Osteobiography (Other Keyword)
1-15 (15 Records)
Population level analyses of violence that are focused on quantifying and comparing traumatic injuries on human skeletal remains recovered from an archaeological context are crucial for understanding violent interactions through time and across regions. However, these types of studies are also limited because, by design, they place less emphasis on individuals and their lived experience. In contrast, when researchers create what Frank and Julie Saul called an osteobiography for each set of...
Bioarchaeology of Postclassic West Mexico: A Research Framework 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. Over the past three millennia, West Mexico’s complex cultural developments and social transformations have characterized it as a unique entity pivotal in the histories of population admixture and cultural transmission, producing long-lasting effects still evident in Mesoamerica. During the Early to Middle Postclassic periods (850/900–1350s CE), polities in...
Distinctive Burials of the Phaleron Cemetery, Archaic Greece: Marginalized in Life and Death (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Bioarchaeology of the Phaleron Cemetery, Archaic Greece: Current Research and Insights" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Phaleron cemetery is most well-known for the archaic burials of 79 young men who had been shackled, probably violently executed, and interred in three trenches. However, there are 80 additional individuals whose mortuary contexts fall outside expected forms, now categorized as “distinctive,”...
Extending Osteobiography: Disability, Care, Agency and Emotion (2017)
Based on evidence in human remains suggesting survival despite functionally-limiting disability, the bioarchaeology of care approach infers provision of health-related care; identifies likely elements of this care; then explores the implications of care practices and outcomes for increased understanding of both the subject of care and their community. A comprehensive osteobiography of the care-recipient (framed within the individual’s lifecourse and lifeways, and acknowledging the centrality of...
From Life History to Large Scale: Osteobiography as Microhistory (2017)
Osteobiography, like other types of biographies, extends beyond the individual through entanglements with objects, landscapes, and social phenomena. The approach requires a multi-scalar analysis to understand how bodies both emerge from and create historical process. Osteobiographies are developed by tacking between an individual’s remains and the wider skeletal population to establish a contextualized life history. Conceptualizing osteobiography as a microhistory of human remains is one way in...
In the Heart of the Inca: An Osteobiography at Huanacauri (Cusco, Peru) (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study takes an osteobiographical approach to describe the archaeological significance and life history of the only known individual buried within Huanacauri (Cusco, Peru), one of the most sacred sites in the Inca Empire (ca. 1400-1533 CE). Given the significant location of the burial—in the center of the place the Incas perceived as the foundation of...
An Osteobiography of a Oaxacan Chontal Young Adult Female (2015)
Skeleton Sk-CV-01 is a female around 18 years of age, carefully buried in a stone cist in the Chontal Highlands of southern Oaxaca during the Late Postclassic or Early Colonial period. She is the first and only human skeleton known from controlled excavations in the area, and the archaeological context and historical documentation associate her with the Chontal people who still inhabit the region. In this presentation the results of the archaeological, osteological, and stable isotope analyses...
An Osteobiography of Skeletal Remains from Holtun, Guatemala (2018)
Excavations at the site of Holtun, Guatemala during the 2014 – 2017 field seasons yielded eighteen human burials from various temporal periods and site locations. Holtun was inhabited by the ancient Maya from the Middle Preclassic (1000 – 300 BCE) to the Terminal Classic Period (600 – 900 CE). Recent archaeological investigations have identified the Preclassic period at Holtun as a time characterized by increasing social inequality, but few burials have been recovered to infer the impact of...
An Osteobiography of Tomb Op. 42, Ent. 5 from Copán, Honduras (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Marking and Making of Social Persons: Embodied Understandings in the Archaeologies of Childhood and Adolescence" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This research constructs an osteobiological narrative of two females and a male from Copán, Honduras, who were placed together within a Classic period (AD 600–822) tomb in the residential group Salamar (8L-10) Op. 42. Utilizing mortuary and isotopic data, this case study...
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...
Osteonarratives in the German-Language Tradition (2017)
This paper will discuss the research history of "osteobiography" in German-language anthropology and archaeology. That the term "Osteobiographie" is actually not in use does not imply that the concept does not exist. Although German-speaking prehistoric anthropologists were and still are predominantly focused on population research, science-based stories relating to individuals have been told, for instance, about Ötzi the Iceman. On closer inspection such narratives reveal a tendency to surface...
A Prism or a Mirror? Reflections of a Hopewell Man (2017)
Interred within a deep, mounded and relatively elaborate tomb nearly two millennia ago, our Hopewell man lived approximately as many years as we have studied his remains. While his tissues have remained unchanged since excavation, our analytical gaze has witnessed near tectonic shifts in theoretical perspectives. The first interpretations, those of the senior author in zealous pursuit of her doctoral degree, were decidedly processual and lacked reflexivity. She spoke of status, for example,...
The Rio Viejo Weaver: Burial Practices, Osteobiography, and the Early Classic Collapse (2015)
The Early Classic (AD 250 – 500) in the lower Río Verde valley was marked by political fragmentation and significant transformations in social, political and economic relations following the collapse of a regional polity centered at Río Viejo. How the region’s inhabitants navigated these transformations remains poorly understood, although regional-scale evidence from settlement patterns and excavation indicates the abandonment of many communities and major changes in the way people engaged with...
Scales of Analysis and Modes of Interpretation in Osteobiography: An Example from the Dilmun Bioarchaeology Project (2017)
Bioarchaeologists have traditionally prioritized statistically significant patterns in large skeletal assemblages to document major biocultural trends in human populations. But in the last 15-20 years, the osteobiography approach has returned to favor, encouraging bioarchaeologists to focus on the specifics of the human scale, reconstruct an experiential prehistory, and restore an identity to those "genderless, faceless blobs" (Tringham 1991: 97) who people so many traditional interpretations of...
‘Where Individuals Are Nameless and Unknown’: Osteobiography Reveals the ‘Big Man’, the Ritualist, the Heiress, and the Priest (2017)
In 1957, Christopher Hawkes (of the ladder of inference renown) wrote: "…. the most scientific and therefore the best, because the purest, kind of archaeology is the prehistoric kind, where individuals are nameless and unknown, and so cannot disturb our studies by throwing any of their proud and angry dust in our eyes."1 Because the social identity of the deceased cannot be identified from human remains without analysis, osteobiography, the bioarchaeological reconstruction of the lives and...