New Directions in Bioarchaeology

MARCH 2012 • VOLUME 12 • NUMBER 2

the

SPECIAL FORUM: NEW DIRECTIONS IN BIOARCHAEOLOGY

S O C I E T Y F O R A M E R I C A N A R C H A E O L O G Y

Editor’s Corner

Letters to the Editor

In Brief

SAA llega a Latinoamérica:La Conferencia Intercontinental Bringing SAA to Latin America: The Intercontinental Conference

Volunteer Profile

Survey of Professional Opinions Regarding the Peopling of the Americas

Experiment Meets Recreation: Throwing Spears with the Public

Proyecto Qochamama? Experiences, Perceptions, and Representations of Three Female

Co-Directors at Tiwanaku, Bolivia

Careers in Archaeology: Taking the Road Less Traveled:Public Outreach through Media and the Internet

Who Gets Published in American Antiquity?

“The Principles of Archaeological Ethics as a LivingDocument: Is Revision Necessary?”

A Request from the SAA Committee on Ethics

special forum: new directions in bioarchaeology

New Directions in Bioarchaeology

Ethnobioarchaeology

Kids through Adult Eyes: The Bioarchaeology of Children

A Bioarchaeology of Sex and Gender: What Is the Difference and Why Is It Important?

The Bioarchaeology Of Disease

News and Notes

Calendar

2 Jane Eva Baxter

3

5 Tobi A. Brimsek

6 Barbara Arroyo, Tomas Mendizabal, and Dan Sandweiss

9 Dan Sandweiss

10 Amber D. Wheat

15 John C. Whittaker

18 Maria C. Bruno, Nicole C. Couture, and Deborah E. Blom

22 Richard M. (Rick) Pettigrew

25 Alison E. Rautman

27 Joe Watkins

Guest Editors: Debra L. Martin and Ryan P Harrod

31 Debra L. Martin and Ryan P Harrod

32 Ryan P. Harrod

35 Marc F. Oxenham

38 Pamela K. Stone

41 Molly K. Zuckerman

44

44

The Magazine of the Society for American Archaeology Volume 12, No. 2

March 2012

SAAarchaeological recordthe

31March 2012 • The SAA Archaeological Record

NEW DIRECTIONS IN BIOARCHAEOLOGY

cultural perspective on humans as both biological and cul-tural beings.

As a subdiscipline, bioarchaeology is emerging as a special-ty that holds a unique place within anthropology, with onefoot in biological anthropology and one foot in archaeologyprivileging each equally. However, bioarchaeology aims to bemuch more than a sum of osteological data plus archaeolog-ical context. As such, bioarchaeology is rooted in anthropo-logical theory, and it has the potential as few other disci-plines do to reveal important dimensions to the human lifehistory that are currently unfathomable. The methodologicalfoundation of bioarchaeology was outlined in a volume byClark Larsen (1997), and the intellectual history of bioar-chaeology was formalized in an edited volume by Jane Buik-stra and Lane Beck (2006).

The mandate for interdisciplinary approaches has grownexponentially. Knudson and Stojanowski (2008) presented astate-of-the-art overview of the ways that bioarchaeology pro-vides “social identities” to human remains. They called forbioarchaeology to push the limits of what can be knownabout the lived experience of individuals and communitiesrepresented by bony remains in the archaeological record.There is an increasing need for bioarchaeologists to havetraining in a number of areas including skeletal biology,paleopathology, forensic anthropology, excavation technique,taphonomy and site formation processes, state and federalburial laws, and advanced analytical techniques such as iso-topic and DNA analysis and histology. Theory drawn from anumber of sources and biocultural modeling has providedthe means for integrating data across these boundaries ininnovative ways.

Our objective is to demonstrate the value of new directionsin bioarchaeology to archaeological research and to betterunderstanding the past. Both offer different strengths andboth are challenged in different ways due to the limits of the

NEW DIRECTIONS IN BIOARCHAEOLOGYDebra L. Martin and Ryan P Harrod

Debra L. Martin is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Ryan P. Harrod is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Anthropology, University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

>MARTIN & HARROD, continued on page 44

Bioarchaeology is the study of ancient and historichuman remains in a richly configured context thatincludes all possible reconstructions of the cultural

and environmental variables bearing upon interpretationsdrawn from those remains. Research focused on the study ofhuman remains must consider how this type of analysisaffects the people who view the remains as ancestors. TheNative American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act(NAGPRA) in the U.S., and similar kinds of injunctions, leg-islation, and mandates in other countries have foreverchanged the way that burials and human remains areapproached. From the moment of discovery through toanalysis and interpretation, NAGPRA and NAGPRA-likemandates have brought bioarchaeologists and indigenous ordescendant populations together in often surprising and pro-ductive ways that could not have been predicted.

Today, virtually no analysis is done on any human remainswithout consensus and some form of cooperative effortbetween bioarchaeologists and other stakeholders. Frommuseum and governmental entities, to tribal representativesand indigenous committees, research proposals, excavationpermits, and access to repositories are strictly controlled.The product of this more collaborative effort is not only amuch deeper engagement with descendant communities inmany cases but also a more detailed understanding of thehuman remains themselves.

As a field of study, bioarchaeology is informed by a widerange of scientific methods and theories coming from disci-plines such as archaeology, medicine, forensics, anatomy,epidemiology, and demography. Yet, it is fully practiced with-in the discipline of anthropology (Armelagos 2003). Bioar-chaeology is the scientific study of humans using the archae-ological record to enhance what can be known about thepast, and this information is used to make verifiable expla-nations about human behavior. At its very best, bioarchaeol-ogy helps explain human behavior and why certain patternsemerge in some cultures at particular times. Primarily,bioarchaeology uniquely provides time depth and a cross-

32 The SAA Archaeological Record • March 2012


For most of the history of scientific research involvingthe study of human skeletal remains, researchers haveidentified themselves as osteologists. Look up the word

osteology and you will find that it means the study of bones.Not satisfied with simply measuring and describing bones,several researchers during the last half of the 1970s started arevolution. These pioneers included Jane Buikstra, GeorgeArmelagos, and Clark Spencer Larsen. What they did waspush researchers to move beyond the “study of bones”toward research that fleshed out the identity of the living per-son and how they fit into the larger cultural context. Theresult was the birth of the field of bioarchaeology.

Nearly twenty years after the development of bioarchaeolo-gy, another leading bioarchaeologist, Philip Walker, chal-lenged researchers analyzing skeletal remains to go evenfurther. He argued that bioarchaeologists must incorporateethnography in the same way that ethnoarchaeologists havesince the mid-1950s (Kleindienst and Watson 1956). Eth-noarchaeology is an approach to understanding materialculture and behavior in the past using ethnographic analo-gy. This is the practice of utilizing ethnographic observa-tions in order to make inferences about the behavior of peo-ple in past cultures.

Walker conducted two projects utilizing this approach, bothlooking at dental health. The first analyzed dental health asit relates to status, while the second looked at the activitiesand behaviors that affect dental health. The first projectinvolved a collaborative effort between Walker and a culturalanthropologist, Barry Hewlett (1990). This project looked atdental health among foraging and agricultural groups inCentral Africa. The second project, a collaborative effortbetween Walker, a cognitive anthropologist, LawrenceSugiyama, and a cultural anthropologist, Richard Chacon(1998) explored dental health among horticultural groups inthe Amazonian Basin. Walker’s pioneering work created amarriage of bioarchaeology with ethnography producing

what he later coined “ethno-bioarchaeology” (Walker et al.1998:389).

It has been over two decades since Walker and Hewlett firstpioneered this method and a decade since Walker, Sugiyama,and Chacon emphatically noted that there was “an urgentneed for more ethnobioarchaeological research” (1998:389). Yetbioarchaeologists have been slow to advance this approach.There have been a few studies that utilize ethnohistoric orclinical documentation as a proxy for ethnographic informa-tion. These, however, lack the specificity and cultural nuancethat ethnographic studies designed collaboratively withbioarchaeologists could bring to the field.

