Unmodified and modified animal remains and animal representations significantly contribute to the content of Mesolithic and, in some cases, Early Neolithic hunter-gatherer burial assemblages in Northern Europe. Though these finds have received noteworthy attention, predominant archaeological narratives focus on their economic, aesthetic, or symbolic values in relation to humans. This contribution explores ways of looking at these assemblages beyond seeing them primarily as signifiers of human identities and human symbolic and/or economic choices. Drawing on insights from Russian ethnographic literature about near-recent East Siberian hunting and gathering communities, this paper explores paths for understanding unmodified and modified animal remains and animal representations from Mesolithic and Neolithic hunter-gatherer graves as animate objects and investigates ways of recognising their personhood. The paper outlines what could be considered as the material consequences of communicative actions and performative acts in relation to artefacts and animal remains that might have been perceived as having the qualities of a person, such as their placement and arrangement within the burial and treatment prior to deposition.

This article discusses two approaches to save the European white stork populations from extinction that emerged after 1980. Despite the shared objective to devise transnational, science-based conservation measures, the two approaches’ geographical focus was radically different. Projects by the World Wildlife Fund and the International Council for Bird Preservation focused firmly on the stork’s wintering areas on the African continent. Interventions by a second group of ornithologists at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Radolfzell concentrated on the Middle East as a migration bottleneck. Based on archival research, interviews and correspondence with involved ornithologists, the article examines stork representations as an important lens for investigating the professional politics of ecology and conservation. It shows that representations of white storks, the birds’ ecology, and derived conservation hotspots became part of the boundary work used by European ornithologists in the creation of changing scientific and institutional identities.

Representations of animals are diverse and can portray local understandings of nature conservation, information that is often missing from conservation debates. In Cantanhez National Park (southern Guinea-Bissau), chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus) are recognized as animals that share certain features with humans but live independently of them in the forest. However, chimpanzees are also integral to socially mediated, deep-rooted local narratives about sorcery and nature conservation. We use results from ethnographic research to explore local interpretations of chimpanzee attacks on people. Attacks by ‘bush’ chimpanzees occur when an animal is provoked by someone's actions towards it. Unprovoked attacks, however, are either interpreted as the act of a shape-shifted chimpanzee (i.e. a sorcerer) or as the responsibility of conservation stakeholders. In the case of unprovoked attacks, chimpanzee aggression is linked to a perceived abuse of power and to greed, with implications for nature conservation locally. Close analysis of local representations of animals contributes to a broader consideration of conservation priorities and practice.