Through the Biocultural Lens: Resilience, Vulnerability, and Lived Experience in the Ancient Southwest

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Multiscale Data and the History of Human Development in the US Southwest" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This study takes a multiscalar approach to understanding human development and lived experience in the Southwest, marshalling archaeological, paleoenvironmental, bioarchaeological, and epidemiological information about populations, communities, and individuals. Well documented climatic changes are associated with large scale migrations, and processes of both dispersal and aggregation in the region. But, as recognized in bioculturally based sustainability science, the examination of local contexts like built environment, terrain, climate fluctuations and social processes reveals the underpinnings of lived experience and well-being. Paleoepidemiological data are used to characterize aspects of morbidity and health parallel to those enumerated in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (water security and quality, peace, adequate diet, gender equity) and the Human Development Index (housing free from indoor and ambient pollution, dental health, functional disability). Innovative new studies that bridge the gap between clinical data and bioarchaeological observations are revising the interpretation of pathological conditions that have long been recorded in human remains, transforming the interpretation of community health and lived experience. This series of contextualized examples from the bioarchaeological record tell stories of both resilience and vulnerability in the long history of occupation in the Northern Southwest. This presentation does not include images of human remains.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Multiscale Data and the History of Human Development in the US Southwest

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 50035