Animal Secondary Products: Domestic Animal Exploitation in Prehistoric Europe, the Near East and the Far East ed. by Haskel Greenfield (review)

The volume’s focus is on how, when, where and to what extent animals came to be exploited for so-called “secondary products,” that is, mainly those things we use animals for other than hides, furs and flesh. The list of such products includes milk (and other dairy products), hair (with wool being one form), traction (pulling plows and wheeled or unwheeled vehicles) and dung (either for fertilizer or hearth fuels in relatively treeless places). This book is mainly the result of a session at the 2010 International Council for Archaeozoology Conference held in Paris, France. The editor, Haskel Greenfield, is to be commended for the never easy job of pulling together the session papers for publication, and that within four years of the conference. Clearly, animal bones have come a long way in importance since the Vinča (Serbia) faunal assemblage was dumped into the Danube many years ago, the story of which Greenfield relates toward the end of the book.

Authors who contributed to the conference session and the book were asked to evaluate the goodness of fit of Andrew Sherratt’s famous early 1980s papers, as well as earlier works by others that Sherratt drew on, given new data and new methods. The contributors engage with Sherratt’s work, mainly using evidence derived from zooarchaeological studies (that subfield whose concentration is on animal bone studies). An exciting, independent (from animal bones) and relatively new method for tracing the history of dairying is the extraction of lipid residues from ceramics. Unfortunately, no chapter in the book is dedicated to that method as its primary source of evidence. Instead, many of the papers mention lipid residue studies in their areas as an additional line of argument. While most papers in the volume use bones as their primary artifact base, a few draw on ancient economic texts (L. Atici) or zoomorphic figurines (T. Kawami), while still others use chemical and microscopic studies of animal bones to engage the subject (J. Giblin, Greenfield, and E. Arnold). A refreshing paper by A. Marciniak offers a critical and philosophical look at not only the proximate subject of secondary products but also more generally of zooarchaeological practice.

What makes this book odd, however, is the editor’s very prominent place throughout. In addition to Greenfield being the organizing force behind the conference session and the book, six of the book’s 14 essays (including a nearly 20-page introduction) are authored or co-authored by the editor. One chapter co-authored by Greenfield and Arnold is, for at least half of its length, a rebuttal to a critique of Greenfield by two other zooarchaeologists. An edited volume seems a strange place to publish a rebuttal, all the more so since the editor’s critics themselves have no essay in the book.

Greenfield also includes a 60-page report on his early 1980s zooarchaeological work at the site of Vinča. This contribution is even longer if the following one (another paper co-authored by Greenfield and Arnold) is included, as it further discusses the bone data from that site. A long essay might be considered an editor’s prerogative, but that paper is closer to a final report on the site’s faunal assemblage than a paper focusing on the Neolithic and Bronze

Age inhabitants’ efforts (or lack thereof) to obtain more than meat and hides from their herds, the purported theme of the book. It is also curious that the CD-ROM included with the book contains additional data from Greenfield’s Serbian work but none from the sites and datasets described by the other authors. This raises further questions about the appropriateness of the Vinča material to the book’s theme. One might also ask whether including a CD-ROM is a good decision at all, since the...