Ethnobioarchaeology is one of the next frontiers for a newgeneration of bioarchaeologists. As such, it is timely to illus-trate the wealth of information that can be produced utiliz-ing this approach. To do this I present an overview of the sec-ond research project by Walker and his team and a currentproject that I have been working on with a cognitive anthro-pologist and a bioarchaeologist. These examples will hope-fully stimulate and generate new areas of collaborativeresearch for bioarchaeologists.

Ethnobioarchaeology of Dental Health (Walker et al. 1998)

Walker and his team had a great idea. They wanted to see ifthey could use data from three groups living in differentregions of Amazonian Basin, the Yanomamö, Yora, and Shi-wiar, to understand more completely the relationshipbetween changes in oral health and dentition and shifts indiet and nutrition. What is unique about this research is thatthe focus was on variations in dental health where there wasgreater control over confounding variables that bioarchaeol-ogists usually have no control over. Changes to dentition arean important area of research because they are typically per-ceived to be strong indicators of diet in bioarchaeological

ETHNOBIOARCHAEOLOGYRyan P. Harrod

Ryan P. Harrod is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology, University of Nevada, Las Vegas


studies. This relationship makes themespecially important for ascertaining thetype and quality of food resources avail-able to each individual. Most of theresearch conducted on dental changesover time related to shifting subsistencepatterns involves the analysis of ancientskeletal populations. As such, a great dealof inference and speculation about the fac-tors underlying these changes was alwayspresent.

The approach to this study involvedrecording dental health on each individ-ual, as well as ethnographically recordingthe subsistence strategy and diet fromeach ethnic group or community. Thedental changes examined included thepresence of caries, wear to the surface ofthe tooth, the loss of teeth during one’slifetime known as antemortem tooth loss,and finally the presence and severity of enamel and hypopla-sia. The subsistence strategy for each group was recordedaccording to three characteristics: (1) How they producedtheir food (e.g., hunting, gathering, and slash-and-burn agri-culture); (2) How the food was prepared (e.g., crushing andsucking sugar cane); (3) What food was actually consumed(i.e., protein versus carbohydrates).

The findings revealed that there are variations in the percent-age and mean frequencies of caries and antemortem toothloss among the groups, but changes in dental wear patternspresented a surprising finding. Instead of showing signifi-cant change among the groups, this measure illustrated theimportance of analyzing the regional differences in the sub-sistence strategy at the micro -level, whichincludes factors like sex-based behaviorand age-related changes. This would alsoinclude how food is produced or its avail-ability (more or less meat as related towear), the way it is prepared (maniocchewing for beer and prevention of cavi-ties), what resources are consumed (tobac-co use and increase wear), and the cultur-al practices related to subsistence (usingteeth as tools and anterior tooth wear).

The overall findings of this research arethat simple correlations between subsis-tence strategy and dental health are notvalid. The researchers discovered there

are numerous, often confounding, vari-ables that need to be taken into consider-ation when analyzing dental health.These factors included the person’s sexand age, the society’s means of food pro-duction, and the culture’s behavioralpractices.

Ethnobioarchaeology of Trauma (Harrod et al. in press, 2012)

Nearly two decades after Walker’s ethno-bioarchaeological research, My colleaguesand I began thinking about the origins andevolution of nonlethal violence, and theimplications for distinguishing violenttrauma from accidental trauma on ancientskeletons. Together with Debra Martin (abioarchaeologist) and Pierre Liénard (acognitive anthropologist), we designed anethnobioarchaeological study to carry out

with the Turkana. The Turkana offered a good model forstudying nonlethal trauma and injury related to lifestyle, mar-riage practices, and violence.

The methodology involved using a questionnaire and a bodydiagram that would provide direct information from individu-als about their various healed scars, wounds, and injuries. Thequestionnaire consisted of over sixty questions about repro-ductive history, general health, stress levels, nutrition and diet,occupational stress, and trauma. The body maps were crucialbecause they provided an illustration of the body that offeredan easy way for individuals to identify all of the places on theirbody where they had sustained injuries. The idea was to havethe Turkana map of each healed injury on the body, as well as

describe when and how it was obtained.Our questions included identifying if therewere certain people in the population atgreater risk of injury, if there seems to be apattern of repeat injury among people whohad sustained past trauma, and if it waspossible to identify the mechanism oractivity behind particular injuries. The lat-ter was especially important as it is oftenargued that injuries to the head and bodythat are identified as evidence of violencecould just as likely be a consequence ofaccidental or occupational activities. So wewanted to see whether or not there was away to differentiate injuries that resultedfrom accidents such as working with the


Figure 1. Richard Chacon in the Yanomamö

village of Mokaritateri (Photo by Lawrence

Sugiyama).

Figure 2. Pierre Liénard fieldwork amongst

the Turkana (Photo by Dolores Bossuyt).


herds, from those related to interpersonalviolence (e.g., male competition for status)and intergroup conflict (e.g., raiding neigh-boring herders for cattle).

The findings of this research indicated thatboth males and females were exposed to afair amount of trauma related to accidentsor occupational activities, such as beinggored by the horn of a cow, kicked by adonkey, bitten by a camel, or simply fallingdown. However, what we learned aboutthese kinds of injuries is that they weretypically superficial and only affected thesoft tissue. In contrast, violence-relatedinjuries were more severe and often didaffect the bone. Turkana informants couldpoint to areas on their body where they had sustained injuriesrelated to fighting or raids, which were the more serious typesof injury. Some of these old, well-healed wounds could still befelt through the skin on the bone. Another interesting resultthat emerged from this research was that there were differ-ences between male and female injury patterns that correlat-ed with their different roles. For example, questionnaire datarevealed that in the polygyous marriages that are typicalamong the Turkana, it is not always males hitting females,but that occasionally women use violence against one anoth-er. The project provided detailed descriptions of why peopleengage in violent action or fall victim to violence. While someof these data are specific to the Turkana, we were also able totake much of the insight afforded by this study and apply it toour ongoing studies of violence in past populations.

Ethnobioarchaeology and the Future

In addition to the projects discussed above, ethnobioarchae-ology can offer better answers to a number of research ques-tions. Here are some ideas I am interested in pursuing orseeing done by others. First, we can clarify the role age playsin the degree of musculoskeletal muscle attachment orenthesis development. Collaboration with a cultural anthro-pologist working with an indigenous group that practicesvery specific and habitual tasks on a daily basis could helpidentify the variables involved in these muscle attachments.This would involve using portable ultrasound or x-ray to cap-ture bone growth over time at the site of the muscle attach-ments of interest. A second project I would like to see per-formed would be to explore the rate of accidental head trau-ma among a foraging population. Because there is a tenden-cy to assume that violence is not very common in hunter-gatherers populations, trauma to the head has largely beenthought to be related to falls and other lifestyle hazards. And,

accidental or fall-related head trauma isanalyzed using Western post-industrialpopulations who do have higher rates offalls due to environmental hazards pro-duced by the artificial landscape (e.g., lowfriction surfaces like linoleum or high-level falls due to multistoried architec-ture). With an ethnobioarchaeologicalapproach, it would be possible to deter-mine how common these types ofinjuries are in a natural environment.

Ethnobioarchaeology is a critical newmethodological approach for bioarchaeolo-gy because through the interaction with liv-ing people we can better understand thecircumstances that result in changes to the

skeleton. It goes beyond simply looking at historic or medicalrecords that capture a snapshot of people’s lives. We owe PhilipWalker gratitude for being so prescience about the futurepotential of Ethnobioarchaeology. In writing the obituary forhim, Clark Larsen and Patricia Lambert (2010) highlighted thepotential of his work in this area.

The use of ethnobioarchaeological approaches are crucial toconsider because they offer a novel method for bioarchaeol-ogists to reverse-engineer individual and cultural behaviorin the past. When we are asking questions about the lives ofpeople in the past, we are often at a disadvantage of notknowing what all of the most important biocultural rela-tionships might be. With more ethnobioarchaeological stud-ies, we can begin to clarify important factors that underliethe patterns in health and healthcare, use of the body,changes in dentition, and other ways that give us cluesabout ancient identity.

