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Bioarchaeological studies of children have, until recently, centered on population data-driven topics like mortality rates and growth and morbidity patterns. This volume examines emerging issues in childhood studies, looking at historic and prehistoric contexts and framing questions about the nature and quality of children’s lives. How did they develop their social identity? Were they economic actors in early civilizations? Does their health reflect the larger community? Comparing and contrasting field research from a variety of sites across Europe and the Americas, the contributors to this volume demonstrate that children not only have unique experiences but they also share, cross-culturally, in daily struggles. Their lives differ significantly from those of adults due to disparate social identities and variable growth needs. In some of the cases presented, this is the first time that child remains have been examined in any detail, making Tracing Childhood an essential resource for scholars and researchers in this growing field.
"Exploring the multiple social, ecological, cultural, and ontological dimensions of food in the Andean past, this book offers a diverse set of theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches that reveal the richness, sophistication, and ingenuity of Andean peoples. With 44 contributors from 10 countries, the studies presented in this volume employ new analytical methods, integrating different food data and interdisciplinary research to show how food impacts socio-political relationships and ontologies that are otherwise invisible in the archaeological record"--
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. In case studies that include Crow Creek in South Dakota, Khmer Rouge–era Cambodia, the Peruvian Andes, the Tennessee River Valley, and northern Uganda, contributors demonstrate that massacres are a process—a nonrandom pattern of events that precede the acts of...
Through an unprecedented multidisciplinary and global approach, this book documents the dramatic several-thousand-year history of leprosy using bioarchaeological, clinical, and historical information from a wide variety of contexts, dispelling many long-standing myths about the disease. Drawing on her 30 years of research on the infection, Charlotte Roberts begins by outlining its bacterial causes, how it spreads, and how it affects the body. She then considers its diagnosis and treatment, both historically and in the present. She also looks at the methods and tools used by paleopathologists to identify signs of leprosy in skeletons. Examining evidence in human remains from many countries, p...
As a biological, cultural, and social entity, the human fetus is a multifaceted subject which calls for equally diverse perspectives to fully understand. Anthropology of the Fetus seeks to achieve this by bringing together specialists in biological anthropology, archaeology, and cultural anthropology. Contributors draw on research in prehistoric, historic, and contemporary sites in Europe, Asia, North Africa, and North America to explore the biological and cultural phenomenon of the fetus, raising methodological and theoretical concerns with the ultimate goal of developing a holistic anthropology of the fetus.
Choice Outstanding Academic Title This volume highlights new directions in the study of social identities in past populations. Building on the field-defining research in Bioarchaeology and Identity in the Americas, contributors expand the scope of the subject regionally, theoretically, and methodologically. This collection moves beyond the previous focus on single aspects of identity by demonstrating multi-scalar approaches and by explicitly addressing intersectionality in the archaeological record. Case studies in this volume come from both New World and Old World settings, including sites in North America, South America, Asia, and the Middle East. The communities investigated range from ea...
This volume brings together expert s 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. In case studies from Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Bahrain, contributors explore the transition from the earliest to the most complex mortuary monuments in the Bronze Age and beyond. They consider sociopolitical and environmental factors that may have influenced mortuary ...
"Breaks new ground regarding how to think about colonial encounters in innovative ways that pay attention to a wide range of issues from health and demography to identity formations and adaptation."—Debra L. Martin, coeditor of The Bioarchaeology of Violence "Amply demonstrates the breadth and variability of the impact of colonialism."—Ken Nystrom, State University of New York at New Paltz European expansion into the New World fundamentally altered Indigenous populations. The collision between East and West led to the most recent human adaptive transition that spread around the world. Paradoxically, these are some of the least scientifically understood processes of the human past. Repres...
New methods for understanding healthcare in past societies “Provides unique and useful models that demonstrate how inferences can be made about communities of care in samples ranging in size from several dozen to several thousand. Authors weave together diverse lines of evidence—osteological, archaeological, ethnographic, clinical—in their historical and cultural contexts. Sophisticated analytical tools and theoretical frameworks position this book at the cutting edge of bioarchaeological research and illustrate the cultural relativity of care, caregiving, and healthcare in the past and present, and in Western and non-Western contexts.”—Alexis Boutin, coeditor of Remembering the De...
Pinson Mounds: Middle Woodland Ceremonialism in the Midsouth is a comprehensive overview and reinterpretation of the largest Middle Woodland mound complex in the Southeast. Located in west Tennessee about ten miles south of Jackson, the Pinson Mounds complex includes at least thirteen mounds, a geometric earthen embankment, and contemporary short-term occupation areas within an area of about four hundred acres. A unique feature of Pinson Mounds is the presence of five large, rectangular platform mounds from eight to seventy-two feet in height. Around A.D. 100, Pinson Mounds was a pilgrimage center that drew visitors from well beyond the local population and accommodated many distinct cultural groups and people of varied social stations. Stylistically nonlocal ceramics have been found in virtually every excavated locality, all together representing a large portion of the Southeast. Along with an overview of this important and unique mound complex, Pinson Mounds also provides a reassessment of roughly contemporary centers in the greater Midsouth and Lower Mississippi Valley and challenges past interpretations of the Hopewell phenomenon in the region.