Archaeothanatology (Other Keyword)
1-4 (4 Records)
Over the last few decades, archaeological narratives have shifted towards far more nuanced understandings of colonized peoples in favor of reconstructing nuanced and integrated understandings of indigenous perception, identity, biosocial interplays, and other responses to conquest. This work merges archaeological, ecological, and bioarchaeological contexts to help understand the significance of mortuary pattern data to compare postcontact cultural outcomes in Mórrope and Eten, two...
Archaeothanatological Analysis of Mortuary Practices in the Prehistoric Sonoran Desert and Implications for Interpreting Sickness through Postmortem Processing (2018)
The La Playa archaeological site in the Sonoran Desert represents one of the earliest agricultural settlements in northwest Mexico. Over 310 mortuary features have been uncovered during salvage excavations since the site was discovered in 1930, revealing a wide variability in mortuary practices that may reflect specific treatments for pathological or transgressive individuals after death. This paper describes analyses of burials uncovered during the 2017 field season utilizing the...
Armchair Archaeothanatology: Post-Excavation Archaeothanatology in the Caribbean (2015)
Archaeothanatology is increasingly important in the study of mortuary practices, as it allows us to study aspects of mortuary behaviour that were traditionally hard to assess. However, the archaeothanatological approach entails a detailed and very time-consuming excavation and documentation methodology that requires thorough training. Increasingly refined excavation and documentation methods have clear advantages for our understanding of the mortuary record, but there is a danger of rendering...
Modelling skeletal disarticulation: using actualistic and comparative taphonomy to improve the analysis and interpretation of human burials (2017)
Skeletal disarticulation patterns can be diagnostic of environmental conditions (e.g. water flow), animal behavior (e.g. scavenging) and/or human action (e.g. intentional displacement of bones), aiding the reconstruction of the events that formed a burial feature. In archaeothanatology, a model of the ‘natural’ or ‘common’ sequence of disarticulation of the human skeleton at the joints has served as the basis to distinguish ‘natural’ bone displacement from human intervention. This model is...