References Cited

Kleindienst, Maxine R, and Patty Jo Watson1956 “Action Archaeology”: The Archaeological Inventory of a

Living Community. Anthropology Tomorrow 5(75–78).Larsen, Clark Spencer, and Patricia M. Lambert2010 Obituary: Philip Lee Walker, 22 July 1947–6 February

2009. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 141(1):1–2.Walker, Philip L., L. S. Sugiyama, and Richard J. Chacon1998 Diet, Dental Health, and Cultural Change mong Recently

Contacted South American Indian Hunter-Horticulturists.In Human Dental Development, Morphology, and Pathology:A tribute to Albert A Dahlberg, edited by J.R. Lukacs, pp.355–386. Anthropological Papers, No. 54. University ofOregon, Eugene.


Figure 3. Ryan Harrod analyzing the

Turkana data (Photo by Stephanie Harrod).


Nearly 4,000 years ago tragedy struck a small com-munity of less than 100 souls. A child, who we canname Sammy, had died at an age, some 8 to 9 years

old, at which children are generally at their peak of healthand vitality. We don’t know Sammy’s gender as children donot develop skeletal signatures of biological sex until adoles-cence, but we’ll refer to Sammy as female. Sammy’s health,good or ill, in addition to her treatment in death can provideinsights into what it was like to be a child thousands of yearsago. Bioarchaeology provides a set of powerful conceptual,methodological, and inferential tools for reconstructingaspects of both the biology and social identity of childrenwho died well before their time in the ancient past.

Using examples from prehistoric Vietnam, I will paint a pic-ture of what it was like to live as a child in small tropical com-munities before the arrival of metal technologies. This peri-od, the Neolithic, is characterized in Southeast Asia by amove from hunting land and water animals in addition togathering wild plants, nuts, and seeds to incorporatingdomesticated crops (e.g., rice farming) and animals (e.g., pigrearing) into the general subsistence economy. It is a perioddevoid of metals such as bronze and iron, where stone adzes,sickles, and knives were used in their stead. We also see theintroduction of pottery vessels, which facilitated the storageof food stuffs and enabled more efficient cooking methods.Sammy’s story is based on extensive archaeological excava-tions and intensive laboratory analysis, often involvingexperts from a wide range of specializations (ancient DNA,ceramic and lithic analysis, osteology, palaeopathology,zooarchaeology, palynology, etc.) (see Oxenham et al. 2011).

Sammy’s village, named Man Bac, is less than a two-hourdrive south of modern day Hanoi. It consisted of a cluster ofclosely set stilted wooden and bamboo dwellings withthatched roofs, was back-dropped by a steeply rising and par-tially encircling limestone ridge rising several hundred feetabove the low thickly forested plains, home to elephant, rhi-

noceros, crocodile, and various species of deer and monkey.Within a hundred yards of the houses a large river started tobroaden as it developed into an expansive estuary rich in birdand aquatic life. This watercourse was one of many that con-tributed to one of the largest deltas in Southeast Asia: theRed River system. The inhabitants of Man Bac formed thevanguard of a major transformational process that was tosweep through Southeast Asia, changing its inhabitants andthe region as a whole for millennia to come.

A few generations prior to Sammy’s birth, villagers engagedin hunting wild animals, fishing in the river, estuary, andeven open sea as well as gathering a wide range of wild plantfoods. This was to suddenly change with the appearance ofnewcomers from the north, with exotic physical features,bringing a new way of living: domesticated crops and ani-mals. Rather than conflict, the archaeological evidence sug-gests the two groups shared their different life-ways andeven genes. However, the transformations occurring at ManBac were not all positive, with a dramatic increase in femalefertility and a decline in human health being two of the clear-est side effects.

How do we know that female fertility markedly increased inSammy’s community? While it may seem somewhat para-doxical, the large number of dead and buried children atMan Bac, half of the entire cemetery population, is a signalof fertility. Hunter-gatherer peoples tend to have long inter-vals between births and relatively low levels of infant mortal-ity. Farmers tend to have reduced birthing intervals andincreased rates of infant mortality, leading to an increase inthe percentage of children in their cemeteries (see Bocquet-Appel 2011).

Neonates, or babies that died shortly before or soon afterbirth, accounted for over 20 percent of the entire cemetery.While this figure sharply declined as babies became infants,there was another mortality peak at 1½ years of age. The


KIDS THROUGH ADULT EYESTHE BIOARCHAEOLOGY OF CHILDREN

Marc F. Oxenham

Marc F. Oxenham is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Archaeology & Anthropology, Australian National University


large number of neonate deaths is expected in preindustrialsocieties; the main cause of death due to endogenous factors,e.g., low birth weight or birthing trauma. The increase indeaths at 1½ years, on the other hand, was due to exogenousfactors, e.g., infectious disease and accidental death (Hal-crow and Tayles 2011:340). Sometimes both a baby and itsmother would have died at or around the time of birth, butevidence for such an unfortunately familiar occurrence israre archaeologically. We only have one such example inVietnam: in a contemporaneous community in the far south,close to modern-day Saigon, a young woman only 15 yearsold, a child herself, died with the tiny skeletal remains of herunborn baby preserved within her lower abdominal region.The tragedy is compounded when considering this youngwomen-girl was not very healthy before she died, with evi-dence for congenital pelvic anomalies and appalling oralhealth (see Willis and Oxenham 2012).

Is it possible to be more specific regarding the causes of somany children dieing at Man Bac? For the most part theanswer is no, however, we can examine aspects of the healthof these children before they died, which may throw somelight on the underlying reasons for their untimely deaths. Insome cases chronic illnesses can leave a skeletal signature orecho of the soft tissue changes associated with certain dis-eases. When bone is involved in the body’s response to dis-ease it will react by way of a net addition or loss of skeletalmaterial, or a combination of both involving remodelling ofthe bony tissues. We know that at least one child, whom wecalled Nguyen, suffered from a seriously disabling disease asa young child, leaving him with complete lower limb andpartial upper limb paralysis. Despite the severity of Nguyen’scondition, he survived into early adulthood; in part facilitat-ed by dedicated and devoted care (see Lorn Tilley’s nextissue). A very high proportion of Man Bac children sufferedfrom debilitating underlying chronic infectious disease thatlikely contributed to their eventual deaths. Moreover, theincreased level of fertility had a deleterious affect on thehealth of these children’s mothers.

In the past, as now, women tended to have poorer dentalhealth than men, in part due to contrasting female and malebiology and physiology. Differences in the composition andflow rate of saliva, hormonal fluctuations (e.g. female men-strual cycling) and major changes associated with pregnancyare contributing factors (see Lukacs 2008). It’s not hard toimagine that a marked increased in the number of births permother will also be associated with poorer female oral healthin a community with elevated levels of fertility: frequentbirths equates with poorer health.

After birth, mother-infant bonding is furthered throughbreast feeding, which also provides the new born with vitalnutrients and a measure of its mother’s built up immunity to

a range of local infectious agents. The introduction of solidfoods and decreased reliance on breast milk marks a baby’sfirst major transitional period: weaning. The process ofweaning, which can take months if not years, can be fraughtwith danger: not the least being reduction or loss of themother’s anti-bodies and the introduction of hithertounknown pathogens by way of solid foods. The sharp spikein Man Bac infant mortality at around 1½ years of age couldbe a signature of this major infant life stage: weaning.

Major transitional periods in life, liminal phases, mark entryinto social groups predicated on a range of biological, psy-chological and socially mediated signifiers. An individual’sidentity as a child versus an adult, perhaps a fundamentalbio-social dichotomy, differs by culture and through time. Inpast, and indeed modern, communities multiple bio-socialcategories occurred that could also vary by gender and otheraspects of identity (e.g. status). Identifying such bio-socialgroups from cemetery remains can be problematic andrequires an assessment of both the biological age (whichtends to approximate chronological age) of the human skele-tal remains and the manner in which individuals wereburied: e.g., investment in burial (e.g., grave goods or fur-nishings, type of coffining, etc.), body orientation, location,position, and so forth.

