo-microbiological family, is beginning to outshine its flashier sibling because of its more general capacity to answer interesting questions. Thus, long-range migrations of bison in North America turn out to be largely mythical, despite the impression gained from nineteenth-century written sources (Speth); the sheep and goats at Aşiklı Höyük grazed together, but the cattle were probably foddered (Peters et al.); and camelids at Inca sites in north-west Argentina had highly varied diets, suggesting the existence of some manured pastures and the movement of animals between different altitudinal zones (Mengoni Goñalons). These are the kinds of questions to which archaeologists need answers—and isotopic studies can answer them better than aDNA.

The book therefore reinforces the comment from Peter Bogucki (quoted above): zooarchaeology is not just about bones, it is one of the best means of answering archaeological questions. The papers in this book, and their bibliographies, will repay close scrutiny for years to come. It would have been nice to have more papers from South America, Oceania and Australasia, all of which have strongly developing zooarchaeological traditions, but those here do provide good starting points for further exploration. Not all the figures have reproduced well in greyscale, but mostly remain legible. There is supplementary online material, but the URL is missing from the main text and inserted on an erratum slip—this reviewer (admittedly no techno whiz kid) was unable to track it down even then. These are pretty minor quibbles, however. All in all, the book is an assertion of the importance of zooarchaeology as a line of enquiry within the discipline as a whole. It should be on the shelves of not just ‘bone buffs’, but of archaeologists across the discipline.