Bioarchaeological Interpretations of the Human Past: Local, Regional, and Global Perspectives

This volume examines how Mexican populations have been shaped both culturally and biologically by European colonization, drawing on methods from archaeology, bioarchaeology, genetics, and history and providing evidence for the resilience of the Mexican people in the face of tumultuous change.

This volume uses historical, archaeological, and bioarchaeological analysis to study and understand a nineteenth-century medical waste pit discovered at the former Army hospital at Point San Jose in San Francisco.

Representing current and emerging methods and theory, this volume introduces new avenues for exploring how prehistoric and historic communities provided healthcare for their sick, injured, and disabled members.

Through an unprecedented multidisciplinary and global approach, this book documents the dramatic 7,000-year history of leprosy using bioarchaeological, clinical, and historical information from a wide variety of contexts, dispelling many longstanding myths about the disease.

This volume highlights new directions in the study of social identities in past populations. Contributors expand the scope of the field regionally, methodically, and theoretically, moving behind the previous focus on single aspects of identity by demonstrating multi-scalar approaches and by explicitly addressing intersectionality in the archaeological record.

Abnormal burial practices have long been a source of fascination and debate within the fields of mortuary archaeology and bioarchaeology. The Odd, the Unusual, and the Strange investigates an unparalleled geographic and temporal range of burials that differ from the usual customs of their broader societies, emphasizing the importance of a holistic, context-driven approach to these intriguing cases.  

Essays in this volume examine borderland settings in cultural contexts that include Roman Egypt, Iron Age Italy, eleventh-century Iceland, and the precontact American Great Basin and Southwest. Contributors look at isotope data, skeletal stress markers, craniometric and dental metric information, mortuary arrangements, and other evidence to examine how frontier life can affect health and socioeconomic status. Illustrating the many meanings and definitions of frontiers and borderlands, they question assumptions about the relationships between people, place, and identity.     

This volume brings together experts in archaeology and bioarchaeology to examine continuity and change in ancient Arabian mortuary practices. While most previous investigations have been limited geographically to Egypt and the Levant, this volume focuses on the lesser-studied southeastern Arabian Peninsula, showing what death and burial can reveal about the lifestyles of the region’s prehistoric communities.  

This volume integrates data from researchers in bioarchaeology and forensic anthropology to explain when and why group-targeted violence occurs. Massacres have plagued both ancient and modern societies, and by analyzing skeletal remains from these events within their broader cultural and historical contexts this volume opens up important new understandings of the underlying social processes that continue to lead to these tragedies.

This volume offers a novel interdisciplinary view of the migration, mobility, ethnicity, and social identities of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican peoples. In studies that combine bioarchaeology, ethnohistory, isotope data, and dental morphology, contributors demonstrate the challenges and rewards of such integrative work when applied to large regional questions of population history.