bioarchaeology (Other Keyword)
201-225 (296 Records)
Oymaağaç Höyűk, the putative Hittite religious center of Nerik, was occupied as early as the second millennium B.C.E. .Nearly three thousand years later, the site was reclaimed as a burial ground for the local populace. Within the upper stratigraphic, tile (tegula) graves and the associated burials, relatively and radiocarbon dated to the Byzantine (i.e., Late Roman) period (A.D. 250-450), provide an informative look into the lives of the rural population. Employing archaeological context in...
The Origins and Identities of the Colha Skull Pit Skeletal Remains (2016)
The lithics production center of Colha in northern Belize provides skeletal evidence relevant to ongoing debates about the role of violence among the Maya of Central America. The Colha Skull Pit (Op. 2011) dates to the Terminal Classic period and consists of thirty individuals, represented only by cranial remains. The skeletal remains include both males and females and range in age from children to old adults. Cranial and dental modifications are prevalent in this feature and many of the skulls...
Origins of the Templo Mayor Skull Masks (2015)
The offerings of human remains made at the Templo Mayor of Tenochtitlán include decapitated skulls, some of them reused as masks or headdresses. It is generally accepted that the sacrificial offerings of the Templo Mayor were obtained through warfare. To test this, we used bioarchaeological analyses to determine where the skull masks came from geographically, and whether the skull masks meet the biological profile of elite warriors. We recorded sex, age, and indicators of disease and nutritional...
Osteoarthritis in Hands, Feet, Spine, and Temporomandibular Joint from Individuals Buried at Tiwanaku Sites in Moquegua, Peru (2017)
This study evaluated evidence of osteoarthritis in the multiple joints of the wrist and hand (ulnae, radii, carpals, and metacarpals, finger phalanges), ankle and feet (tibia, tarsals, metatarsals, foot phalanges), spine (cervical, thoracic, lumbar vertebrae), and temporomandibular joint from human skeletal remains previously excavated from Tiwanaku sites within the Moquegua Valley of Peru (AD 500-1000). Osteoarthritis, a type of degenerative joint disease with a complex etiology, has been shown...
Osteoarthritis in the elbow and knee from a modern documented cemetery collection in Cyprus: Using "new" bones to understand "old" ones (2015)
Osteoarthritis is one of the more ubiquitous and abundant forms of pathology seen on ancient material. Osteoarthritis (OA) has a complex etiology with variable clinical characteristics. Documenting it is important because it may shed light on aspects of lifestyle (e.g. occupational), and social and cultural habits. Osteopathology studies conducted on modern, documented skeletal collections can add an important dimension. The aim of this paper is to present patterns of OA in the elbow and knee...
Osteobiographies of British Prisoners from the Old Convict Burial Ground on Watford Island, Bermuda (2020)
This is a paper/report submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The unexpected discovery of human remains from an unmarked cemetery for convicts located on Watford Island, Bermuda provides a unique opportunity to reconstruct the lives of these forgotten builders of the British Royal Naval Dockyard, now a major tourist destination. Buried in the early 1850s, the remains of at least seven men represent more than 9,000 British and Irish prisoners...
Osteobiographies of Mrs. Ann (née Crusoe) and Reverend Stephen H. Gloucester, Abolitionists of Philadelphia (2022)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "“We the People”: Historical Cemetery Archaeology in Philadelphia" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Not all figures who sustain social or political movements are obvious or celebrated. For instance, in 1923 Rosetta Douglass Sprague published a short biography of her mother Anna Murray-Douglass, the first wife of Frederick Douglass. No such biography of Ann (Crusoe) Gloucester exists despite her husband...
Osteobiographies of two peculiar women from early medieval Poland (2015)
The aim of this paper is to analyse the biographies of two peculiar women from early medieval Poland, one from Ostrow Lednicki and the other from Kaldus sites, both of which were the capitals of the Polish state. This paper presents the most representative and interesting biographies of the ill and the disabled from these sites. The very best sample for such a study is the giant woman whose skeleton was discovered in the cemetery on the Ostrow Lednicki. Her height was 215,5 cm. Osteoma of skull...
