bioarchaeology (Other Keyword)
151-175 (301 Records)
Diverse, lower elevation areas were home to producers and procurers of goods not easily grown or obtainable in the South Central Andean heartland of the Tiwanaku state. Various Tiwanaku colonial settlement clusters, near present-day Moquegua, Peru, comprised one such region. Tiwanaku colonists in this area participated in activities that included farming of corn and coca, as well as transportation of goods between the heartland and colony. For example, Omo-style (Omo M16D and Rio Muerto M70...
The Langobards in Italy: A Bioarchaeological Analysis of the Seventh-Century A.D. Necropolis of Sovizzo in Vicenza, Italy (2017)
The Romans and Byzantines in Veneto (northeast Italy), experienced invasions from a Germanic tribal group, the Langobards, in AD 567, with occupations lasting until the 8th century AD; however, Langobard diet and health are largely unknown during this period of transition. Information on Langobard diet and health is pertinent to understanding the political, economic, and social changes that occurred during the Langobard arrival and subsequent occupation. To address these questions, we focused on...
Late Bronze Age women of the steppe frontier: a bioarchaeological analysis of multiple sites in northern China (2017)
The late Bronze Age in the Inner Asian steppe was a transitional period, with the adoption of mobile herding, as well as increasing sociopolitical interaction and complexity among groups in this region. Although archaeological studies have indicated that many steppe groups engaged in a variety of subsistence practices, pastoralism in general has been characterized as a rather uniform lifestyle; and nomadic pastoralism in particular has been associated more often with the role of males, i.e., as...
Life and Death among the Late Fort Ancient: Injury Recidivism and Perimortem Trauma at Hardin Village, Kentucky (2017)
Hardin Village is a Fort Ancient site located less than half a kilometer from the south bank of the Ohio River. It was excavated under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration in the late 1930s. The skeletal remains from the Late Middle and Late Fort Ancient Periods (A.D. 1450–1675) represent more than 300 individuals, both male and female, aged neonate to 60+ years. Adult individuals presented a range of possible cranial and post-cranial trauma, including blunt force, sharp force, and...
Life and Death at the mouth of the River Loa: Bioarchaeological and biogeochemical analysis of human remains from Formative Period northern Chile (2015)
Recent research has shown that during the Formative Period (1500 B.C.-A.D. 500), in northern Chile’s Atacama Desert life was sustained and enriched by inter-zonal movement and networks of exchange of both prestige goods and staple materials. In order to further detail these phenomena, a series of five cemeteries in the region of Caleta Huelén were recently excavated. In this work, we present the results of contextualized bioarchaeological and biogeochemical analysis of over 30 individuals,...
Life Course as Slow Bioarchaeology: Recovering the Lives of Laborers and Immigrants in an Anatomical Collection (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Slow Archaeology + Fast Capitalism: Hard Lessons and Future Strategies from Urban Archaeology" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. I consider the potentials of a slow bioarchaeology of the Huntington Anatomical collection, focusing on the collection’s Irish immigrants, who lived and worked in New York City in the nineteenth century. Taking the skeleton as a record of experience, life course approaches interpret...
A Life History of the Transbay Man as Reconstructed through Stable Isotope Analysis (2015)
By analyzing tissues that develop at different points in the life cycle, such as early-forming first molars and later-forming third molars, archaeologists can trace the dietary life histories of individuals from the past. Because environments differ in the food and water resources, these dietary patterns can also be linked to mobility patterns. This paper reconstructs a dietary and mobility life history of the 7600-year-old "Transbay Man" discovered in 2014 in downtown San Francisco, CA, a...
Life in Suleiman’s Army: Preliminary Investigations of Health in an Ottoman Cemetery Site (2016)
In recent years, analyses of human skeletal remains have significantly contributed to our understanding of the past. A cemetery collection of 160 skeletons from the 16th and 17th centuries excavated from the city center of Timişoara, Romania have provided a rare opportunity to study a brief, tumultuous time when the Ottoman Empire extended into Central Europe. The inhumations, representative of the Ottoman population that relocated into the fortified city center after Turkish expansion, provide...
