Cattle and sheep were central to the everyday lives and wellbeing of Bronze Age communities in northwest Europe, but archaeologists tend to focus primarily on their economic significance. They were clearly more than this to Bronze Age people, however, as the careful deposition of complete and partial animal bodies in graves, pits and ditches suggests. The traces of cattle and sheep are present in other ways too, in hoofprints around waterholes and in landscape features like droveways that appear at this time. Here, we will consider how living with animals involves intimate interaction and interdependency, and we will ask how it might be possible to explore the role of cattle and sheep as active participants in Bronze Age social worlds. Joanna Brück is Professor of Archaeology at University College Dublin. She is a specialist on Bronze Age Europe and has published widely on Bronze Age settlements, burials and depositional practice, including her book ‘Personifying prehistory: relational ontologies in Bronze Age Britain and Ireland’ (Oxford University Press, 2019). She is currently Principal Investigator on the European Research Council Advanced Grant ‘Animals and Society in Bronze Age Europe’. She is editor of Archaeological Dialogues, an international journal published by Cambridge University Press.