Several years ago I had the opportunity to have a relaxed discussion with my doctoral advisor, Dr. Donald K. Grayson. In the course of that discussion, I asked him if he would ever revise his then 20-year-old book titled Quantitative Zooarchaeology, which had been out of print for at least a decade. He said “No” and explained that the topic had been resolved to his satisfaction such that he could do the kinds of analyses he wanted to do. A spur-of-the-moment thought prompted me to ask, “What if I write a revision?” by which I meant not literally a revised edition but instead a new book that covered some of the same ground but from a 20-years-later perspective. Don said that he thought that was a fine idea.

After the conversation with Grayson, I began to mentally outline what I would do in the book. I realized that it would be a good thing for me to write such a book because, although I thought I understood many of the arguments Grayson had made regarding the counting of animal remains when I was a graduate student, there were other arguments made by other investigators subsequent to the publication of Grayson's book that I didn't know (or if I knew of those arguments, I wasn't sure I understood them very well).