Life in times of change – A bioarchaeological perspective on health and living conditions in Upper Nubia in the late 2nd and early 1st millennium BC (2017)
With the end of the Pharaonic Egyptian colonial occupation c. 1070BC and the increasing deterioration of climatic conditions, communities in Upper Nubia faced significant changes, both to the political structure (which may have affected trade networks), and to the agricultural potential of the region (e.g. availability of arable land). This presentation aims to elucidate if, and in what ways, these alterations impacted upon the living conditions of the people in the area, using the skeletal...
Life on the Northern Frontier, Bioarchaeological Reconstructions of 11th century Households in the Skagafjörður Region, North Iceland. (2016)
Iceland was settled in the 9th century by people of Norse and Celtic stock. Located on the margins of the Viking world, the Skagafjörður region was, by the 11th century, home to a large number of independent households forming core social units in a country without a king or central government. Although they maintained close ties with their old home world, ship arrivals were erratic and individual households were largely dependent on their own produce for survival. Early settlers lived in a...
Like Pulling Teeth: Relationships Between Material Culture And Osteology At The Milwaukee County Poor Farm Cemetery (2018)
Material culture is a mediator between the living and the dead (Hallam and Hockey 2017). Items used by the living can leave their mark osteologically, can follow an individual into a burial context, or can become part of an individual. Each of these actions leaves archaeological evidence of cultural communication. This paper examines the dialectical relationships between artifacts and osteology through an integrative analysis of the multilayered relationships between osteological data, artifact...
A Line in the Sand: Bioarchaeological interpretations of life along the borders of the Great Basin and Southwest. (2016)
Prior to A.D. 1300, several archaeologically defined cultures were identified at the intersection of the American Great Basin and Southwest. Human skeletal remains were analyzed from site that represent the borders and the heartlands of the Fremont, the Virgin Branch Puebloan, and the Northern San Juan Puebloan cultural areas. The goal was to examine how life in the crossroads of these regions affected the experiences of individuals and groups. The following indicators were used to reconstruct...
Lives in Transition: Impacts and Adaptations in the Georgia Bight (2015)
The St. Catherines Island Archaeological Project, now more than 40 years in duration, has provided a wealth of data for addressing questions and hypotheses about native adaptations in the Georgia bight. Owing to the rich archaeological context and robust research design, the project has provided opportunities to document and interpret key developments and adaptive transitions in ways not dreamed of when fieldwork began in 1975. The bioarchaeological arm of the investigation, viewed in its rich...
Living and Dying a Bioarchaeological Analysis of Human Remains Recovered by Earl Morris at Aztec Ruins (2017)
Aztec Ruins, an Ancestral Pueblo site in northern New Mexico, is recognized as a large and socially complex site. Aztec Ruins is typically considered in relation to the Chaco Phenomenon, although connections to Mesa Verde have also been made. Combined these relationships suggest close ties to other temporally occupied sites. Excavations of Aztec Ruins were undertaken between 1916 and 1923 by southwestern archaeologist Earl Morris. Among his many finds he reported excavating 186 sets of human...
The Living and the Dead: The Icelandic Household From Early Medieval to Historic Times. (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Medieval to Modern Transitions and Historical Archaeology" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. How does one reconstruct population demography in the past and what lines of evidence exist to assist in these interpretations? The census of 1703 recorded information about household composition in Iceland and this rich resource has been used as a proxy for early population demography. Until recently, actual cemetery...
Living on the Border: Health and Identity during the Colonial Egyptian New Kingdom Period in Nubia (2016)
Tombos is located at the Third Cataract of the Nile River in modern-day Sudan, and marks an important literal and figurative boundary between Egyptian and Nubian interaction. During the New Kingdom Period (1400-1050 BC), the cemetery at Tombos in Upper Nubia exhibits the use of Egyptian mortuary practices, including monumental pyramid complexes, likely used by both immigrant Egyptians and local Nubians. Despite the influence of Egyptian culture during this colonial period, there are several...
