Session: #672

Content:

In the Pleistocene epoch, animals were common food resources for humans. The archaeological findings of animal exploitation largely are related to herbivores and carnivores but remains of any other living creature of the Earth's biome can be part of the faunal assemblages. Archaeozoological studies indicated that animal species of different kinds were hunted or scavenged for dietary purposes, to obtain raw materials for clothing, ornamentation, musical instruments, housing, tools of domestic activity, and to construct hunting weaponry. Therefore, animals were the most important resources for a thriving human existence in the Pleistocene. Prey animals were of different species, each of which had a specific behavior that may have demanded particular knowledge and technique of hunting and exploiting methods. As animal bones are often part of the Pleistocene archaeological site, there must be various evidence of animal exploitation embedded together with artifacts and fossil remnants of human behavior. The exploitation of animals by Pleistocene humans thus shapes and fundamentally contributes to the formation of the Pleistocene archaeological record.

This session aims at
- inspiring to review archaeological assemblages to illustrate human purposes, techniques, technologies, constraints, and adaptations in animal exploitation;
- seeing the variability or principles of human behavior involved in animal exploitation;
- discussing how prey ecology affected the organization of human living, subsistence strategy, and technology;
- reconstructing the variability of hunting strategies;
- studying adaptiveness in human behavior that adjusts subsistence strategy to the changing environment and prey spectrum;
- understanding human mobility and settlement network of hunter-gatherers in relation to animal exploitation;
- finding correlations between prey species and artifacts;
- studying the roots of animal domestication in hunter-gatherer societies;
- exploring the role of Pleistocene wildlife in the formation of the archaeological record.

Session: #672

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