Bioarchaeology/Skeletal Analysis (Other Keyword)
151-175 (487 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Debra L. Martin" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The concept and approach of "bioarchaeology as anthropology," wherein bioarchaeology is framed as interdisciplinary, hypothesis-driven, biocultural, cross-cultural, and focused on understanding the adaptation and evolution of social systems, was pioneered by George Armelagos and has been progressively strengthened and amplified...
Don’t Throw the Baby out with the Bathwater: New Insights into Palaeodemographic Change with the Intensification of Agriculture in Southeast Asia (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Paradigms Shift: New Interpretations in Mainland Southeast Asian Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. With the accumulation of bioarchaeological research in mainland Southeast Asia we are beginning to assess the impact that agricultural intensification and associated environmental and social changes had on these societies. Recent work is starting to build up a model of demographic change with increasing...
The Down and Dirty: Differential Preservation of Burials from Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Cemeteries on Sint Eustatius, Dutch Caribbean (2021)
This is an abstract from the "NSF REU Site: Exploring Globalization through Archaeology 2019–2020 Session, St. Eustatius, Dutch Caribbean" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study explores the markedly different preservation of skeletal remains from two historic cemeteries situated within 500 m of each other on the Dutch Caribbean island of Sint Eustatius. The burials of eighteenth-century enslaved Africans are located along the coast and are...
The Dread of Something after Death: Ownership, Excavation and Identification of World War II Axis Combatants in Europe (2018)
Human remains possess an indexical quality that references once-living people. Human bone may also serve as a symbolic representation of larger ideas such as honor, vengeance or injustice. As such, human remains, as evidence of past criminal actions, have the ability to bring communities together, but also to tear them apart. In regard to the remains of soldiers who perished in the European theater during World War II (WWII), the presence of remains may serve to reinforce the perceived moral...
Drought, Diet, Demography, and Diaspora during the Mississippian Period: A View from the Central Illinois River Valley (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Migration and Climate Change: The Spread of Mississippian Culture" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For decades archaeologists have conjectured about the impacts of climate change on the distribution of Mississippian and related pre-Columbian populations in midcontinental North America. Until recently, climatological reconstructions were coarse grained and lacked the temporal and spatial resolution to link in any...
Early Childhood Diet during the Bronze Age Eastern Zhou Dynasty (China): Evidence from Stable Isotope Analysis (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Health and Welfare of Children in the Past" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Diet and health are deeply intertwined, and childhood is a critical period where nutrition can have significant short- and long-term effects on the growing individual. Breastfeeding, weaning, and childhood dietary habits are culturally-mediated practices, and how a developing body is fed is a critical cultural experience with biological...
Early Human Biology, Ecology, and Archaeology in the Lowland Tropics of Central America (2018)
Renewed focus on Paleoamerican and archaic peoples across Mesoamerica have broadened our understanding of those time periods. However, few stratified sites have been documented. We present new data from two multi-component rockshelters located in the Bladen Nature Reserve in the Maya Mountains of Belize. We document persistent use of these rockshelters from the late Pleistocene through the Maya collapse and suggest these spaces were used for animal processing, tool reduction, and as...
Eating and Empires: Stable Isotope Analysis to Reconstruct Diet and Foodways in the Wari Heartland (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Seeing Wari through the Lens of the Everyday: Results from the Patipampa Sector of Huari" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dietary patterns within a community can reveal insights into how communities were organized and how social class or gender roles could shape who had access to which foods. In this study, we use stable isotope analysis of archaeological humans and fauna from three Wari sites in the imperial heartland...
Elites, Craftsmen, or . . . Commoners? Ten Years of Bioarchaeological Research at Castillo de Huarmey (2023)
This is an abstract from the "A Decade of Multidisciplinary Research at Castillo de Huarmey, Peru" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the last 10 years, the multidisciplinary Polish-Peruvian archaeological project at Castillo de Huarmey brought to light numerous finds. Some of the most significant research consists of wide-scale bioarchaeological analyses of human and animal remains originating from both undisturbed and looted burials. The most...
Embodied Empire: Life and Death of Wari Elites from Castillo de Huarmey (2018)
The discovery of an undisturbed burial context at Castillo de Huarmey, bringing to light remains of Wari immediate elite members, finally embodied long discussed highest social levels of Wari Imperial elites. Until that time they characteristic was derived almost exclusively from indirect sources, mainly material remains of high quality material culture and architecture. Now, there is a chance to get a glimpse on their actual life stories, occupation, and to see their faces. Analysis of the...
Embodying the Sun. Pyrotechniques as Part of Human Sacrifice in Ancient Mesoamerica (2018)
In Mesoamerica, sacrificial ceremonies for the sake of religious merit-making tended to bridge polarities between action and symbols. Some of the ritual practices were mediated by mythical narratives surrounding domestic hearths, divine fire, and the sun itself. Among ancient Mesoamericans with their hierophagic cosmic understanding, the fiery protagonists to which sacrifices were destined to were deemed necessary complements of all life and had to be fed. This talk combines graphic and textual...
Entering the "Valley of Death": Isotopic Evidence of Vulnerable Survivors at Roman Period Kellis, Egypt (2018)
Breast-fed infants living in communities with adequate food access experience particularly high health risks during complementary feeding between ages 6 to 36 months. The most vulnerable of these die in this period, characterized as the "valley of death," which represents a biocultural reality. The majority of those who survive are "vulnerable survivors." The Kellis 2 cemetery sample (Dakhleh Oasis, Egypt, AD 50-450) provides a unique opportunity to analyze effects of biocultural disruptions...
