bioarchaeology (Other Keyword)
51-75 (296 Records)
Efforts to repatriate Native American human remains and artifacts are of immediate importance to American archaeology. Excavated in the early 20th century, Casuarina Mound (8-Br-0122) was first dated to the Malabar II period (750-1565CE) by Irving Rouse in his 1951 publication A Survey of Indian River Archaeology, Florida. Historical accounts describe the removal of at least 112 skeletons and numerous funerary objects from three successive interments. A small subset of this material was donated...
The bravery and beauty within: Skeletal analysis of the ancient Chachapoya people at Kuelap (2015)
In early 17th century historical descriptions, Garcilaso de la Vega describes the Chachapoya people of Peru as "very brave", "the men well-formed and the women extremely beautiful". While the archaeological remains cannot address the veracity of these statements, the analysis of the skeletal remains from important Chachapoya complexes, such as Kuelap, provide the only direct means of reconstructing a biological profile of these ancient people, including aspects of their physical morphology,...
Burial Distribution as a Reflection of Social Organization in Late Postclassic Tlaxcallan (2016)
The Late Postclassic state of Tlaxcallan represents a void in Aztec hegemony that is still poorly understood. Ethnohistoric studies, extensive archaeological survey and limited excavation suggest that the social and political organization of this group diverged from the empire’s policies of rule, allowing for much local authority and cooperative governance. Fargher et al. (2010) argue that a unique form of social organization may have contributed to the state’s ability to remain autonomous from...
Burial treatment in the area of La Noria, Tamtoc, SLP, Mexico (2015)
Archaeological information confirms that between the second and fifteenth centuries AD Tamtoc evolved into a complex urban society that left evidence of their cultural identity through the vestiges of their ancient city. Testimony to this is the architectural complex designed for the preparation of complex funeral rituals, currently known as La Noria. In this area we have 67 burial mounds dug Postclassic (900-1500 AD), recovering 92 graves with the remains of 147 individuals of different ages...
The burials of Tibes, reconsidered (2016)
The 1970s Tibes excavations of the Sociedad Guaynía unearthed the remains of well over one hundred individuals from various portions of what is currently understood to be the earliest ceremonial center in the Caribbean. Despite attempts to avoid burials, more recent (and ongoing) excavations by the Proyecto Arqueológico del Centro Ceremonial Indígena de Tibes have increased this number to a modest degree. Taken together, the resulting corpus of bioarchaeological material represents one of the...
Cahal Pech Mortuary Practices in Regional Perspective (2016)
In Patricia McAnany’s influential work Living with the Ancestors, she argued that the practice of venerating ancestors by placing human burials in eastern structures originated with commoners and was appropriated by the ruling elite as potent political displays. Within the Belize Valley, sites at all levels of the settlement continuum had eastern structures that contained numerous human inhumations, suggesting ancestors may have been politically powerful for elites and non-elites. However,...
Can commingled human remains be useful in reconstructing life during the Neolithic? A case study from Xemxija, Malta. (2015)
Osteological material has historically been underexploited in archaeological research. This is most directly true of commingled assemblages which present an exclusively difficult challenge to bioarchaeologists. The commingled assemblage here examined is the result of the episodic usage of rock-cut tombs, advanced in post-mortem fracture, and disruption during transport and storage. The aim of this study is to reconstruct skeletal profiles, age, sex, and pathological demographics through the...
Caring for Bodies or Simply Saving Souls: the emergence of institutional care in Spanish Colonial America (2015)
During the early 16th century, the recent appearance of institutions specializing in care in Europe spread to the Americas. Unlike our modern perceptions of these healthcare institutions where you can seek help for illnesses that affect the body, the colonial period institutions were primarily run by religious groups and may have been more preoccupied with providing spiritual care for the indigenous populations. While this divergence of caring for bodies to caring for the souls may seem...
