This book investigates relations between humans and animals over several centuries with a focus on the Middle Ages, since important features of our perceptions regarding animals have been rooted in that period. Elucidating various aspects of medieval human-animal relationships requires transdisciplinary discourse, and so this book aims to reconcile the materiality of animals with complex cultural systems illustrating their subtle transitions 'between body and mind'.

This book investigates relations between humans and animals over several centuries with a focus on the Middle Ages, since important features of our perceptions regarding animals have been rooted in that period. Elucidating various aspects of medieval human-animal relationships requires transdisciplinary discourse, and so this book aims to reconcile the materiality of animals with complex cultural systems illustrating their subtle transitions 'between body and mind'.

This volume constitutes the proceedings of the Horses and Humans Symposium, held in 2000 at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History Powdermill Nature Preserve, in Rector, Pennsylvania, USA, in honor of Mary Aiken Littauer. The four-day symposium brought together 35 academics from Eurasia and America from the disciplines of archaeology, art history, history, paleontology, biology, veterinary medicine, animal husbandry, and other fields for presented papers, round-table discussions, demonstrations and much lively debate in the evenings. The culmination was a one-day public event at the St. Clair Showgrounds called the Celebration of the Horse that involved a wide range of equestrian performances by over 50 horses and riders for a public audience of over 500. In addition to the production of this volume, the symposium introduced many equine scholars to each other and initiated both collaboration and communication amongst this active community.

Thirty-six papers, from the 2nd meeting of the (ICAZ) worked Bone Research Group held in Budapest in 1999, written by archaeologists and archaozoologists, report on material from North and Central America, Europe and South West Asia. The collection is divided into six thematic sections (general theory, raw material exploitation, manufacturing technology, function, social context and special assemblages) and include reports on bone materials, objects and tools that date from the Neolithic to the Viking and medieval periods.

A case study from Vac, Hungary. It is the author's ocntention that during the late Middle Ages, the contribution of animals to urban development intensified in Hungary since animal hubandry and trading became a major form of accumulating wealth. Through his archaeozoological survey of data he aims to provide illumination of aspects of urban lifeways in the city of Vac which may not be clear from previous examinations that have focused on other cultural data.

Sixteen perspectives from archaeology, history and ethnology bring together recent research on the origins, development and eventual demise of transhumant pastoralism. All the papers except one were presented at a symposium during the 12th International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences at Zagreb, July 1988, and one of the ultimate aims of the collection is to present a series of testable models that can be used to help identify the signs of transhumant pastoral adaptation in the archaeological record, given the difficulty of establishing its presence and significance in the study of prehistoric cultural systems. Contributors: Anne-Marie Brisebarre; Frederick Baker; Laszlo Bartosiewicz; Tone Cevc; Ekaterini Chalkea; Claudia Chang; Eugen Comsa; Nikos Efstratiou; Herbert Grassl; Haskel J. Greenfield; Joel Martin Halpern; Marta Moreno Garcia; John G. Nandris; Michael L. Ryder; Jurij Senegacnik and Inja Smerdel.