In examining evidence for bio-social age classes at Man Bacwe have found that children are not automatically buriedwith grave offerings until they are at least 7 years of age.Prior to this age milestone, children have a steadily decreas-ing probability of receiving funerary offerings: neonates onlyhad a 50 percent likelihood. Nephrite, or jade, is found in anumber of burials, but the earliest it appears in children’sgraves is at 1½ years, perhaps coincidental with the inferredperiod of weaning: or a further signifier of this importantbio-social age class. Another important bio-social stageseems to begin around 3 to 5 years, when tools first accom-pany deceased children. From a motor and cognitive devel-opment perspective this makes sense, as children will havethe mental and body coordination skills to facilitate the useof tools. Children as young as 5 years old wielding machetes,leading water buffalo, searching for shellfish, and engagingin any number of economically significant tasks are as com-mon a sight in Southeast Asia today as thousands of yearsago.

A further bio-social age class, defined by a high percentageof young individuals holding long bivalve shells in theirhands, spans a range of other classes from birth to late teens.The significance of the shells is difficult to determine, butsymbols of fertility (e.g., shells) are often associated with thedead, perhaps as a reflection of the opposing states of birth(life) and death. This brings us full circle back to Sammy,nicknamed the “shell-child” when discovered, who was



unusual in being one of only two children to die aged 8–9years old, and the only individual to be laid to rest upon a bedof shells. Sammy’s lifeless fingers grasped long knife-likeshells, while a necklace of small cowry shells encircled herneck. Additional grave offerings included a globular ceramicpot and footed bowl that may have contained victuals toassuage any thirst and hunger she might encounter on herjourney onward.

We are unlikely to ever know the underlying cause ofSammy’s death, and her skeleton is free of any obvious signsof either trauma or responses to chronic infectious disease.Many of the other children at Man Bac did show signs ofphysiological disruption and/or disease before they ulti-mately succumbed. Given the extremely high probability ofdeath during childhood at Man Bac, one might be excusedfor thinking that adults would forswear any significant emo-tional investment in their offspring. However, such a propo-sition is not supported: despite high levels of childhood mor-tality and morbidity, all recovered children were affordedbasic burial treatment-and some very young kids had excep-tionally “rich” graves. There was deep emotional investmentin children in spite of (or perhaps because of) the exception-ally high risk of ill health and/or death. Sammy, and theother children at Man Bac, was invested with great value indeath and in life. Living with death everyday heightened thecommunity’s appreciation of the gift of life: children.

References Cited

Bocquet-Appel, J.-P.2011 When the World’s Population Took Off: The Springboard

of the Neolithic Demographic Transition. Science333(6042):560–561.

Halcrow, S. E., and N. Tayles2011 The Bioarchaeological Investigation of Children and

Childhood. In Social Bioarchaeology, edited by S. C. Agarw-al and B. A. Glencross, pp. 333–360. Wiley-Blackwell,Malden, Massachusetts.

Lukacs, J. R.2008 Fertility and Agriculture Accentuate Sex Differences in

Dental Caries Rates. Current Anthropology 49:901–914.Oxenham, Marc F., H. Matsumura, and K. D. D. Nguyen (editors)2011 Man Bac: The Excavation of a Neolithic Site in Northern

Vietnam. The Biology. Australian National University EPress, Terra Australis 33. Canberra.

Willis, A., and Marc F. Oxenham2012 A Case of Maternal and Perinatal Death in Neolithic south-

ern Vietnam, c. 2100–1500 BCE. International Journal ofOsteoarchaeology DOI: 10.1002/oa.1296, in press.



Sex and gender, what is the difference? As I began towrite this I thought it might be interesting to pose thisquestion to my 10 and 7-year-old boys. They thought

about it and the older one suggested that sex is the differencebetween being a boy and a girl, but he was not sure how gen-der was any different than sex. In the end both of themresponded—”they are the same.” I tried some more prompt-ing about sex, the youngest one suggested that maybe it hadto do with having a “doodle” or not. A good answer, biologydefines sex. But still they could not tease apart how gendermight be different. Why is this? And if there are no differ-ences between the two, why are we concerned with the con-cepts of sex and gender?

As Bioarchaeologists we have to be clear and careful aboutwhat we mean when we use these terms. We can begin thediscussion stating that sex defines the reproductive and bio-logical differences in which some components are visible(for example, the phallus and breasts) and others are unseen(such as the uterus and chromosomes). Gender is theascribed cultural performance (roles, behavior, activities) ofindividuals, often prescribed by the culture in which theylive. A GOOGLE search offers the same range of definitionsand they all suggest that these terms are limited to definingmale and female— and offer no alternate to this establishedbinary. Thus, we have defined ourselves into a corner, onethat results in an inability to see the differences between sexand gender, and the potential for there to be more than whatis now traditionally seen as a biological and social male andfemale. Anything outside these boundaries is usuallythought to be deviant.

To move beyond these binaries, both in our everyday livesand also in our interpretations of past populations, requiressome self-reflection on our part. This binary perspective is aproduct of our own cultural colonialism of the body, initiat-ed in the 1800s, and constructed with rigid parameters forwhich to consider males and females both biologically and

behaviorally. A concept forged by a changing social climatedominated by western European culture and reaffirmed bythe confluences of the Victorian Era moral codes, the Indus-trial Revolution, and the need for science to categorize allthings into simple and clearly definable groups (see Stoneand Walrath 2006). Sex was (and is) predicated on the ideathat you have only two options: male or female. The same istrue for gender, which rests on this binary of male andfemale sex creating two genders: masculine and feminine.This established the norms, and in turn they have been usedas the lens with which to interpret all other cultures throughtime and space.

The downfall has been that this results in homogenizingpeople and missing the diversity of sex and gender, and theroles, behaviors, and activities that might not be tied to sex inthe same way that they have been within our own culturaltapestry. Bioarchaeologists have begun to look beyond thebinary, and to offer more complex interpretations of peoples’identities and roles in communities not bound by single bio-logical markers or cultural practices, but acknowledged inother ways and through other markers.

In archaeology, Gero and Conkey (1991) reflected on thisissue as they worked toward engendering archaeologicalinquiry. Here their objective was to challenge assumptionsand concepts, to reframe “how to think about gender rela-tions,” and to consider how this shift in thinking wouldexpand and reimagine conceptual frameworks. They cau-tioned archaeologists to move away from the “idea of genderas a structuring principal” (1991:9). They were calling for anew model of gender analysis, one that included women andoffered more complex interpretations of peoples roles incommunity not bound by prescribed cultural practices, butinterpreted through the material culture excavated. Fausto-Sterling (1993) showed how biologically the concept of twosexes is problematic, and that there actually may be as manyas five sexes. Moreover, anthropologists had been reporting


A BIOARCHAEOLOGY OF SEX AND GENDERWHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE AND WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?

Pamela K. Stone

Pamela K. Stone is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the School of Natural Sciences, Hampshire College, Amherst, MA


on many cultures in which three or more genders live in con-cert, and that the gender was not always as clearly connectedto the biological sex as it was to the role that the individualplayed within the community (for example, see Abbott 1984;Epple 1998). The goals here were in the acknowledgment ofmultiple gender roles and a movement away from a static binary— thus, to recognize that the spectrum of human iden-tity is tied both to biological (sex) identity and to the identityof the individual through lived experience within their cul-tural frameworks (gender). For the bioarchaeologist thisdoes not mean we have to define the gendered experience asa lens of sex identity, but as we interpret the past we have toremember to see the lived experience as reflected on thebody and in the archaeology before we decided what rolesomeone is playing in their society.

