Bioarchaeology/Skeletal Analysis (Other Keyword)
326-350 (487 Records)
The high morbidity (50% or greater) of Iceland’s Black Death in 1404 C.E. disrupted a rigidly hierarchical Icelandic social order and led to an inability to enforce social and legal constraints on Iceland’s labor classes. This newly untethered and mobile lower class searched for avenues for wealth creation previously unavailable. One avenue, in the century following Iceland’s Black Death, was through fishing and fish exports. During this period, previously tightly restricted fish exports...
Often the Victims, Occasionally the Aggressors: The Role of Women in Warfare and Raiding in the Ancestral Pueblo World (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Women of Violence: Warriors, Aggressors, and Perpetrators of Violence" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Discussions about warfare in the pre-contact Southwest tend to focus on lethal interactions between male combatants or the capture of women during raids; much of our own research has focused on the latter. What is overlooked most of the time, however, is the roles that women played in hostile encounters in the region,...
Old Tomb, New Ancestors: Investigating the Role of a Preceramic Burial in Huarás Community Formation (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Cooperative Bodies: Bioarchaeology and Non-ranked Societies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The social and physical history of a place often plays a crucial role in people’s decisions regarding where to establish a community. In the ancient Andes, burial monuments offered powerful connections to landscape and shaped community identity by demonstrating claims to a shared ancestry and legitimizing access to ancestral...
Oneota Burial Practices: A Case Study from the Dixon Site (13WD8) (2018)
Past populations that are associated with the Oneota archaeological tradition appear to have practiced a variety of burial practices. This paper serves as a presentation of another case study that contributes to our knowledge base of Oneota burial practices. Contexts for human skeletal remains recovered from Oneota sites range from scattered isolated elements to primary burials (both extended and flexed) oriented in various directions, both within constructed mounds and other non-mound features....
Ontology, Time Travel, and Transformation in the Lower Illinois Valley (2019)
This is an abstract from the "From Individual Bodies to Bodies of Social Theory: Exploring Ontologies of the Americas" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, we explore the implications of time travel (Holtorf) and ontology (Viveiros de Castro, Latour, Pedersen) for bioarchaeological perspectives of Middle Woodland (Hopewellian) peoples of the lower Illinois River valley (LIV), who occupied this region two millennia ago. Following...
Open Chests and Broken Hearts: New Perspectives on Human Heart Sacrifice in Mesoamerica (2021)
This is an abstract from the "New Perspectives on Ritual Violence and Related Human Body Treatments in Ancient Mesoamerica" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Beyond the general idea of benefiting society and placating the divine, the polyvalent symbols and meanings of ancient religious sacrifices can be interpreted properly only after combining different disciplinary lenses. In this paper, we scrutinize iconographic and ethnohistorical testimonies of...
Osteobiographical Investigations: The Case of Anomalies in the Spine (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This research reconstructs the osteobiography of an unprovenienced male individual that is part of an anatomical collection house at the University of Oklahoma to get more information about his life. This is done by reconstructing his biological profile and investigating possible habitual activity through skeletal indicators. Specifically, the analysis...
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...
Osteological Analysis of Two Contemporary Tombs from the San Giuliano Necropolis (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Etruscan Centralization to Medieval Marginalization: Shifts in Settlement and Mortuary Traditions at San Giuliano, Italy" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper will describe and compare the skeletal remains recovered from two small Etruscan chamber tombs from the San Giuliano archeological complex in the Marturanum Park in the Lazio region of Italy. Both tombs, G13-001 and G12-060, are dated to the sixth century...
An Osteological and Isotopic Assessment of Diet at Ancient Corinth and Ancient Paphos (2018)
Corinth and Paphos were two key centers of the ancient Mediterranean during the Hellenistic and Roman eras. While the commercial and political lives if these communities have been studied, less is known about aspects of day to day life such as diet and health. Here we present some insights based on paleopathology and collagen stable isotope analysis. This study (n = 275 individuals for Paphos; 94 individuals for Corinth) suggests populations that were under a certain amount of stress. Mean...
An Overview of Forensic Trophy Skull Analysis in Montana (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Retaining a skeletal element, especially a skull, whether it be for ancestor veneration, social memory, or as a trophy, is a common practice throughout human history. Keeping a cranium can reflect a lot of information about cultural beliefs concerning death, war, and victory at specific points in time. It is more common than one might think to come across...
Paleoarchaic Cultural Affiliations on the Columbia Plateau (2018)
Two decades of mortuary and bioarchaeology studies have built evidence for determinations of cultural affiliation for human remains and artifacts associated with the Paleoarchaic and Early Middle Archaic periods. Background studies (under NAGPRA: Kennewick by 2000 and Marmes in 2004, 2010, and 2012) outline major lines of evidence for determining probable affiliation. Sufficient and necessary evidence are subjects of healthy debate. Diversity in burial practices and artifacts unites more than...
Paleodietary Analysis of Xiongnu Individuals in Zuunkhangai, Mongolia (2018)
The archaeology of the Xiongnu period has grown considerably over the last decade, yet debate still surrounds Xiongnu subsistence practices and the timing for the rise, expansion, and ‘collapse’ of the Xiongnu polity. The problem, in part, has to do with discrepancies between dates that come from the same sites. Some dates have been reported to be earlier when the samples came from human remains. These discrepancies have been attributed to the ‘reservoir effect’. In order to investigate this, we...
