bioarchaeology (Other Keyword)
176-200 (311 Records)
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...
Missing: Un experimento a largo plazo para evaluar procesos tafonómicos ocurridos en yacimientos arqueológicos (2011)
This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the EXARC Bibliography, originally compiled by Roeland Paardekooper, and updated. Most of these records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us using the...
Mitogenome sequencing of ancient dogs in the Americas: assessing dog genetic diversity and population history (2016)
Mitochondrial DNA of ancient dogs in the Americas has been studied extensively, but most studies focus solely on the hypervariable region. We sequenced the complete mitochondrial genomes (mitogenomes) of dogs in the Americas from multiple geographic regions and time periods in order to compare populations between regions as well as to compare the genetic diversity of ancient dogs in the Americas to modern dogs worldwide. When comparing the HVR and mitogenome data, we found that the two data sets...
Mixed burials and commingled human remains recovered from the Milwaukee County Institution Grounds Poor Farm Cemetery (2015)
From the mid-1800s to its abandonment in 1974, the MCIG Poor Farm Cemetery in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin served as a burial place for institutional residents, unidentified or unclaimed individuals from the Coroner's Office, and the community poor and indigent. Previous excavations at the cemetery in 1991 and 1992 recovered 1649 individuals in predominantly single interments with an occasional extraneous body part representing incidental amputation or autopsy. The 2013 excavations at the site yielded...
"A Monumental Blunder": The Challenging History and Uncertain Future of the Virginia State Penitentiary Collection (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Urban Erasures and Contested Memorial Assemblages" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The Virginia State Penitentiary (1804-1991) loomed over the Falls of the James River and was a feared site of solitary confinement, carceral labor, and capital punishment. Designed by Benjamin Latrobe, the penitentiary was notorious for its inhumane treatment and poor management in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Fieldwork in...
More than Just Bones: A Biocultural Analysis of Fremont Human Remains (2016)
Many existing studies of Fremont mortuary data have been limited to documenting the location of burials, the presence or absence of burial goods, and the position of the remains. Furthermore, much of the analyses of Fremont human skeletal remains have focused almost exclusively on population-level comparisons or evidence of extreme violence. Current bioarchaeological methods have expanded the type of questions that researchers can ask. Equipped with hypotheses influenced by social theory, it is...
Morphological Signatures of High-Altitude Adaptations in the Andean Archaeological Record and the Challenges of Distinguishing Developmental Plasticity from Genetic Adaptations (2016)
High-altitude hypoxia, cold ambient temperatures, and malnutrition are critical environmental stressors affecting living human populations in the highland Andes. Decades of scholarship in human biology explain the complex physiological responses that provide adaptive fitness to living human groups at high altitudes through both developmental acclimatization, in which the human body adjusts to environmental stress during growth, and genetic adaptations from natural selection. Given the longevity...
Morphology and Culture among the Middle and Late Intermediate Period inhabitants of Catarpe (San Pedro de Atacama, Chile) (2015)
Catarpe tambo represents one of the clearest pieces of evidence for an Inca presence in north Chile’s Atacama oases. The tambo was built and used north of the oases, in the San Pedro river canyon. Catarpe was chosen by the Incas as the local administrative center, however the valley was already densely occupied since at least the Late Intermediate Period (AD 1000-1400). Here, we study morphological affinities and the distribution of cranial vault modification among over 300 individuals from the...
A Mortuary Analysis of Adult and Child Burials of Río Viejo, Oaxaca, Mexico (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mortuary practices are symbolically charged activities that vary depending on wealth, religion, manner of death, and even age. Recent excavations of the site of Río Viejo, Oaxaca, Mexico, suggest similar burial practices between adults and children during the Early Postclassic (AD 800–1100) and Late Classic (AD 500–800). The current understanding of burial...
Mortuary Archaeology, Burial Practices, and defining the Prehistoric Funerary Landscape on the Sunshine Coast, British Columbia (2017)
The ancestral burial practices among the peoples of the northwest coast of British Columbia have been well studied and documented by academics, heritage resource management professionals, and the First Nation Communities. Recent systematic surveys from archaeological impact assessments within the Sunshine Coast have yielded previously unidentified funerary archaeological features including various funerary petroforms atypical to this region. My aim is to revisit and define the types of...