Los Aatributos de la Identidad el Caso de Tamtoc, San Luis Potosí, México (2017)
La ritualidad de los grupos humanos está íntimamente ligada a su cosmovisión, a su organización social, así como con aquellos elementos que les otorgan identidad. Las modificaciones corporales que se han estudiado tradicionalmente en la antropología física, como son la modificación intencional el cráneo, el limado dental, la lesión suprainiana y la trepanación, deben ser consideradas como expresión de los elementos antes mencionados. El significado de cada una de ellas solo puede ser entendido...
Love Never Dies? (2015)
In this talk, I examine the contemporary commonsensical thinking about sex, gender, and sexuality that informs study of bioarchaeological remains. To this end, I focus on double burials whose decedents appear to be embracing—their discovery, investigation, and presentation in scholarly and popular settings. Images of and stories about these ancient embracers garner significant and often sensationalized attention in myriad, global spaces. Here I deliberate about their representation in...
Making Sense of Kennewick Man (2016)
For almost 20 years, the >9000 year-old skeleton known as Kennewick Man has been the subject of rumor, media hyperbole, lawsuit, political posturing, and even some good science. Archaeological, osteological, morphometric, stable-isotope, chronometric, and genetic studies have now been completed and reported and more than 50 scholars have presented their findings in internet publications, journals, and books. Widely divergent claims have been made about this man’s heritage and place of origin. He...
Making the Bioarchaeology of Care Methodology Public: Understanding the Roles of Ethics, Communication and Public Engagement in a Novel Approach to Physical Impairment in the Archaeological Record. (2015)
This presentation will discuss the public perception and communication of the Bioarchaeology of Care approach and the accompanying Index of Care program. The ethical considerations of the methodology, as an integral feature of working with human skeletal remains, will also be considered and discussed within a consideration of who ‘owns’ the past and, more specifically, who (if anyone) owns the remains of individuals. In particular it will focus on individuals who are described as disabled, or...
Marginalized Motherhood: Infant Burial in 17th Century Transylvania (2016)
During the last four decades bioarchaeologists have enriched what we know about the lives of past people; however, many questions remain unexplored and understudied. Among these, the lived experiences of expectant mothers and their newborn infants have not received much attention in the bioarchaeological literature. Moreover, few scholars have attempted to understand how women who experienced a failed pregnancy or loss of a newborn infant have dealt with this reality, particularly in terms of...
The Mass Grave at Kulleet Bay: Bioarchaeological Evidence of Human Catastrophe (2017)
A mass grave of cremated individuals representing 15,353 comingled bone fragments representing 65 individuals was uncovered from the ancient Northwest Coast archaeological site of DgRw-17, a continuously occupied Stz’uminus First Nation village in Kulleet Bay. Cremation of multiple individuals buried in a mass grave is not an established burial tradition or mortuary practice of any Coast Salish community. Mass graves of comingled and cremated human remains may represent ossuaries or episodic...
Men at Work: Economic Complexity and Exploitation of Dietary Marine Protein Sources in the San Francisco Bay Area (2015)
In the San Francisco Bay Area, distinct dietary niches were exploited in prehistory, and these different food economies are most readily distinguished in terms of their primary protein sources. This paper highlights the use of external auditory exostoses (EAE), a pathology linked to the exploitation of marine resources in cold water, to evaluate varying economic complexity in acquisition of marine protein food sources between different sites around the Bay Area. The high occurrence of EAE in...
Miraculous Bodies: Archives of Medieval Impairment (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper Bodies: Excavating Archival Tissues and Traces", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Among the “cacophony” of medieval bodies (Walker Bynum 1995) were those affected by physical impairments. The embodied social and physical realities of those living with impairment might be glimpsed through different material traces. Hagiographies and chronicles provide textual descriptions of impaired bodies, most often in...
The Missing Years: Continuity and/or Change in Woodland Funerals in the LIV (2018)
Lynne Goldstein has significantly advanced knowledge of ancient peoples in many theoretical and empirical domains, including her seminal studies of ancient cemeteries, especially their spatial organization and interpretation through the judicious use of ethnographic sources, critically evaluated. The senior author has had the pleasure of collaborating with Dr. Goldstein in several of these ventures, some under challenging conditions of heat and cold, which were bearable only due to Lynne’s...