Life and Death in the San Francisco Bay: Multi-Disciplinary Approaches to Historic Lifeways

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Life and Death in the San Francisco Bay: Multi-Disciplinary Approaches to Historic Lifeways," at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

European expansion into California brought with it new cultures and ways of life, especially to the San Francisco Bay. This cultural shift was intensified by the massive growth in population following the Gold Rush Era and Manifest Destiny movements of the mid-nineteenth century. With easy access to ports, the San Francisco Bay welcomed thousands of immigrants and rapidly became a place of cultural, economic, and ethnic diversity. To better understand the complexity of the populations living in historic San Francisco Bay, we combine multidisciplinary approaches that focus on life history, cultural landscapes, diet, health, and death. Studies include faunal analyses, examining health with historic documentation and osteological analyses, stable isotopic reconstruction of diets, and mortuary analysis.