Introduction --The emergence of zooarchaeology -- A persepctive on zooarchaeology -- The evidence -- vertebrate bodies -- Bone and vertebrate bodies as uniformitarian materials -- Bone's intrinsic traits : why animals eat animals -- Bone's intrinsic traits : inferring species, sex, and age -- Bone's intrinsic traits : age estimation from mammalian dentition -- Basic practical approaches -- Field recovery, lab methods, data records, curation -- Identification : sorting decisions and analytic consequences -- Zooarchaeology's basic counting units -- dentifying causal process, effector, actor