These developments are opening up new research agendasin bioarchaeology. In my own research I questioned the waysin which biological sex was assigned to skeletal individualsand how this then forced certain kinds of interpretations. Forexample, it was assumed that if a female died between theages of 18–30 it was because she was likely stressed by preg-nancy and birth. Could birth really be that dangerous? Thisseemed an unexplored assumption lacking empirical data tosupport it. These assumptions about reproductively fragilefemales dying at a higher rate than age-matched males fit theroles ascribed to reproductive women. It seemed to me thatthis assumption was biologically deterministic and cultural-ly narrow. I began to wonder if there were data to counterthese interpretations, and how could we get past the repro-ductively “sick” female and show that there is more to beinga female than death in childbirth.

Research that takes these kinds of issues into consideration

are beginning to redefine how bioarchaeologists conceive ofand assign sex and gender to the skeletonized individual.The research I and others (see Agarwal and Glencross 2011)have been conducting acknowledges that women living inmarginal settings give up meals so that their children caneat, that they are the primary caregivers to both young andold members of their families, and that often they performstrenuous activities to either maintain the household or toearn a wage. We know now it is more important to considerthe complexity of the biological burden on women and theways that these gendered activities may make women morenutritionally stressed, immunologically compromised, andphysically tired (see Selin and Stone 2009). New interpreta-tions of the “man the hunter, woman the gatherer” paradigmreveals that the gathering females bore the burden of feedingthe group on a day-to-day basis, placing them at the center ofsubsistence strategies in many foraging populations.

In concert with beginning to understand the biological bur-dens of subsistence and day-to-day stressors, we need toreturn to the question of pregnancy and its impact. There islittle data to support problematic, particularly obstructed,birth as a key factor in early death for a large number ofancient women. However, there are a few notable exceptionswhere neonatal remains are found in situ in the pelvic girdle(for example, see Arriaza et al. 1988). My own analysis ofobstetric pelvic data has revealed that females in marginal-ized environments show little to no difference in pelvic sizeand shape (except in the case of pathology or traumaticinjury) (see Stone 2000). Thus, the sole cause of youngfemale mortality is not simply due to pregnancy but rather toa complex suite of factors that we can begin to quantify withnew techniques such as muscle enthesiopathies (raised andirregular boney changes as the site of muscles), measures ofrobusticity, and chemical analyses of diet.

Another example of the new directions in bioarchaeologycomes from the Eurasian Steppes where Davis-Kimball andBehan (2003) revealed the complexity of male-female inter-pretations based on grave goods, burial practices, andassumed roles of women and men. Here the skeletal materi-al and mortuary context clearly demonstrated that thefemales were practiced warriors. The original interpretationsby archaeologists who did not look at the bioarchaeologicaldata was that the burials with swords and fighting imple-ment were males. It was the bioarchaeological data thatrevealed that the females were the ones with the warriorgrave goods. The alternative hypothesis proposed was thatfemales were buried with their husband’s swords or thatthese items represented some sort of fertility symbolism. ButDavis-Kimball presented a compelling case that the bioar-


Figure 1. Riley (10) and Tanner (7). Photo by Pamela Stone.


chaeological data combined with the folklore of the regionsupport the assertion that these women were most likelywarriors.

So we come back to the question: why is this important tounderstand the distinctions between sex and gender? Wheredoes this leave the archaeologists and bioarchaeologists?Today, as my boys grow up, they are entering a world that isbeginning to recognize that boys and girls are not the onlyidentities that people have. As we hear more and more aboutchildren “born in the wrong body,” we are seeing new mod-els for gender beyond our traditional “pink and blue” binary.It is important to make the distinction between sex and gen-der and to be clear in our interpretations, because it allowsus to think beyond our own cultural box and offer morenuanced and hopefully accurate interpretations of the past.Walker and Cook (1998:259) put it succinctly, and I will endwith their words as my last point: “in bioarchaeology, main-taining this distinction is important because it makes it pos-sible to explore the relationship between the biological andsocial forces that shape human behavior. . .” in the past, andI would add, also in the present.

References Cited

Abbott, C.1984 Two Feminine Genders in Oneida. Anthropological Linguis-

tics 26(2):125–137.Agarwal, Sabrina C., and Bonnie A. Glencross (editors)2011 Social Bioarchaeology.Wiley-Blackwell, Malden.

Arriaza, B. T., M. Allison, and E. Gerszten1988 Maternal Mortality in Pre-Columbian Indians of Arica,

Chile. American Journal of Physical Anthropology77(1):35–41.

Davis-Kimball, Jeannine, and Mona Behan2003 Warrior Women: An Archaeologist’s Search for History’s Hid-

den Heroines.Warner Books, New York.Epple, Carolyn1998 Coming to Terms with Navajo Nádleehí: A Critique of

Berdache, “Gay,” “Alternate Gender,” and “Two-Spirit”.American Ethnologist 25:267–290.

Fausto-Sterling, Ann1993 The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female Are Not Enough.

The Sciences March/April:20–24.Gero, Joan M., and Margaret W. Conkey (editors)1991 Engendering Archaeology: Women and Prehistory. Blackwell

Publishers, Oxford.Selin, H. S., and Pamela K. Stone (editors)2009 Childbirth Across Cultures: Ideas and Practices of Pregnancy,

Childbirth and the Postpartum. Springer, New York.Stone, Pamela K.2000 Paleoobstetrics: Reproduction, Workload, and Mortality

for Ancestral Pueblo women. Unpublished Ph.D. disserta-tion, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Stone, Pamela K., and D. Walrath2006 The Gendered Skeleton: Anthropological Interpretations

of the Boney Pelvis. In The Social Archaeology of FuneraryRemains, edited by R. Gowland and C. J. Knüsel, pp.168–178. Oxbow Books, Oxford.

Walker, Philip L., and D. C. Cook1998 Brief Communication: Gender and Sex: Vive La Differ-

ence. American Journal of Physical Anthropology106(2):255–259.


Figure 2. Pamela Stone. Photo by Tanner.


The bioarchaeology of disease is the study of health con-ditions that affected human populations in the past,achieved primarily through the study of human skele-

tal remains. In general, scholars often think of this focus asthe province of paleopathologists— those who trace the his-tory of ancient diseases using skeletal evidence. But thebioarchaeology of disease is in many ways unique and dis-tinct from this field; while paleopathologists often focusclosely upon identifying which diseases affected humans inthe past, bioarchaeologists primarily focus on what these dis-eases meant to those that they affected. Bioarchaeologistswho work on disease often ask questions such as: what doesthe presence— or absence— of a particular condition in apast population suggest about its environment, culture, orpolitical and economic systems? How did social inequality,and a person’s position within society, influence the diseasesthey developed, their access to resources and treatment, andthe way that they experienced their condition? What does thehealth of a given population, especially its most disadvantagedand thus vulnerable members, tell you about the success withwhich they adapted to changes in their environment?

Bioarchaeology emerged in the 1970s from the nexus ofarchaeology, physical (biological) anthropology, and pale-opathology. It is premised on three components: attention topopulations of humans rather than individuals, recognitionthat cultural practices, technology, and even ideology canaffect biological adaptation as much as environmentalchange, and an emphasis upon using hypothesis testing toexamine the relationship between cultural and biologicaladaptation in past populations. This perspective grants bioar-chaeology its creative and interpretive power for answeringimportant questions about the adaptive processes of pastpopulations on both regional and broader levels (Armelagosand Van Gerven 2003); it gives the bioarchaeology of diseasea unique avenue for examining how a given society’s tech-nology, ideologies, environment, economy, and politics willinfluence the particular diseases it is affected by and in turn,the way these diseases shape that particular society. In manyways, this means that the bioarchaeology of disease is muchlike a medical anthropology of the past. Just as medical

anthropologists examine the biological and social causes ofdisparities in health, different cultures’ perceptions of dis-ease and illness, and how medical practitioners and healersoperate in modern societies, bioarchaeologists examine thesame in those of the past. They do so using skeletal evidenceof disease, diet, and behavior; archaeological evidence of pastenvironments, and social, political, and economic systems;and, for historic societies, historical material on health, med-icine, beliefs about illness, and many other aspects of pastcultures.