Categorizing and Analyzing Age: Historical Bioarchaeology and Childhood (2016)
While bioarchaeologists are able to estimate age from the remains of children into narrow ranges, they often avoid dividing childhood into categories based on these age estimates. Children then end up lumped under just a few categories, or even a single category, "child." While this is prudent in cases where chronological and cultural age cannot necessarily be matched, historical bioarchaeology gives us a unique opportunity to examine historical records and further refine how we categorize,...
The Challenges of Bioarchaeological Research in Peru: Archaeological Field-School Project "Pachacamac Valley" (1991-) (2017)
The archeological study of human burials presents many special challenges. Deterioration begins or accelerates with the exposure to new environmental conditions after recovery. In many cases, the context has to be analyzed in situ by bioanthropologists to record information before the removal of the materials to the laboratory and storage area. Continuous participation of bioarchaeologists is also vital for subsequent analysis of the funerary context many months or years after the end of the...
Childhood Diets and Residential Mobility in the Late Intermediate Period, Colca Valley, Peru: A Study of Carbon and Oxygen Isotope Ratios from Dental Apatite (2017)
Around AD 1300 in the Colca Valley of southern Peru, an increasing proportion of elite individuals began to mark themselves as ethnically distinct by elongating the heads of children. This permanent act had far-reaching effects on the livelihoods of modified individuals, especially females, who exhibit more diversified diets in adulthood and experienced lower rates of cranial trauma. The present study complements prior stable isotopic analysis of bone collagen by examining carbon and oxygen...
Children as social actors within the domestic group at Monte Albán, Oaxaca. Mexico (2015)
This paper starts from a micro and qualitative approach to describe and analyze the social position of individuals: children, women and men within various domestic units in Monte Alban, Oaxaca, through archaeological indicators of prestige, power and wealth. The methodology uses funerary practices and its meaning in social terms within the domestic group, to identify the social role especially of children, a sector of the population rarely studied. The location of burials into de domestic unit...
Chincha-Inka Mortuary Traditions at Jahuay, Quebrada de Topará (2019)
This is an abstract from the "From the Paracas Culture to the Inca Empire: Recent Archaeological Research in the Chincha Valley, Peru" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The site of Jahuay, located 20 km north of the Chincha Valley, was first occupied during the Early Horizon as a commoner fishing community. In later eras, it was reoccupied by the Chincha and Inka, possibly as a tambo. During the 2017 and 2018 field seasons, the Proyecto de...
A Combined Bioarchaeological and Isotopic Approach to Understanding the Regional Diversity and Population Mobility within the Holmul Region, Guatemala (2015)
The northeastern Petén of Guatemala is an ideal area for applying stable isotope analysis to reconstruct past population histories and to explore the interplay of migration and social complexity throughout the rise of the Maya. The strontium and oxygen isotope analysis of dental enamel is a productive alternative when bone collagen is not available or is severely altered by taphonomic processes or conditions of preservation. These isotopic analyses of dental enamel can be combined with...
Commingled, communal and complex: reconstructing Iberian Copper Age mortuary practices (2015)
Fragmentary and commingled human remains recovered from salvage excavations present bioarchaeologists with a number of interpretative challenges, including calculating MNI in the absence of detailed provenience information, untangling post-excavation commingling of remains, and analyzing high volumes of recovered material. Importantly, analytical techniques developed in recent research on forensic and archaeological taphonomy can help overcome some of these difficulties. Here I focus on the case...
Community and Ancestors in the Titicaca Basin during the Formative Period (2015)
The Formative Period (1500 BC-AD 200) in the Titicaca Basin was a time of important social and economic changes, such as the establishment of sedentary settlements and long distance trade routes, increasing horticultural investment, and an emerging regional ritual tradition, Yaya-Mama. However, while archaeologists have documented and described these changes, less is understood about how they impacted local communities. In particular, Yaya-Mama has been interpreted in a variety of ways: as a...
Comparability of Photogrammetry and Laser Scanners for Generating 3D Surfaces for Archaeological Questions (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Three-dimensional modeling has become an invaluable tool in many areas of archaeology, including bioarchaeological contexts. 3D modeling can increase the scope and scale of many research questions by, for example, allowing for the use of geometric morphometrics to provide high-resolution anatomical information. Unfortunately, rendering 3D surface data has...
