Most, if not all, past human societies interacted with animals on a daily basis. Many ancient communities ate animal meat and used animals for their byproducts (milk, wool) and their bones and sinew for raw material to manufacture different artifacts. Many also used animals for transporting goods or people and for pulling carts and plows. Therefore, animal bones tend to be ubiquitous in the archaeological record. Until now, zooarchaeology students and instructors, as well as others interested in understanding human–animal interactions, did not have many comprehensive resources. An Introduction to Zooarchaeology by Diane Gifford-Gonzalez offers a broad overview of many methodological and interpretive approaches to the study of faunal assemblages from archaeological sites. Other volumes on faunal analysis do exist, but they have a different focus. Two that are most worth mentioning are Zooarchaeology by Elizabeth Reitz and Elizabeth Wing (1999) and Vertebrate Taphonomy by R. Lee Lyman (1994). Reitz and Wing's volume is a general reference manual on basic zooarchaeology concepts. Lyman's excellent volume focuses mostly on the postmortem and burial histories of faunal assemblages. In some ways, Gifford-Gonzalez's volume can be seen as complementary, because it takes a more archaeological approach than Lyman's and a more comprehensive methodological approach than do Reitz and Wing.

An Introduction to Zooarchaeology is divided into five parts. The first part includes three chapters that cover the history of zooarchaeology in different parts of the world, its relation to archaeology and to other disciplines that study animal remains, key definitions of zooarchaeological terms, and an overview of main concepts and themes such as uniformitarian approaches, actualistic research, and the problems of equifinality.

The second part of the volume comprises four chapters that cover animal bone tissue and its properties, nutritional contributions of animal consumption in humans (particularly during preagricultural times), and the literature on determining species, size, sex, and age from faunal assemblages. One important contribution on age estimates is Gifford-Gonzalez's discussion of precision, accuracy, and intrinsic population variation. She provides guidance on when to opt for lower precision but greater certainty and when to apply more sophisticated statistical analyses to population variability, such as Bayesian approaches instead of probabilistic approaches.

Bones need to be counted and identified to the anatomic and taxonomic level to allow for comparison between layers and contexts and between different sites or time periods. The third part of the volume is titled “Practical Approaches” and includes an overview of how to record bone information on databases, a discussion of different levels of identifiability, and a summary of basic quantification methods.

The fourth part focuses on the traces left on the bone by animals and humans, including fracture, carnivore and rodent tooth marks, cutting, percussion, and cooking signatures. It is important to note that these chapters include overviews of the complex behaviors behind the bone surface modifications. In this sense, they are valuable because readers will not only learn how to recognize the origins of such modifications on the bones (aided by excellent photographs in these chapters) but also better understand why they occur.

The last part is the longest in the volume, and it discusses several approaches to the ultimate goal of inferring the behavioral, social, and ecological contexts where the faunal assemblages were created. The initial chapter in this section presents some cases that illustrate how archaeologists interpret assemblages produced by multiple agents. The next chapter provides an overview of common statistical tests in zooarchaeology and some of the considerations needed when using different quantification units. It is followed by a discussion of skeletal element frequencies to infer human and animal carcass dismemberment, dispersal, and transport. The following chapter reviews attempts to measure nutritional utility values (meat, marrow, and bone grease, among others) of different body parts to elucidate humans’ decisions regarding animal selection, transport, and discard. It is common practice (and a necessity) to assess bone durability to calibrate bone bias preservation, and this is discussed in a very clear way.

The last four chapters delve well into ecological, behavioral, and social approaches. Of course, these approaches are not necessarily exclusive, and many scholars combine different aspects of them in their interpretation of faunal assemblages. For example, Gifford-Gonzalez discusses how zooarchaeologists approach the study of livestock management and predation (both in herding and hunting systems) through the analysis of mortality profiles, among other methods. The volume also offers an overview of stable isotope analysis and genetics and their application in understanding diet, mobility, and domestication. There is a chapter on the study of social relations from archaeofaunas, including discussions on social inequality, trade and exchange relations, and ethnic distinctions. Here Gifford-Gonzalez makes an important contribution to the subdiscipline by providing “conceptual tools for the zooarchaeological toolkit,” explicitly discussing how certain approaches can be applied to elucidate social relations. Such analytical approaches applied to zooarchaeology include household archaeology, chaîne opératoire and task differentiation approaches, a political economy approach, and practice theory. These conceptual tools are explained and exemplified with different case studies, and I think make for the strongest chapter in the textbook. The volume ends with a chapter on the progress and challenges of zooarchaeology. Particularly interesting is the table on the considerations that zooarchaeologists should take into account when approaching their analyses. It helps the reader consider and follow several key steps (such as research questions, the nature of the sample, choice of quantitative units, etc.) when approaching zooarchaeological analysis.

Some readers may notice a preponderance of Paleolithic, forager, and hunter-gatherer examples and scenarios. However, for those interested in ancient village or state societies, the methods and interpretations are largely applicable as well. An Introduction to Zooarchaeology will be undoubtedly valuable for undergraduate and graduate-level zooarchaeology courses. Some chapters, such as Chapter 5, “Why Animals Eat Animals,” can be appropriate to introductory archaeology courses. Human osteology and forensic anthropology instructors and students will find all the chapters and photographs on bone surface modification in Part IV particularly useful. Chapter 18, “Reasoning with Zooarchaeological Counting Units and Statistics,” could be a valuable addition to a statistics course for archaeologists because of its clear overview of the methods applied to faunal assemblages.

The title of the volume, although accurate, does not convey how comprehensive and sophisticated this volume is for an introductory book. Both those starting research in zooarchaeology and those with previous knowledge in the subdiscipline will find it valuable.