The Osteobiography of Philadelphia’s Forgotten Abolitionist: Reverend Stephen H. Gloucester (1802-1850) (2018)
Bioarchaeology often provides a pathway back to public recognition for forgotten historical figures. This presentation provides an osteobiography of Reverend Stephen H. Gloucester, a once nationally prominent and now virtually forgotten African-American abolitionist, educator, and community leader. Born enslaved in Tennessee, by the 1830s Gloucester was a vocal participant in the American Anti-Slavery Society, a founder of the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, and one of the primary...
Osteobiography: A Conceptual Framework (2017)
Osteobiography provides a rich conceptual basis for understanding the past, but its conceptual basis has never been systematically outlined. It both stands in conceptual opposition to a traditional statistical approach to bioarchaeology modelled upon clinical studies in biomedicine, and is interdependent with it. As such, its position mirrors those of clinical case histories as opposed to statistical studies, participant-observation ethnography as opposed to quantitative sociology, and...
An Overview of the Hoyo Negro Project and Its Findings (2015)
Hoyo Negro is an immense, underwater collapse chamber deep within the Sac Aktun Cave system, Quintana Roo, Mexico. On its floor lie data-rich calcite raft deposits, bat guano piles, scatters of wood and charcoal, skeletons of large animals, and the remains of one teen-age human female. These sediments and fossils lie in total darkness, >40 meters below sea level, creating major technical challenges for their study and recovery. Investigations by a team of divers and scientists from Mexico, the...
Paleogenetic analysis of the Eneolithic (4900 – 2750 calBC) Trypillian Culture from Verteba Cave, Ukraine (2016)
In this presentation, we make use of high-resolution paleogenetic data to better understand the peoples of the agropastoral Tripolye Culture. Verteba Cave is the only known site with associated Trypillian human remains. Here, we explore population origins and the Tripolye people’s relationship with local populations from the greater Carpathian and Dnieper regions, as well as possible connections to peoples from the Near East. Our motivation for this study derives from several unknowns....
Paleogenetic and Paleopathological Studies at Pachacamac: Methodological Issues and Preliminary Results (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ancient DNA (aDNA) analysis can be a useful tool for sex determination, general mitochondrial lineage (haplogroup), and disease diagnosis in human remains. However, non-endogenous DNA contamination of archaeological material is a recurrent problematic, since excavation, handling, and storage usually don’t fit with the precautions recommended for aDNA...
A paleopathological analysis of skeletal remains uncovered in La Cueva de los Hacheros, Turicato, Michoacán. (2017)
This poster deals with the study of skeletal remains belonging to eighteen individuals deposited within La Cueva de los Hacheros, a site located in the municipality of Turicato, Michoacán. Unfortunately, as a result of looting by landowners, the site has an altered context. Despite that fact, a salvage excavation and a comprehensive analysis of the remains yielded valuable data for interpreting the site and learning more about the individuals buried within. The skeletal analysis made it possible...
Pandemic Parallels: The Black Feminist Necropolitics of Excavating Cholera in the Time of COVID (2021)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Black Studies and Archaeology" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. “The despair and deplorable conditions within which the black community continued into the realm of death and burial.” While Steven J. Richardson offered these words in 1989, their essence still rings true today. Over the past decade, skeletal remains of nearly thirty individuals have been discovered underneath the 3300 Block of Q Street in...
Patterns of cranial trauma in the Late Intermediate Period Colca Valley, Peru (A.D. 1000-1450) (2016)
Cranial trauma studies of Late Intermediate Period populations (LIP, A.D. 1000-1450) suggest that conflict and social stress were endemic across the south-central Andes, although the nature of interpersonal violence was strongly mediated by local political and social structures. This study explores how individuals buried in elaborate cliffside tombs from the Colca valley of southern Peru experienced violence across the 400-year period preceding Inka imperialism. Cranial trauma rates show high...
The Philistine Cemetery at Ashkelon:funerary remains and mortuary practice (2017)
During the 2013-6 seasons, an extramural cemetery was discovered at the coastal site of Ashkelon in Israel. Dated almost entirely to the Iron IIA period, more than 200 sets of remains were exposed and excavated, providing for the first time a secure and sizeable number of burials from which to generate an understanding of Philistine burial practices and mortuary ritual. The majority of bodies were found in primary inhumation with various depositional practices observed, among them simple pit,...
