Hunting and Fishing in the Neolithic and Eneolithic

REVIEW BY KATHERINE V BOYLE

This book looks at an often-overlooked aspect of European prehistory, more specifically the Neolithic/Eneolithic, but one that, fortunately, is gradually changing with work undertaken in recent years by scholars across Europe. The subject is the role in the local economy of hunting and fishing, subsistence strategies more commonly associated with the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic. As a compilation of information from a range of sites across a broadly defined region (southern Europe and Anatolia), Hunting and Fishing in the Neolithic and Eneolithic provides both zooarchaeologists and material-culture specialists with a useful source of information.

However, there is one major feature of the volume that this reviewer considers to be a shame, although that inevitably reflects my own interests. It is the somewhat curtailed definition of southern Europe, with Italian and French data of similar types and periods ignored. There are, for instance, some areas of southern Europe where hunting seems to have been of some importance across a number of broadly contemporary sites (for example, in northern Italy) that are overlooked completely. But if the reader is particularly interested in south- east Europe during the Neolithic, this book is a must.

Most of the papers in the volume offer the traditional approach of listing and describing either faunal or ‘tool’ assemblages assumed to indicate hunting. In this, there is little novelty, but having the information compiled into a single source is invaluable. However, one thing that has often puzzled me is why one should accept that the artefacts all too often assumed to indicate hunting do actually point to the procurement of wild game. Is it not possible that Neolithic herders used the same tools as earlier hunters, or at least very similar ones, in order to kill tame or domestic stock? Does the Neolithic farmer immediately possess a different tool kit? When taphonomic conditions at a site are such that fauna is rare, or even absent, interpretation of artefacts (with the exception of fish hooks perhaps) as a wild-game hunting toolkit seems, to me, premature.