Entheseal Changes in Bronze and Early Iron Age Mongolia (2018)
Extensive bioarchaeological research has addressed questions about stress, pathology, and activity in agricultural and semi-agricultural populations throughout the archaeological record, yet comparable studies pertaining to nomadic pastoral and semi-pastoral groups are relatively rare. During the Bronze Age in the Eurasian Steppes, archaeological evidence suggests a transition of lifeways from semi-sedentary agricultural to nomadic pastoralist. Entheseal analyses in bioarchaeology introduce an...
Establishing Cultural Affiliation under NAGPRA Using Geographic Origin: A Case Study of Minnesota (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Indigenous perspectives of cultural affiliation center on shared relationships with the land (Bruchac 2005); thus, establishing cultural affiliation under NAGPRA is more meaningful if it can reassociate an ancestor based on their region of origin. Biological relatedness has been used to establish cultural affiliation, but this approach prioritizes a...
Establishing Cultural Affinity through Multiple Lines of Evidence (2018)
Repatriation and reburial efforts following the 2006-2008 excavation of the Alameda-Stone cemetery—a multiethnic, historical-period cemetery in downtown Tucson, Arizona—required a determination of cultural affinity for all human remains recovered from the civilian section. Goldstein played a key role in developing for the project a transparent and objective biocultural approach to determining cultural affinity that overcame problems encountered by previous projects in assessing cultural...
Ethical issues of bioarchaeology in Southeast Asia (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Future of Bioarchaeology in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since the 1990s, there has been an increase in bioarchaeological research in many parts of Southeast Asia conducted by both locals and non-locals. Southeast Asian countries are characterised by varied social, cultural, and political histories, but there are also some broad similarities in terms of poor economic development that limits much...
Ethics of Repatriation > Culture of Academic Freedom (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) is 30 years old, and the generation that opposed its passage is now approaching (or past) retirement age. For professionals that succeed them, repatriation has always been both legal and ethical practice and they must confront legacies of mentors/predecessors who found ways to avoid the...
Ethics, professionalism, and qualifications in bioarchaeology and forensic anthropology (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Future of Bioarchaeology in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bioarchaeology and forensic anthropology both primarily deal with the analysis of human skeletal remains and employ similar methods for osteological analysis. However, over the past several decades, both subfields have become increasingly specialized with unique procedural and analytical goals. This divergence means that training in one...
Evaluating the Applicability of the Coimbra Method on an Archaeological Sample from Sint Eustatius (2021)
This is an abstract from the "NSF REU Site: Exploring Globalization through Archaeology 2019–2020 Session, St. Eustatius, Dutch Caribbean" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. To uncover details of past people’s day to day life, bioarchaeologists have attempted to reconstruct possible activity patterns by examining changes that occur at musculoskeletal markers, called entheseal sites (ES). While there is general agreement about the overall effect of...
Evaluation of an Impact of Different 3D Surface Scanning Protocols on Sex and Age-at-Death Assessment from Os Coxae in Bioarchaeology (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the contemporary bioarchaeology and anthropology in general, 3D imaging technologies are being used more frequently. They offer many new possibilities, among which we can mention for instance a possibility of permanent documentation, an easier and faster sharing of data among institutions or new opportunities of data analysis. 3D surface data may be...
Examining the Trade-Off between Food Acquisition and Violence Avoidance: Population-Level Effects and Variability in Risk-Preference (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Life Is Risky: Human Behavioral Ecological Approaches to Variable Outcomes " session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Resource procurement and the avoidance of interpersonal violence are critical features of human survival strategies. Yet these features are often competing, requiring individuals to make trade-offs in order to maximize fitness. Recent decades of research have shown violence to be a pervasive, albeit variable,...
Expanding Individual Life Histories to Large-Scale Dietary Comparisons of Early Neolithic Cemetery Populations at Lokomotiv and Shamanka II, Cis-Baikla, Siberia (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Northeast Asian Prehistoric Hunter-Gather Lifeways: Multidisciplinary, Individual Life History Approach" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Reconstructing individual life histories using bio- and geochemical proxy records from 3-molar sequences of incremental dentin has elucidated a surprising degree of interpersonal variability amongst Early Neolithic populations in southwestern Cis-Baikal, Siberia. Previous...
Expanding the Role of Animals in Romano-British Burials (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This work considers the implications of human-animal relationships as they are found in the mortuary record of Verulamium- modern town of St. Albans, England. Once considered to be a major center, the mortuary rites given to its people suggest high variability in the role specific animal species played within the living and death culture of the city. While 480...
An Exploration of the Demographics of Non-Adults in Medieval Hospital Cemeteries in England (AD 1050-1600). (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Health and Welfare of Children in the Past" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the medieval period (AD 1050-1600) in England, hospitals were associated with the Church and most were governed by Church rule. Distinct types of hospitals were founded: leper hospitals, general infirmaries, and alms houses. These sites provided care, shelter, and spiritual nourishment for those in need. Many hospitals had admission...
Exploring Childhood Health Through Lead Trace Element and Isotope Analyses: A Case Study of Historic Populations in Newfoundland, Canada (2018)
Lead was ubiquitous throughout the cultural environments of the Atlantic World during the 18th and 19th centuries and can be toxic to humans, particularly children. There is a long history of examining human lead exposure using trace element and isotope data in archaeological remains, but most studies have sampled bone tissue, which is prone to diagenetic alteration. More recently, researchers are sampling tooth enamel, which is more likely to retain a biogenic record of lead exposure. Since...