{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02335766423357664, 'fraction_numerical': 0.006326034063260341, 'mean_word_length': 4.891117478510028, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
107th Annual Meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America, Montréal, Canada 5–8 January 2006

according to these two kinds of model, but people with particular social goals and concepts, who acted out distinctive practices, which their successors gradually began to vary. There is therefore much to chew over. Questions that it raises for me include the role of dairy products, the temporalities of consumption, and the extent of variation from site to site, from longhouse to longhouse, and from feature to feature, as well as the continued value of ‘big narrative’ generalization. There is little or no discussion here of dairy products. Lipid analysis of pottery in southern Britain has indicated that dairy fats can be widely detected in pottery of the earlier fourth millennium cal BC. Were cattle used for so-called secondary products in the LBK, as Bogucki (1988) and others have argued? How does this affect the observed patterns? Were all cattle used in the same way? Since cattle bones are regularly unweathered, Marciniak argues that they were quickly deposited, but this would repay comparison with sherd history from the same sites, and we need to know how often such events took place. Where did the missing cattle limbs end up? (Were these the marrow roastings?) Are we looking in part at differences between events such as house foundations and more regular consumption? What can the evidence of human teeth contribute, as being investigated by Marek Zvelebil and colleagues at Vedrovice, and could isotopic analysis reinforce the hypotheses of Marciniak? I have been as guilty as anyone of generalizing on a big scale, but one next step, particularly with such unusually good data sets now to hand (at least for the LBK), must be to examine differences between and within sites, and at varying stages of their histories. I see much still to do as we try to come to grips with all aspects of keeping, managing, eating and thinking animals in the early to middle Neolithic, but this book is a significant contribution to that process.