Agricultural History Review, Volume 65 Part 1 (2017), p. 158

Among the barriers to communicating good inter- and multi-disciplinary work is jargon. Technical language can help convey complicated messages succinctly, but its over-use can limit the accessibility of our written and spoken words. Why would we want that? For books such as Deer and people, which cross the disciplines, it is, I believe, important to write clearly and plainly because the intended audience is, presumably, wide and diverse in academic background. The book largely succeeds against those criteria, most chapters being easily accessible and limited in their use of jargon.

The editors sought to ‘draw together research on deer from wide-ranging disciplines and in so doing substantially advance our broader understanding of human-deer relationships in the past and present’ (p. vii), by compiling papers submitted by speakers at two international conferences. Those conferences both focused on zooarchaeology, so it should be no surprise that the majority of chapters (17 of 24) arise from that discipline. The remainder cover history, law, iconography, genetics and ecology: a wide range of disciplines indeed. Most chapters represent reviews of single or multiple papers and reports that have been published previously, with few presenting novel data. That is not a criticism; the breadth of subjects addressed should mean that there will be few readers who do not learn something new to them. I learnt a lot.

Chapters are organized into six sections, some of which group more logically than others. In the first section the opening chapter traces the origins of the current distributions of several deer species by mapping the genetic relatedness of different populations. It confirms the important role that translocation by humans has played and demonstrates the utility of techniques in molecular ecology for answering questions in zooarchaeology and history. The second chapter beautifully combines traditional archaeological approaches, a biogeographical perspective and population genetics to briefly chart the spread of fallow deer across Eurasia in prehistory with a detailed focus on their introduction and expansion over Sardinia since the medieval period. Subsequent chapters become decreasingly inter- and multi-disciplinary. The final two chapters of this section are somewhat more traditional, presenting single-discipline accounts of human-deer interactions at two locations: Sardinia and the Yukon river basin, albeit over different timescales (since the medieval and from the early Pleistocene to the present, respectively).

The following two sections provide 13 case studies of interactions between humans and deer: the first section looking at prehistory and the second examining the Roman and medieval periods. All choose to limit their accounts to certain species, specific archaeological sites or summaries across regions or countries. This simple approach results in a distinctive nature to each chapter, while also clearly demonstrating the many similarities in the ways in which deer have been viewed and exploited between discrete geographical locations, and also over time. A great advantage offered by many of the authors in these sections is the quantification of archaeological and historical evidence. Provision of such high-quality information allows other authors to make more use of a paper (e.g. by parameterizing models) than do purely descriptive accounts. On the downside, many of these chapters were less accessible than others due to the use of jargon words without explanation, and the apparent assumption that all readers will be equally familiar with all levels of periodization used by geologists and historians. A description of each period (‘from’ and ‘to’) would be very helpful.

Next, the peculiar situation we find in Great Britain is explored, where sizeable patches of the rural landscape were given legal protection in order to preserve populations of wild, feral and captive deer for hunting by royalty and nobility. The final two sections deal specifically with hunting and management. The first, somewhat more esoteric section examines changes in hunting iconography during the medieval period, and the last presents two chapters addressing aspects of modern-day deer management: population management for hunting and for conservation.

While acknowledging that the editors could only work with articles that were submitted for this volume, it seems surprising that so little is included on interactions between humans and deer in modern times since the quantity and quality of information available today is considerable. Perhaps this reflects my biases. I also have a preference for synthesis; I like to understand editors’ opinions on what a collection of works tells us that each piece of work cannot convey on its own. For whatever reason, the editors chose not to provide a synthesis for this book.

Nevertheless, Deer and people represents a collection of chapters covering a range of disciplines and including multi- and inter-disciplinary studies. It provides every reader with an opportunity to learn something new about our interactions with a group of closely related species that seem to have profoundly affected the ways in which humans have lived since prehistory, and which continue to hold fascination for us today.