Avant-propos

More than thirty years ago, in 1978, the Peabody Museum Press published a volume edited by Meadow and Zeder entitled Approaches to Faunal Analysis in the Middle East. This innovative volume presented a wide range of then current approaches in faunal analysis in the Near East and functioned (and still does) as an indispensable reader for researchers and students alike. This volume highlighted the diversity of innovative approaches and novel research agendas being implemented by zooarchaeologists in the 1970s. It was with the intent to produce an updated version of this volume that we organized a session entitled Zooarchaeology and the reconstruction of cultural systems: Case Studies from the Old World at the Society for American Archaeology annual meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico, April 28, 2006, from which the papers presented in this volume derive.