Zoia Animal-Human Interactions in the Aegean Middle and Late Bronze Age

The 18th International Aegean Conference on the subject of Zoia (literally ‘creatures endowed with an anima or life force’) was conceived and organized by Robert Laffineur and Tom Palaima, director of the Program in Aegean Scripts and Prehistory (PASP) in the Department of Classics at The University of Texas at Austin, marking 30 years of their collaboration on Aegaeum volumes and conferences. In the event, Covid-19 forced the cancellation of the conference proper. This volume, however, testifies to the dedication of Aegeanist scholars worldwide to accomplish the scholarly objectives of the proposed conference: to examine, from a wide range of specialist research perspectives, how the human societies that developed in the Aegean area in the Middle and Late Bronze Age and the human beings within them interacted with wild, domesticated and semi-domesticated animals of the sea, sky and land socio-politically, economically, religiously, ideologically, imaginatively and artistically. Diamantis Panagiotopoulos stresses in his keynote paper that the 28 papers in Zoia reflect “the dynamic development of Human-Animal Studies” in the last two decades. Papers are grouped under five main topics: identification of the animal environment; human uses of domesticated and wild animals, material economy, diet and society; hybrid and fantastic creatures in animal iconography (seals, frescoes and other forms of representation); animals in beliefs and religion (their contemporary symbolic uses and later uses as relics or heirlooms); and animals in texts (Indo-European and non-Indo-European; Cretan Pictographic, Linear A, Linear B and later Homeric and historical Greek). The results are comprehensive, eclectic, scientifically informative and intellectually provocative. They help us see protohistoric Aegean cultures as the non-human animals inextricably linked to them saw them.