Mortuary multiplicity: Variability in mortuary treatment at a Late Prehistoric matrix village from Spain (2016)
At 113 ha, Marroquíes Bajos (Jaén, Spain) is one of the largest villages known for the Iberian Copper Age. Attention was first focused on the site in the 1960s after construction work underneath the modern city of Jaén unearthed a series of elaborate artificial burial caves. However, over the past several decades salvage excavations revealed even more mortuary areas at the site, including commingled depositions in enclosure ditches, primary and secondary inhumations in discrete subterranean...
Mortuary Variability and Identity Upstream of the Fourth Cataract (2017)
Fieldwork upstream of the Fourth Cataract in northern Sudan reveals substantial variation in mortuary practices among roughly contemporaneous sites on both local and regional levels. Cemeteries in the Bioarchaeology of Nubia Expedition (BONE) concession on the right (north) bank of the Nile River near el-Qinefab include intervisible clusters of graves from the Kerma period (c. 2500-1500 BC) and into the subsequent period of Egyptian colonization of Nubia. These sites constitute a mortuary...
Multiethnic Colonial Communities and Endogamy: Evaluating the Dual Diaspora Model of Moquegua Tiwanaku Social Organization (2017)
The Moquegua Valley Tiwanaku colonial enclave was comprised of two Tiwanaku-affiliated populations: camelid agropastoralists who used Omo-style ceramics and maize agricultural specialists associated with Chen Chen-style ceramics. Despite living in close proximity, Chen Chen- and Omo-style communities maintained distinct social and cultural boundaries for several centuries. Goldstein’s dual diaspora model suggests that Omo- and Chen Chen-style Tiwanaku colonists represent two separate but...
A Multistage Model for Treponemal Disease Susceptibility (2015)
There are numerous historical, bioarchaeological, and paleopathological studies of treponemal disease, but most have focused on the origin and antiquity of syphilis. Therefore, little is known about the evolution and ecology of the other treponematoses, such as yaws. In modern populations, research options are limited by difficulty in culturing the causal bacteria, lack of animal models, and ethical issues with human testing. Treatment with antibiotics has also limited clinical research into...
Mummy studies and the soft tissue evidence of care (2015)
Evidence of care in the bioarchaeological record has focused on two broad circumstances; (1) long term survival with disability in which functional independence is impossible and (2) healed/healing trauma or illness that would have necessitated intervention or care to ensure recovery and survival. These conditions reflect relatively extreme, life-or-death circumstances and thus provide the clearest opportunity to observe care. The preservation of soft tissue, however, not only affords the...
NAGPRA Human Remains Inventory: Making Our Work More Vsible (2016)
In 2008, Central Washington University NAGPRA Program and the Columbia Plateau Tribes created a more visible, participatory osteobiography process. CWU let go of the “culture of secrecy” around our NAGPRA human remains documentation process and found the benefits outweigh fears. The change showed the tribes what we really do and generated research questions from Tribal representatives.
Narrativizing a Bioarchaeology of Care: A Case Study from Ancient Dilmun (2015)
Since 2008, the Dilmun Bioarchaeology Project has been studying and publishing the materials from Peter B. Cornwall’s 1940-41 expedition to Bahrain and eastern Saudi Arabia, which now reside in the Hearst Museum of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. By analyzing these skeletal and artifactual remains, our multi-disciplinary team is adding to anthropologists’ understanding of how life was experienced and death commemorated in Dilmun. One of the most exceptional skeletons belongs to a young woman who...
Neonatal line assessment among Milwaukee County Institution Grounds (MCIG) perinates to determine viability (2015)
A sample of perinatal individuals recovered from MCIG Cemetery (ca. 1890-1920) included broken teeth. We evaluate these teeth for the presence of the neonatal line to differentiate stillborn individuals from those that died as postnatal individuals. Our research is nondestructive. We compare the results of the dental analysis to the distribution of stillborns and live births documented in the MCIG burial record and City of Milwaukee vital records. SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR...