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Many thanks for the various contributions on what ZOOARCH is about. Since Jaqui Mulville and I have taken the initiative to start it, a few clarifications from our side may be needed. ZooArch is intended to be a discussion list on the study of animal remains from archaeological sites - any animals. Although this may be obvious, Harry's plea to invertebrate specialists is more than welcome, as vertebrate studies tend to play a dominant part in zooarchaeology to the extent that this is sometimes wrongly equated to animal bone studies. I can therfore only confirm that any discussion on invertebrates in archaeology will be more than welcome on ZooArch. Since Terry made a reference to it, I also have to mention that this list is not intended for discussion of human bone studies, though humans are obviously part of the animal world. The reason why we take this exception is that in general animal and human bone studies tend to have different methodological problems and to address slightly different archaeological questions. Overlaps obviously occur but isn't this the case with any other archaeological specialisms? I'm afraid we had to draw the line somewhere. This obviously does not mean that human bone specialists are not welcome to join the list and offer a contribution whenever a common question is raised. I'm not an archaeobotanist but that didn't stop me from joining an archaeobotany list. One final point. Since Mailbase is based in Britain we do expect to have a substantial proportion of members from Britain but this is an international list and people from any country are encouraged to join and in fact many non-British members have already joined. The use of languages other than English is also perfectly acceptable, but it is probably fair to say that English is the language that is likely to reach the greatest number of readers and members are therefore encouraged to use it. Cheers, Umberto Umberto Albarella Department of Ancient History and Archaeology University of Birmingham Edgbaston Birmingham B15 2TT U.K. tel. +44/121/4147386 fax. +44/121/4145516 email [log in to unmask] http://www.bham.ac.uk/BZL %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%