Picking up the Pieces: Bioarchaeological analysis of a looted cist tomb in the mid-Chincha Valley, Peru (2016)
This poster presents a bioarchaeological analysis of a cist tomb in the mid-Chincha Valley, Peru dating to the Late Intermediate Period (c. AD 1100-1450). Though the tomb was partially looted prior to excavation, we successfully reconstructed associations between elements from multiple individuals to gain important data regarding health status and the life course during this dynamic period in late prehistory. The analysis revealed the presence of at least 7 individuals buried in the single cist...
The Poetics of Corpse Fragmentation and Processing in the Ancient Southwest (2016)
The bioarchaeological record in the ancient Southwest has an abundance of evidence of disarticulated remains to suggest a long history of body (corpse) processing and fragmentation. From AD 800 to the 1500s, various assemblages of processed human remains have been recovered. Published studies of these have argued for a wide range of motivations that could account for such assemblages including anthropophagy/cannibalism, massacres, torture, witch executions, ritualized violence, warfare, raiding...
Post-Mortem Manipulation, Movement, and Memory in Copper Age Iberia (2017)
Post-mortem manipulation of human remains played a critical role in mortuary practices in Copper Age Iberia (c. 3250-2200 BC). During this period in Spain and Portugal, individuals were buried communally in tholos-type tombs, as well as natural or artificial caves and rock shelters. Evidence from across Iberia suggests that mortuary practices included the manipulation and movement of previously interred bodies, either in order to clear space for new individuals, or to facilitate secondary...
Potential Applications of the Bioarchaeology of Care Methodological Approach for Historic Institutionalized Populations (2015)
In the 19th century, mental institutions were created in the United States to provide care for the mentally ill. These state institutions of care were designed to serve as cultural buffers to protect mentally ill individuals from the harsh conditions that they would have otherwise been exposed to in other state institutions, such prisons or poorhouses. In this paper, I examine whether and to what extent Tilley’s (2012) "Bioarchaeology of Care" methodological approach provides a means to evaluate...
Prehistoric Mobility and Population Movements in Palau: New Data from aDNA and Stable Isotope (Sr, Pb) Analysis (2015)
Ongoing research at the Chelechol ra Orrak rockshelter in Palau, Micronesia, has revealed the presence of one of the oldest (ca. 3000-1700 BP) and most demographically diverse cemeteries in the Pacific. Archaeological excavation of only a small portion of the site indicates that dozens of individuals were buried here for more than a millennia. Subsequent osteological analysis coupled with recent attempts to extract ancient DNA and stable isotopes (Sr and Pb) have shed new light on genetic...
Preliminary bioarchaeological analysis of the Qijia culture Mogou site (2400-1900 BCE), Gansu Province, China. (2015)
At the Mogou site 1000 graves were excavated from 2008-2011. A preliminary bioarchaeological analysis was done on 154 individuals. The male to female sex ratio is the same as other Qijia sites, with more males than females. The sample population was heterogeneous with 8% of the individuals originating from the west (Xinjiang), north (Mongolia), and east (China) of the region. This may be a result of the site being situated on trade routes from the West into China. Analysis was done on trauma...
Preliminary Results from the Bioarchaeological Investigation of Human Sacrificial Victims from China's Late Shang Dynasty (2015)
Ongoing archaeological investigations at the Late Shang capital of Yinxu (ca. 1200 – 1050 BCE) in China have resulted in the location and partial excavation of thousands of sacrificial pits with an estimated 10,000 individuals interred within. Evidence of human sacrifice during this period includes contemporaneous oracle bone inscriptions, mortuary contexts, weaponry, and the skeletal remains of these individuals. We are presenting our preliminary interpretation of the osteological analysis of...
Preservation of Ancient Teeth Geomorphometry through Computer Tomography Scanning and 3D Printing: An Accuracy Test (2016)
Human remains are pivotal to our understanding of the past. While much bioarchaeological analysis continues to rely on macroscopic and non-invasive methods, scientific and technological developments in the last 30 years have revolutionized the discipline. Among others, isotope analyses, and the extraction of ancient DNA (aDNA) have further unveiled the richness of information that bones and teeth can provide. In spite of their potential, the application of these methods is limited due to their...