From the very start of the field, bioarchaeologists havefocused on diverse aspects of health and disease in both pre-historic and historic cultures. Many early studies used skele-tal indicators of stress, such as signs of arrested growth anddevelopment during childhood from disease or starvation, toexamine the health consequences of major shifts in pastsocieties. For instance, studies examined the consequencesof contact between Europeans and Native Americans and theOld and New Worlds (Larsen and Milner 1994), the develop-ment of agriculture, sedentism, and plant and animaldomestication in the Neolithic Transition (Cohen and Arme-lagos 1984), and more recently, how patterns of health andhuman disease have changed over entire millennia in boththe eastern and western hemispheres (Steckel et al. 2002;Steckel and Rose 2002). From the 1980s into the early 2000s,scholars moved on to such topics as the relationship betweenarthritis and other forms of joint disease and culturally spe-cific, often gender-based behaviors (e.g., Mays 1999; SofaerDerevenski 2000); the effects of poverty, social inequality,and gender and class-based differences in access toresources on health (e.g., Sullivan 2005); and the emergence,ecology, and evolution of disease (e.g., Barrett et al. 1998).For instance, Barrett and colleagues introduced the idea thatbioarchaeological evidence of health and disease could— and should— be relevant to contemporary public health theory oncurrent trends in disease. They argued that rather than view-ing current patterns of infectious disease, specifically the riseof new and reemerging diseases like tuberculosis,HIV/AIDs, and now H1N1 influenza, as phenomena unre-lated to history, they should instead be interpreted in light of


THE BIOARCHAEOLOGY OF DISEASEMolly K. Zuckerman

Molly K. Zuckerman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Middle Eastern Cultures, Mississippi State University


other trends and transitions in humanhealth. Specifically, modern disease trendscan be viewed as but one phase of ongoingsocial, historical, and ecological themes inthe relationship between humans andtheir diseases. This cycle started with therise of epidemics of infectious disease dur-ing the Neolithic Transition and pro-gressed to the rise of chronic and degener-ative disease, such as cardiovascular dis-ease and cancer, with urbanization, indus-trialization, and modern environments.This argument— that modern diseasetrends can be best understood within thecontext of past patterns, and in corollary,that studies of past health should beundertaken with the goal of elucidating (ifnot improving) the health conditions fac-ing modern societies (Armelagos et al.2005)—guides much current research onthe bioarchaeology of disease and, indeed,is one of the key threads binding togethersome of the great diversity of currentresearch on the subject.

Given the great range of topics currently encompassed with-in the bioarchaeology of disease, the following discussionhighlights two particular foci, each of which are novel, excit-ing, and promise to be highly influential within the field.

The first is the use of biochemical analyses to examine theeffects of social inequality and aspects of social identity, likeclass, on access to health care and treatment in the past. Sev-eral scholars have pursued skeletal evidence of treatment inthe past, like Grauer and Roberts’ (1996) seminal study,which examined bone fractures in skele-tons from a medieval English cemetery,finding that even the poorest sufferershad well healed breaks and thus access tobone setters. But work on the subject haslargely been stalled by the fact that fewdiseases affect bone and even fewer treat-ments leave discernible marks. Recently,however, minimally destructive tests thatidentify and quantify the elements andmetals present in bone have opened newavenues for detecting chemically basedtreatments and determining who hadaccess to them. Several recent studieshave focused on syphilis, which leavesdistinctive skeletal lesions and was com-monly treated with mercury from theRenaissance up to the antibiotic era.

For instance, Rasmussen and colleagues(2008) examined medieval Danish skele-tons with syphilis (as well as leprosy) fromseveral monastic cemeteries, and foundelevated levels in several individuals. Byintegrating historical evidence, they wereable to attribute the levels to exposure frompreparation of red, mercury containinginks, or more likely, to preparing andreceiving treatments for syphilis and lep-rosy. Most recently, Zuckerman (2011,2012) assessed whether gender or socioeco-nomic status had any measurable effect onsyphilis patients’ access to mercury in sev-enteenth- to nineteenth-century England.

For example, while historical evidenceambiguously suggested that women likelyhad little access to treatment, due to greaterpoverty and gendered prejudice, mercurylevels were surprisingly uniform acrossskeletons of different sexes. These resultssuggest that women may have exerted great— and previously undetected— agency in pursuit of one of the few treat-

ments thought to be effective against this painful, disfiguringdisease.

Second, bioarchaeological evidence has recently beenapplied to an area of epidemiological research that exploresthe relationship between stressful events experienced earlyin life and poor health later in life. The Developmental Ori-gins of Health and Disease Hypothesis, or DOHaD (i.e.,Barker Hypothesis), holds that stressors experienced duringgestation and childhood, such as those linked to low birth

weight, are tied to negative outcomes inadulthood, like cardiovascular disease anddiabetes. The hypothesis has been testedusing twentieth-century medical records,but incomplete records and confoundersinvolved in tracing health over the course ofan entire lifetime have spurred critiquesthat substantially more research is neededin humans to better understand the phe-nomenon. Armelagos and colleagues (2009)responded with a previously untappedsource of evidence: skeletal data on health,stress, and longevity. Bioarchaeologistshave long recognized that a linkage existsbetween skeletal stress indicators, especial-ly dental indicators of arrested growth, andoverall health and longevity in skeletal sam-ples from many populations. However,these patterns had not yet been explicitly


Figure 1: Woodcut, Vienna, 1498. An illus-

tration of physicians treating patients

infected with syphilis, then known as ‘the

great pox’, with mercury. Mercury was

commonly applied as a skin ointment, as

shown here.

Figure 2: Molly Zuckerman participating

in a question and answer session with stu-

dents on the bioarchaeology of disease at

Georgia State University (the pictured

skeleton is a plastic instructional

cast)(Photo credit: Bethany Turner).


recognized as potentially congruent with the DOHaD andthus, as representative of a tremendous source of valuabledata for providing new insights into this theory. Importantly,because of the great number of skeletal samples in existence,and the availability of archaeological and historical evidenceproviding context on the environments, behaviors, and prac-tices of the once living communities that they represent,skeletal samples can provide bioarchaeologists with aninvaluable and unrivaled amount of information on thehealth consequences of a tremendous and highly variablerange of behaviors and environments. Whereas the length ofhuman life spans and ethical issues involved with testing onhumans often mean that many questions remain unan-swered about the health consequences of various behaviorsand environments for modern humans, bioarchaeologicalstudies of health and disease can often reveal instances ofpast populations that have already experienced those envi-ronments and engaged in those behaviors. Findings fromthese studies can further reveal whether their health benefit-ted from— or bore the brunt of— these choices. Their experi-ences are thus there as lessons to be learned— if bioarchae-ologists can seek them out— for our potential benefit.

References CitedArmelagos, George J., Peter J. Brown, and Bethany L. Turner2005 Evolutionary, Historical and Political Economic Perspec-

tives on Health and Disease. Social Sciences and Medicine61:755–765.

Armelagos, George J., Alan H. Goodman, Kristin N. Harper, andMichael L. Blakey

2009 Enamel Hypoplasia and Early Mortality: BioarchaeologicalSupport for the Barker Hypothesis. Evolutionary Anthropol-ogy 18:261–271.

Armelagos, George J., and Dennis P. Van Gerven2003 A Century of Skeletal Biology and Paleopathology: Con-

trasts, Contradictions, and Conflicts. American Anthropolo-gist 105:53–64.

Barrett, R., C. W. Kuzawa, T. W. McDade, and George J. Armelagos1998 Emerging and Re-emerging Infectious Diseases: The

Third Epidemologic Transition. Annual Review of Anthro-pology 27:247–271.

Cohen, Mark N., and George Armelagos (editors)1984 Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture. Academic

Press, New York.Grauer, A. L., and C. A. Roberts1996 Paleoepidemiology, Healing, and Possible Treatment of

Traumas in the Medieval Cemetery Popoulation of St.Helen-on-the-Walls, York, England. American Journal ofPhysical Anthropology 100:531–544.

Larsen, Clark Spencer, and George Milner (editors)1994 In the Wake of Contact: Biological Responses to Conquest.

