Wim Van Neer is a biologist, trained at the University of Leuven (MA 1976; PhD 1981), specialising in archaeozoology. Since 1984, he has been involved in fieldwork at many Egyptian sites in the Nile Valley, the Eastern and Western Deserts and the Red Sea coast. Wim joined the Hierakonpolis Expedition in 2002 and has analysed or re-analysed the fauna of all localities where animal remains have been found since 1979. He has (co-)authored several scholarly and popular articles on the subsistence strategies of the site’s inhabitants and on the role animals played in the burial ritual. The unusual finds at Elite Cemetery HK6 especially keep him very busy with the more than 150 complete animals so far, both domestic (cattle, goat, sheep, dog) and wild (baboons, elephant, aurochs, hartebeest, hippo, crocodile, ostrich, leopard and wild cats). Research on these wild species focuses, among other things, on reconstructing the conditions in which they were kept by examining the pathologies visible on the bones. Wim is especially excited about (and responsible for) the early evidence for cat taming found on HK6, which predates the domestication known from Pharaonic Egypt by 2,000 years.
