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Dear colleagues, We write to invite you to take part in a symposium at next April's 2014 SAA Annual Meeting in Austin, Texas. Organizers: Robert Losey and Lacey Fleming (University of Alberta) Symposium abstract: Historically, zooarchaeologists have analyzed and interpreted animal remains at the assemblage level, rarely examining an individual animal’s life history. Increasingly, questions about the lives of specific animals are being examined through analytical and interpretive approaches that can be viewed as a form of animal osteobiography. These osteobiographical approaches combine data gleaned from many areas of inquiry, including activity-, trauma-, and disease-related pathology, dietary provisioning through stable isotope analyses, and mortuary treatment. This symposium highlights methodological and theoretical research on individual animal life histories from a global perspective. Specific questions currently being addressed through these approaches will be identified, and the emerging methods used to answer them will be described and discussed. This advancing area of zooarchaeology has great potential to provide entirely new perspectives on human-animal interaction in the past. We hope you will consider contributing a paper. If interested, please contact me ([log in to unmask]) before August 20. Many thanks!