J. Wiley, New York.Mays, Simon1999 A Biomechanical Study of Activity Patterns in a Medieval

Human Skeletal Assemblage. International Journal ofOsteoarchaeology 9:68–73.

Rasmussen, Kaare L., J. L. Boldsen, H. K. Kristensen, L. Skytte, K.L. Hansen, L. Mølholm, P. M. Grootes, M.-J. Nadeau, andK. M. F. Eriksen

2008 Mercury Levels in Danish Medieval Human Bones. Jour-nal of Archaeological Science 35(8):2295–2306.

Sofaer Derevenski, Joanna R.2000 Sex Differences in Activity-related Osseous Change in the

Spine and the Gendered Division of Labor at Ensay andWharram Percy, UK. American Journal of Physical Anthro-pology 111(3):333–354.

Steckel, R. H., Clark Spencer Larsen, Paul W. Sciulli, and Philip L.Walker

2002 A History of Health in Europe over the Past 10,000 Years:Summary of a research proposal. The Global History ofHealth Project. Electronic document,http://global.sbs.ohio-state.edu/european_module.htm.

Steckel, Richard H., and Jerome C. Rose (editors)2002 The Backbone of History: Health and Nutrition in the West-

ern Hemisphere. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.Sullivan, Amy2005 Prevalence and Etiology of Acquired Anemia in Medieval

York England. American Journal of Physical Anthropology128:252-272.

Zuckerman, Molly K.2011 Mercury in the Midst of Mars and Venus: Reconstructing

Gender and Socioeconomic Status in the Context of Mer-cury Treatments for Acquired Syphilis in 17th to 19thCentury England. In 76th Annual Meeting of Society forAmerican Archaeology, Sacramento.

2012 Mercury in the Midst of Mars and Venus: ReconstructingGender and Socioeconomic Status in the Context of Mer-cury Treatments for Acquired Syphilis in 17th to 19thCentury England. Journal of Social Archaeology, in press.


Figure 2: Molly Zuckerman using handheld X-Ray Florescence Spec-

trometry to measure levels of mercury in human bone from seventeenth-

century London skeletal samples, Museum of London’s Centre for

Human Bioarchaeology Laboratory. This technique allows nondestruc-

tive analysis of the elements contained within various materials, includ-

ing human bone (Photo credit: Lilly Zuckerman).

S O C I E T Y F O R A M E R I C A N A R C H A E O L O G Y

SAAarchaeological recordMAY 2012 • VOLUME 12 • NUMBER 3

the

NEW DIRECTIONS IN BIOARCHAEOLOGY, PART II

78TH ANNUAL MEETING SUBMISSIONS DEADLINE: SEPTEMBER 12, 2012.

Editor’s Corner

Letter to the Editor

2013 Call for Nominations

Volunteer Profile

Avocational Archaeology: A Half -Century of Increasing Contributions

New Developments in Lithic Analysis: Laser Scanningand Digital Modeling

Digitizing the Archives of Archaeology Series

Low Stakes, High Impact Learning: A Pedagogical Model for a Bioarchaeology and Forensic Anthropology Field School

special forumNew Directions in Bioarchaeology, Part II

A Bioarchaeology of Social Identity

A Bioarchaeology of Captivity, Slavery, Bondage, and Torture

The Bioarchaeology of Violence: Infusing Method with Theory

The Bioarchaeology of Care

The Bioarchaeology of Migration

Report from the SAA Board of Directors

SAA Annual Business Meeting

2012 Awards

In Memoriam: Robert Leonard Hall

In Memoriam: Alberto Rex Gonzalez

Positions Open

News And Notes

Calendar

2 Jane Eva Baxter

3 David M. Gradwohl

3

4 John Norder

5 Cathy Poetschat, Marcel Kornfeld, and James D. Keyser

12 Michael J. Shott and Brian W. Trail

19 Joseph A. Tiffany

24 Heidi J. Bauer-Clapp, Ventura R. Pérez, Tiffany L. Parisi, and Robin Wineinger

Guest Editors: Debra L. Martin and Ryan P Harrod

29 Sabrina C. Agarwal

32 Debra Martin and Anna Osterholtz

35 Ventura R. Perez

39 Lorna Tilley

42 Tiffiny Tung

46

49

53

58

59

60

60

60

The Magazine of the Society for American Archaeology Volume 12, No. 3

May 2012

SAAarchaeological recordthe

24 The SAA Archaeological Record • May 2012

LOW STAKES, HIGH IMPACT LEARNINGA PEDAGOGICAL MODEL FOR A BIOARCHAEOLOGY AND

FORENSIC ANTHROPOLOGY FIELD SCHOOL

Heidi J. Bauer-Clapp, Ventura R. Pérez, Tiffany L. Parisi, and Robin Wineinger

Heidi J. Bauer-Clapp is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and

is the Instructor for the 2012 offering of Field and Laboratory Methods in Bioarchaeology and Forensic Anthropology. Ventura

R. Pérez is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and is the Director of Field

and Laboratory Methods in Bioarchaeology and Forensic Anthropology. Tiffany L. Parisi is graduating with a Master’s in

Anthropology in May 2012 from George Washington University and will enter the Ph.D. program in the Department of

Anthropology at University of Massachusetts Amherst in fall 2012. Robin Wineinger is a 2009 graduate of University of Cen-

tral Florida.

Excavation and laboratory analysis of excavation data are critical components to the education andtraining of students interested in archaeology, bioarchaeology, and forensic anthropology. The Jan-uary 2012 issue of the The SAA Archaeological Record featured an insightful Special Forum on Inno-

vations in Archaeological Field Schools to illustrate key aspects of the archaeological field school experi-ence. In this article, we outline a field school in bioarchaeology and forensic anthropology designed toaddress the unique issues fundamental to working with human remains.

Challenges and Limited Opportunities

Excavation and analysis of human skeletal remains are generally not part of traditional archaeological fieldschools in the United States, and rightfully so. However, this leaves students with few opportunities todevelop skills in these areas. A brief Internet survey (utilizing Google and field school listings on shovel-bums.com and archaeological.org) revealed fewer than 10 field schools in either bioarchaeology or foren-sic anthropology offered during the summer of 2012 in the United States. There are at least twice as manyofferings outside the United States, but this is still a mere fraction of the number of archaeological fieldschools.

While these search results are by no means an exhaustive representation of all bioarchaeology and/orforensic anthropology field schools, they do illustrate two specific challenges for students. First, themajority of such opportunities are outside the United States, and combined costs for tuition, room andboard, and transportation can be prohibitively expensive. In addition, field schools outside the UnitedStates will not expose students to U.S. laws associated with human remains, including unmarked buriallaws, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), and the American justicesystem. Second, these field schools— both international and domestic— focus on either bioarchaeology orforensic anthropology, requiring students to choose an area of specialization, perhaps before developinga clear understanding of the similarities and differences between these two subfields.

Field and Laboratory Methods in Bioarchaeology and Forensic Anthropology: Course Design

Field and Laboratory Methods in Bioarchaeology and Forensic Anthropology, offered by the Departmentof Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass) is designed to provide broad expo-sure to both bioarchaeology and forensic anthropology and is framed around three goals: (1) to recognize

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25May 2012 • The SAA Archaeological Record

what constitutes data in the fields of bioarchaeology and forensic anthropology; (2) to understand howbioarchaeological and forensic fieldwork is conducted and get students comfortable with the idea of work-ing in the field; and (3) to understand how field data is analyzed and interpreted in the laboratory. Thefive-week course is offered over the summer and is divided into three stages to mirror the course goals.Students initially read relevant literature, learn field techniques such as mapping, familiarize themselveswith lab equipment, and gain hands-on experience working with real human skeletal remains through labexercises. The second portion of the course is spent in the field excavating, and the final portion is spentin the lab analyzing field data and producing a written report to summarize results.