Comparing Methodologies for Documenting Commingled and Fragmentary Human Remains (2016)
Commingled and fragmentary human remains are a common occurrence in archaeological and forensic contexts, but only a few methods have been developed to record these complex assemblages. Conventional inventory methods, such as the Standards for Data Collection from Human Skeletal Remains, document the presence and completeness of specific portions of skeletal elements and the minimum number of individuals (MNI) represented by each bone portion. This rather subjective method for MNI calculation...
Comparison of Nubian and Egyptian patterns of physical activity at New Kingdom Tombos (2017)
Tombos, located at the Third Cataract of the Nile River in Sudan, was established as an Egyptian colonial site in Nubia during the New Kingdom period. Burials provide evidence for high level Egyptian administrators and support staff as well as local community members. Previous investigations of the Tombos remains have indicated that individuals buried at Tombos participated in relatively low levels of strenuous physical activities, indicative of roles such as administrators, scribes, and...
A Comparison of Two Late Woodland Features: Helton 20-36 and Carter 2-15 (2016)
While the structure of Middle Woodland (2050-1600 BP) burial mounds from the lower Illinois River valley (LIV) is widely understood in terms of ramps, tombs, and peripheral interment facilities, those for the subsequent Late Woodland period (1600-1000 BP) remain poorly characterized. To illustrate commonalities between Late Woodland sites from the LIV, we here compare Feature 36 from Helton Md 20 and Feature 15 from Carter Md 2. The detailed excavation notes from the Helton excavation are used...
Corporeal Congregations and Asynchronous Lives: Unpacking the Pews at Spring Street (2017)
This paper seeks to expose the "fallacies of synchrony" that often accompany the analysis of human remains. In approaching a cemetery, for example, we all too easily think of the bodies there as a "community," even when they belong to different generations or geographic contexts. This simple point has major implications, especially for the bioarchaeology of urban landscapes. Here, chronologically disparate elements accumulate in vast mélanges, offering innumerable examples of the...
Cranial morphological variation among Paleoamerican skeletons: a test of the coastal migration hypothesis (2015)
Although the origin of the first Americans has been resolved through genetics, the routes that early humans traveled from Asia into North and South America are still the subject of intense scholarly debate. Recent genetic and archaeological data suggest an early migration may have occurred along the Pacific coast of the Americas. Based on these lines of evidence, it is hypothesized that Paleoamericans may show morphological affinities to prehistoric skeletons from coastal sites if an early...
Creating an Interdisciplinary Map of Social and Environmental Change through Topography and Bioarchaeology (2016)
Societal change does not occur in a vacuum and marks the social and physical landscape in a myriad of ways. The natural world—the lived in landscape—is the most pervasive and enduring reminder and example of social order. Water is a staple of both domestic and ritual life and leaves its mark in architectural and biological manifestations of society. Mountains, caves, and ravines and other landscape monuments are emblematic of regional geology and influence the local human population both at the...
Cremation Mortuary Practices during the Archaic Period in Ancient Athens and Attica (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, we provide preliminary results for reconstructing cremation mortuary practices from the Archaic site of Phaleron (ca. 750–480 BCE), located in Athens, Greece. We build on performance theory and embodiment ideas to answer two main research questions: (1) Who were the cremated individuals? and (2) How were cremation mortuary rituals performed?...
Curating Large Skeletal Collections: An Example from the Ancient Maya Site of Copan, Honduras (2017)
Bioarchaeologists draw data from the detailed study of human remains from archaeological contexts. The information embedded in the skeleton provides a powerful window into prehistory; informing us of past lifeways, health/disease, diet, kinship, migration, and conflict. The intimate relationship between the living and the dead is necessarily imbued with respect and an ethical responsibility to properly handle and curate the remains of those that we study. However, the conservation of skeletal...