bioarchaeology (Other Keyword)
301-311 (311 Records)
One problem forensic archaeologists have encountered during the investigation of mass graves is the commingling of human remains. Commingling can consist of disarticulated body parts, and can be more complex when remains are skeletonized or fragmented. Methods exist to address this problem; however, some are costly while others are time consuming. It has been shown that mapping the three dimensional location of body parts in a mass grave is useful for re-association based on proximity of the...
Using Historic Archaeology To Uncover Previously Ignored Collections (2016)
In 1891 George Dorsey conducted excavations Ancon, Peru, as archaeology was still a fledgeling discipline, and his conclusions reflect his naïveté of modern field methods to come. He assessed that the remains derived from one community, and classified the burials as elite/non-elite. From what we know today, there were two distinct time periods, between which mortuary practices and material culture changed dramatically. The collection has been repeatedly ignored due to the theorized disappearance...
Using oral health indicators as evidence of environmental instability and subsistence shifts in the Late Upper Paleolithic of Western Eurasia (2015)
Oral pathology prevalence can be used to make inferences about the behavioral and environmental factors that contribute to individual and population health. Late Upper Paleolithic Western Eurasian human groups were expanding geographically as well as increasing in density, and the major climatic oscillations that define this period stressed these pioneering humans. Evidence of this strain includes temporal differences in oral pathology prevalence, namely caries, periodontal disease, tooth loss,...
Using the Index of Care on a Bronze Age Teenager with Poliomyelitis: From Speculation to Strong Inference (2015)
Bioarchaeology has come a long way in using differential diagnosis, attending to the Osteological Paradox, using biocultural frameworks to integrate different levels of analysis, and developing ways to work with small sample sizes and fragmentary remains. Designed by Lorna Tilley (U. Aukland), the Index of Care offers a new scientifically-based and systematic tool to collect and integrate a range of information in life history, disease processes, and cultural context. This online tool tests...
Vertebral Wedging: A potential tool for the determination of parity in archaeological samples? (2016)
During pregnancy, women experience lordotic posturing to compensate for the weight of the growing fetus. Biomechanical stress from lordotic posturing causes bone remodeling of the lumbar spine during pregnancy resulting in lumbar wedging, which may persist after giving birth. Persistence of lumbar wedging in skeletal samples has potential applications for estimating parity in the archaeological record. This research analyzes the possibility that lumbar wedging is observable in the skeletal...
A View from the Periphery. Bioarchaeology and Funerary Archaeology at Al Khiday, Central Sudan (2017)
Archaeological sites south of Khartoum are much scarcer compared to those further to the north and this presentation aims to report on a multi-phase cemetery that is situated at the periphery of our archaeological knowledge. At present, burials dating to three chronological periods have been recovered at Al Khiday. The site is located on the left bank of the White Nile, approximately 20 km south of Omdurman (Khartoum). Forty-two individuals are dated to the Classic/Late Meroitic period (end of...
Wetherill Mesa, M.V.N.P Bioarchaeological Data (2021)
Analysis of bioarchaeological indicators of stress and skeletal fractures from selected Wetherill Mesa sites in Mesa Verde National Park. Data was collected in 1995 in compliance with NAGPRA.
Where's your Mummy? The Business of Mummification in Late and Roman Period Egypt (2015)
It is often said that the practice of mummification became a veritable business during the Late and Roman periods, when it was extended to include not only the elite, but also those on the lower end of the status scale. The increase in the number of bodies being embalmed led to the widespread adoption of more expeditious techniques, sometimes resulting in mummies that, though outwardly pleasing in appearance, concealed nothing but a jumbled mess of bones beneath their wrappings. The non-elite...
Who was Maria Grann? Balancing Archives of Narratives and Facts of a Contested Sámi(?) Skull (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. One of the late nineteenth-century skulls in the anatomical collection at Lund University (Sweden) belongs to a middle adult woman (28-45 years of age); according to the archival documentation (including writing on the skull) she was a 28-year-old Sámi woman named Maria Grann. Media reports in Sweden have generally...
Who/What Is In That Vial? (2018)
Archaeologists typically conceptualize the "material" in an integrated analysis of material culture and biological data as artifacts/objects/things recovered through excavation from an historic mortuary setting. However, further explorations of meaning are possible when the definition of material encompasses both what is recovered and produced by archaeologists. Destructive testing, as a component of bioarchaeological analysis, creates additional materialized relationships between the living and...
You Better Be-Leaf It: Microbotanical Remains Found in Dental Calculus of Individuals from Actun Kabul, Belize (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dental calculus (DC), the mineralized plaque or tartar on a tooth’s surface, is formed and fossilized during life. Foodstuffs and medicinal plants that people interact with in life can be caught in the DC matrix. Because DC fossilizes during life, researchers can decalcify DC and analyze the microbotanicals, proteins, and aDNA trapped inside....