Paleoindians from Mexico: What Do They Tell Us about the Early Peopling of the Americas? (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Dedication, Collaboration, and Vision, Part II: Papers in Honor of Tom D. Dillehay" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mexico is important in the debate on the early peopling of the Americas because several well-preserved Paleoindian/Preceramic individuals with ages between 13,000 and 8,000 years have been found in lake sediments/volcanic deposits surrounding a Late Pleistocene Lake in Central Mexico and in submerged...
Paleoindians from the Basin of Mexico: How do they fit in the early peopling of the Americas? (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Legacies of The Basin of Mexico: The Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization, Part 1" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Basin of Mexico is important in the debate on the early peopling of the Americas because several well preserved Paleoindian/Preceramic individuals have been found in the lake sediments/volcanic deposits surrounding the Late Pleistocene Lake. They include: Peñon Woman III,...
Paleopathology and Dental Disease from Point San Jose (2018)
Traditional studies of health and stress in archaeological samples use several categories of skeletal alterations: linear enamel hypoplasias (LEH), adult stature, scars of anemia, dental disease, osteoarthritis, trauma, and infection. Skeletal remains from a late 19th century military hospital at Point San Jose (PSJ), San Francisco, represent a commingled assemblage, complicating paleopathological observations on the bones. Unlike bony changes, dental pathologies are often studied by individual...
Paleopathology and Non-Specific Indicators of Stress from Point San Jose (2018)
Paleopathology encompasses the understanding of disease processes that affect skeletal remains as well as the timeframe and context in which they occur. Although most such studies focus on changes observed at an individual level, the Point San Jose assemblage provides a challenging perspective on paleopathology because it consists of separate skeletal elements lacking association with whole individuals. Consequently, our focus is on the types of bony changes seen rather than specific diagnoses...
Papa Was a Rolling Stone: Migration Stories from the Three Rivers Region, NW Belize (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Ancient Maya Landscapes in Northwestern Belize, Part II" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A robust body of literature on ancient Maya migration exists, showcasing their intrinsically mobile nature. Interestingly, while migration inquiries have been conducted in urban centers throughout the ancient Maya world, it is less well understood how people moved around more rural landscapes. For the ancient Maya inhabiting...
Parental Investment in a High-Stress Environment: Weaning Age and Early Childhood Diet at Uraca, Lower Majes Valley, Peru (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human behavioral ecology predicts that individuals alter reproductive strategies to maximize reproductive success in response to environmental and social conditions. We employ stable isotope measures (δ15N and δ13C) of weaning age and early childhood diet from serial micro-samples of first molar dentin from 10 individuals as proxies for the reproductive...
Patterns of Migration at Paquimé: Insights from Isotopic and Demographic Data (2019)
This is an abstract from the "25 Years in the Casas Grandes Region: Celebrating Mexico–U.S. Collaboration in the Gran Chichimeca" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Interregional interaction has factored prominently in debates about the origin and cultural trajectory of Paquimé since the site was first excavated six decades ago. In this paper, we use a bioarchaeological approach to reconstruct the structure and scale of migration at Paquimé to better...
The People of the Land and the People of the Sea: Tracing Residence and Relationships between Littoral and Chaupiyunga Populations in the Moche Valley during the Early Intermediate Period (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Exploring mobility and inter-community relationships has been an important area of research in the Precolumbian Andes since Rostworowski first argued for economic and ethnic divisions between communities of fishers and farmers on the Peruvian north coast. To address this issue in the Moche Valley, we examined Viru period (150 BC–AD 500) dental remains of...
Perceptions of Disability and Care in Early Islamic Central Asia (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Identity, Interpretation, and Innovation: The Worlds of Islamic Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, we apply an index of care approach to a case study of an individual with progressive pseudorheumatoid dysplasia from an early Islamic cemetery at the site of Tashbulak in southeastern Uzbekistan. Joint degeneration and progressive impingement of nerves would have severely limited individual TBK...
Physical Effects of Social Status in Early Medieval Thuringia: A Bioarchaeological Investigation of Health and Disease among Individuals from the Merovingian Cemetery of Großvargula, Germany (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Merovingian society (450–751 CE) was strongly stratified with differences in social standing being written in law and affecting many aspects of life, such as occupation and access to material, nutritional, and medical resources. How did these status differences become embodied in Early Medieval Thuringia? This study explores the cumulative effect of...
Pinniped Taphonomy: Observations from a Northern Elephant Seal Breeding Colony Provide New Insights into the Taphonomic Processes on Pinnipeds (2018)
Actualistic studies on vertebrate taphonomy have been focused on terrestrial mammals, and little is known about the taphonomic processes affecting marine mammals. Pinnipeds (seals, sea lions, fur seals) exhibit an extensive fossil and archaeological record, the interpretation of which is often impeded by the lack of research on their taphonomic processes. We present the preliminary results of a taphonomic study performed in a modern breeding colony of Northern elephant seal (NES; Mirounga...
Plus ça Change: Archaeology and Incarceration (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology Out-of-the-Box: Investigating the Edge of the Discipline" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Spike Island Male Convict Depot opened in 1847 at the height of the Great Famine in Ireland as part of the colonial government’s response to the rise in ‘criminality’ that accompanied mass starvation. The site has a global reach, not just because it was an embarkation point in the transportation of convicts around...