Beyond (and including) academia in zooarchaeological research in Britain: the ‘Rewilding’ later prehistory project

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Beyond Academia: Zooarchaeological Case Studies from CRM and Other Nonacademic Spaces" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The ‘Rewilding’ later prehistory project has set a developer-funded fieldwork organisation – Oxford Archaeology – and the wider developer-funded industry centre stage of exciting cross-sector multidisciplinary research with environmental archaeology colleagues from academia, Historic England, and pioneering rewilding projects in Britain. Alongside wielding an unprecedented volume of zooarchaeological and other environmental evidence to produce a novel account of wildlife from 2500 BCE to 100 CE, project researchers are working with practitioners across the discipline to transform access to zooarchaeological data. This paper elicits three zooarchaeological aspects of this work: (a) an overview of zooarchaeological evidence for prehistoric wildlife from three case study areas, (b) community-wide work on the design, development and testing of a new digital system for routinely logging zooarchaeological remains via OASIS, the national infrastructure for registering archaeological projects, and (c) emerging results from a multistranded study of the wildness (or not) of horses over the duration of the Holocene in Britain. We hope to convey the groundbreaking research that can be achieved through, as well as reflecting on the challenges and joys of, joined-up zooarchaeology beyond (and including) academia.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Beyond Academia: Zooarchaeological Case Studies from CRM and Other Nonacademic Spaces

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53052