Zoia. Animal-Human Interactions in the Aegean Middle and Late Bronze Age

The 18th International Aegean Conference on the subject of Zoia (literally "creatures endowed with an anima or life force") was conceived and organized by Robert Laffineur and Tom Palaima, director of the Program in Aegean Scripts and Prehistory (PASP) in the Department of Classics at The University of Texas at Austin, marking 30 years of their collaboration on Aegaeum volumes and conferences. In the event, Covid-19 forced the cancellation of the conference proper. This volume, however, testifies to the dedication of Aegeanist scholars worldwide to accomplish the scholarly objectives of the proposed conference: to examine, from a wide range of specialist research perspectives, how the human societies that developed in the Aegean area in the Middle and Late Bronze Age and the human beings within them interacted with wild, domesticated and semi-domesticated animals of the sea, sky and land socio-politically, economically, religiously, ideologically, imaginatively and artistically. Diamantis Panagiotopoulos stresses in his keynote paper that the 28 papers in Zoia reflect "the dynamic development of Human-Animal Studies" in the last two decades. Papers are grouped under five main topic