I wish this book had existed when I began studying zooarchaeology under the late Paul W. Parmalee, nearly 40 years ago. “Bear” in mind that, prior to this publication, the zooarchaeologist's “bear bible” was A. Irving Hallowell's “Bear Ceremonialism in the Northern Hemisphere” (American Anthropologist 28:1–175, 1926), and until recently, bear remains on archaeological sites were largely considered to represent strictly food and ornamentation.

Following a brief introduction by Heather Lapham, Gregory Waselkov provides a rich overview of ethnohistorical and ethnographic accounts on bear-human relationships in Native eastern North America, setting the stage for subsequent chapters that focus on more specific regions and times. David Mather's (Chapter 2) overview of bear ceremonialism in Minnesota provides historical accounts of bear-human relationships in that area and then brings it to “bear” on the archaeological evidence of bear feasts, bear graves, and bear power. Thomas Berres (Chapter 3) describes the role of the Great White Bear and the importance of the color white in Great Lakes Indigenous cosmology, ritual, myth, imagery, and social structures. Ralph Koziarski (Chapter 4) reviews the spiritual and economic roles of bears in Meskwaki society, with special attention to evidence of bear feasts at the late eighteenth- to early nineteenth-century Bell site in Wisconsin.

Terrance Martin's synthesis of black bear remains from Native American sites in the western Great Lakes region (Chapter 5), although focused on evidence of ceremonialism involving perforated bear mandibles, is a valuable synthesis of evidence of variation in bear-human relationships from over 30 sites dating between 3000 BC and AD 1820. Chapter 6, by Christian Gates St-Pierre and colleagues, provides an overview and interpretation of bear remains from late precontact Iroquoian sites, taking into consideration (and arguing the importance of integrating) archaeofaunal, artifactual, ethnohistorical, and mythological evidence. Remains from 155 sites reveal a diet consistently focused on deer and beaver, with bear remains nearly always present but in lesser numbers. Their analysis of ethnohistoric accounts, however, indicates that bear stories refer mostly to food and the hunt, followed by ones involving beliefs and rituals. Lapham (Chapter 7) starts with accounts of bear meat and other bear products evidently supplied by Native hunters to Juan Pardo's Spanish garrison at Fort San Juan (the Berry site) in western North Carolina. Her examination of evidence from 49 village and town sites postdating AD 1000 neatly sets the stage for future studies that might involve bone isotope analysis to identify bear source provenance.

Heidi Altman and colleagues (Chapter 8) address ethnohistorical references regarding bears among the Cherokees and other Iroquoian speakers, and then they look to the archaeological record (17 sites in the southern Appalachian region) for potential evidence of the production and use of bear grease. They argue that a predominance of head and foot elements may point to the importance of bears for fat and hides. Barnet Pavão-Zuckerman (Chapter 9) looks for zooarchaeological evidence, in support of historical observations of the ancestral Creek, that cattle meat gradually replaced bear meat in the diet. According to written accounts, bear meat was highly esteemed and, although cattle were seen as vulgar beasts that contributed to ill health and their management was problematic in the lower South, their representation relative to bear in the zooarchaeological record did indeed increase to the extent that bear remains are all but absent after AD 1800.

Ashley Peles and Megan Kassabaum (Chapter 10) review evidence of bear ceremonialism in the Lower Mississippi Valley that reveals a disparity in bear skeletal element representation among Late Woodland mound and off-mound/premound contexts. This they interpret as evidence of “situational” use of bears. They also note a decline in bear remains in the Mississippian period, possibly related to the shift to maize agriculture. Hannah O'Regan (Chapter 11) notes the “strong links between British identity, ceremonialism, and bears” (p. 270) and gives a historical overview of the significance and extirpation of native brown bears in Britain and their replacement by American black bears and bear parts—albeit with different functions—following colonization of America.

The volume closes with Waselkov and Lynn Funkhouser's synthesis of the preceding chapters, summarizing archaeological and ethnohistorical evidence of bear-human interaction in Native eastern North America. What is made clear is that more recent zooarchaeological studies, taking a closer look at ethnohistorical accounts and archaeological context, reveal a greater complexity to human-bear relationships than was previously imagined.

Bears is a sturdy book with high-quality paper and printing, and it includes an abundance of sharp photographs of specimens and reproductions of historical images. Now, everything you wanted to know about bears, from archaeological and ethnohistorical perspectives in eastern North America and beyond, can be found in one exceptional, high-quality package. This book is a “bear” necessity for zooarchaeologists and other scholars interested in Native American peoples of eastern North America.