my amateur understanding is that there are two parameters to consider. first, for obviously non-human animals, the real distinction is between palaeontology and archaeozoology. archaeozoology is the study of how humans and animals interacted in the past. It's
more of a methodological distinction than anything else; if you're trying to extract viable DNA from *Macrauchenia* specimens or trying to elucidate the dietary preferences of pre-contact Moa birds, that's more palaeontology. If you are talking about how humans
interacted with animals (extinct or otherwise) in the past, that is archaeozoology. The boundaries of archaeozoology as a field are obviously fuzzy, but human-animal interactions (hunting, domestication, religious significance) are the main scientific focus.
The second parameter is the boundary between what is a human-like animal and what species or subspecies we can call "human". I would think that stone tool use is the cut-off most useful for archaeologists. So far Homo (?Australopithecus) habilis is the oldest
'handy man'. Archaeologists are just as interested, if not more so, in manmade tools than they are in actual human bodily remains. Archaeology is a subset of anthropology (at least, that's the way it's taught in academia), and anthropology is focused on human
* culture * to a greater degree than human physiology or biomechanics or other more "objective" measures of man.
Basically, the question you should ask yourself if you have trouble identifying whether a particular paper or other piece of science is archaeology or not is - are the authors applying archaeological principles? Are they interested in answering questions about
human _culture_? If they are interested in the genetic or morphological differences between Neanderthal and Sapiens or Sapiens and Erectus, I would be less likely to call it archaeology, although the conclusions of that research would no doubt be informative
to archaeologists. But studying early sapiens artwork, or Neanderthal tool use, those could be considered archaeology.
Someone who actually gets paid to study this stuff should really chime in here, and please correct me if I got something wrong. But to my understanding, the different fields aren't necessarily mutually exclusive but have utterly different focuses (determined
arbitrarily by us, of course). Archaeologists are fundamentally interested in the _human_; their engagement in paleontology is in the service of understanding something about human beings. Paleontology is actually somewhat fuzzier - is studying very recently
extinct forms of life such as the thylacine or dodo really paleontology or is it just zoology? That boundary is arguably much harder to draw. Hope this helps feed thought.
Thomas Yazbeck
Good day!
So where is the strict boudary between the two? Is it that archaeologists are studying only hominid fossils and their environment (say up to 3 million years old)? Paleontologists, OTOH, can study fossils as recent as 12 000 years? Thank you for clarification,
in advance! Tom