This course will focus on zooarchaeological interpretation: how do archaeologists reconstruct past human behaviour on the basis of animal bones recovered from archaeological sites? As has become increasingly clear over the past decades, in order to interpret archaeofaunas the zooarchaeologist must understand factors ranging from the natural (e.g., fluvial processes, carnivore activity, and differential bone density) to the cultural (e.g., ritual disposal of bone, and status differences in access to meat of different species), and everything in between (e.g., methods of quantification, patterns of bone transport, isotope analyses, and butchery methods). This course will cover seminal and recent papers on the theory and methods used to develop robust and complex pictures of ancient human lifeways.