REGIONAL ZOOARCHAEOLOGY AND GLOBAL CHANGE - PROBLEMS AND POTENTIALS

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