Prior to the excavation phase students are divided into two teams, one excavating in a bioarchaeologicalcontext and one in a forensic context. Communication between the groups is constant, so all studentsleave the course with nearly equal exposure to both subfields. Throughout the course students utilize theUMass Osteological Trauma Lab and the Taphonomy Research Lab (see Figure 1). Together the labs pro-vide students with a comprehensive basic training that emphasizes the symbiotic relationship betweentaphonomy, bioarchaeology, and forensic anthropology and/or forensic archaeology.

This course provides a low-stakes, high-impact opportunity to learn excavation and laboratory analysismethods through two specific pedagogical choices. First, the field school utilizes “burials” and “crimescenes” built with plastic skeletons. (Plastic skeletons are used during excavation only; all lab work is con-ducted with real human skeletal remains.) Learning excavation on constructed sites allows students tofocus on the learning process without worrying about making mistakes that could be costly in a traditionalresearch-oriented field school.

Second, the course features a peer education component, with students working as a team to determinethe best course of action for each step in the excavation and analysis processes. This course is notdesigned to provide students with specific instructions on how to excavate and analyze data, but ratherexpose them to the relevant literature, methods, tools, and technology, then place them in a situationwhere they must think about how to apply these elements. Our peer learning approach enables studentsto identify their own research goals and plan how these goals might be achieved. This pedagogicalapproach creates a democratic discourse easing potential alienation between the students and the instruc-tor while promoting reciprocal critical learning. Thus, the learning process is negotiated, with leadershipby the graduate student instructor. This is a vital learning-how-to-learn skill, providing students with lead-ership roles and conflict-management skills that enhance their learning outcomes.

The course design emphasizes how bioarchaeology and forensic anthropology work in the “real” world.On the bioarchaeology side, students study NAGPRA, ethical and legal issues such as looting, andrespectful treatment of skeletal remains. In addition, students are encouraged to consider how bioar-chaeological research could be conducted in an engaged manner: What opportunities exist for collabora-tive work? Is there a role for descendant communities in research design? How do anthropologists sharetheir results with a diverse array of interested groups?

On the forensic side, students are often attracted to the discipline through programs like CSI or Bones andcome into the course thinking forensic anthropologists utilize flashy tools and run around solving crimes.Our course has been designed to provide a more realistic picture of what forensic anthropologists actual-ly do. Students are also exposed to violence theory as a means to think about how the cultural contexts ofviolence are just as significant as the act of violence itself. Finally, students explore the emotional realityof working with human remains in a forensic context. Guest speakers discuss their experiences in thefield and offer suggestions on mentally preparing to work with recently deceased individuals who likelydied in a violent manner.

Finally, we address the reality that there are few available jobs in bioarchaeology and forensic anthropol-ogy. Students are encouraged to think about their career trajectory and how to best situate themselves to

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take the next steps. We bring in professionals who work in bioarchaeology and forensic anthropology— from both academic and non-academic settings— to help students understand what jobs in these fieldsactually look like.

Student Perspective: Robin Wineinger, Bioarchaeology Team

Nothing is more effective than hands-on experience in the field. Low stakes excavation makes it possiblefor students to gain experience without the risk of professional backlash. This method allowed us tobecome familiar with the basics of field and lab methods as well as develop an understanding of the largeamount of data that need to be recorded, the importance of accuracy, and how much patience is neededduring excavation.

Another essential component of this class was the opportunity for peer learning. Prior to beginning exca-vation, we participated in laboratory activities to introduce bioarchaeology and forensic techniques,including the basics of ballistics, ceramic dating, sexing and aging the skeleton, and distinguishing fau-nal from human remains. This was beneficial because we worked together and discussed our conclu-sions.

After the excavation we moved back into the lab to assess the information gathered in the field and I waschosen as the lab coordinator for the bioarchaeology group, which allowed me to utilize leadership skillsI did not know I had. My team was able to exchange ideas in a risk-free setting and learn from each otherwhile we collaborated to create a report based on our findings. Each student came from a different aca-demic background, and most of us (me included) had no prior field or lab experience. Through thiscourse we all gained essential laboratory and field skills and a better understanding of the fundamentalsof bioarchaeology and forensic anthropology.

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Figure 1: The Taphonomy Research Lab is a 75-acre facility on the campus of the University of Massachusetts Amherst offer-

ing students hands-on research experience in taphonomy, field methods, and decomposition.


Student Perspective: Tiffany Parisi, Forensic Anthropology Team

When there is a forensic implication tied to the exhumation of human remains, there is no room forinvestigative error. However, within the environment of this course, we were given the opportunity to con-duct a forensic investigation where errors were not dire, and were actually beneficial to the learningprocess. As students, we were given free reign of the investigative process and had to apply the theory welearned in the classroom to actual field conditions. While we strove for perfection, mistakes wereinevitable. However, since our site was specifically designed as a learning opportunity we were able tolearn from our mistakes and focus on our specific interests without external distractions or professionalconsequences.

The field school was structured around student-directed field and lab work so we were often in the posi-tion of needing to explore different ways of conducting our investigation. Even when students had previ-ous excavation experience, we were largely trained in different techniques. Our group discussions werean exercise in learning how to communicate effectively within a diverse team dynamic as we discussedthe importance of different possible techniques and how the application of each could be beneficial to oursuccess. In previous field experiences I have seen how detrimental poor communication can be, but I feltthat the low-pressure nature of this field school contributed to our ability to overcome our disagreements.This experience enabled us to learn about the whole picture of the investigative process and learn how tonavigate this process in a professional and efficient way.

I have always been drawn to pursuing a career as an applied, public anthropologist, and this course intro-duced me to ways in which issues of public involvement, NAGPRA, and non-academic writing could beviewed in a positive manner as each served as complementary parts to a larger system. I took this new-

ARTICLE

Figure 2: Students excavate a plastic skeleton as part of the bioarchaeological team in the 2010 field school.


found passion with me and have developed a forensic anthropology summer camp for 4th–8th gradersthat Robin Wineinger and I will teach in July 2012 through the Smithsonian Institution. It is my hopethat this experience will allow the public to become involved and interested in anthropology and establishthe importance of historical stewardship and connecting with our past.

Instructor (Heidi Bauer-Clapp) and Director (Ventura Pérez) Perspectives

As a graduate student instructor for this course, I gained experience by leading teams in the field, but withthe same low-stakes setting as the students. I was able to focus on the logistics without the added pres-sure of developing a research agenda, which proved to be a tremendous asset when planning my ownfieldwork. In addition, facilitating the peer-learning process strengthened my ability to communicate withstudents, mediate conflicts, and foster a student-centered teaching approach as I encouraged students toapply what they have learned without looking to me for answers.

As director of the field school and a bioarchaeologist working in Mexico, the abovementioned benefits aresignificant. My graduate students have honed their teaching and logistical skills before setting foot on thesite. They have thought about time management and have become balanced, independent researcherswho are willing to ask for and listen to advice from multiple voices. In addition, in the years to come Iexpect some of the Spanish speaking undergraduates who matriculate though our field school to findtheir way to some of the sites I am working at in Mexico, ready to begin work immediately. Indeed, mynewest Ph.D. student and one of the co-authors of this article, Tiffany Parisi, followed this very path.

Foundational Learning Experience

Ideally, students leave this course with an understanding of the broad scope of bioarchaeology and foren-sic anthropology. Students are in a better position to make informed decisions when choosing a subfield,entering graduate school, or seeking employment. In addition, students will be well-situated for futurefield experiences, as they have already spent time becoming comfortable working in the field, communi-cating with team members, and understanding the consequences of mistakes made in the field or lab.This course is not designed to replace a more traditional research-focused field school but rather providestudents with a skill set that can be applied in a variety of settings.

For more information on Field and Laboratory Methods in Bioarchaeology and Forensic Anthropologyoffered in the summer of 2012 at UMass please visit www.umass.edu/bioarchaeology.

ARTICLE

Figure 3: Students search for clues on where to begin excavating as part of the forensic team in the 2010 field school.


The unique nature of the human skeleton as the cre-ation of both biological and cultural influences is cen-tral to the field of bioarchaeology. The details of the life

you lead, including such things as the amount of physicalactivity you have, the food you eat, or number of children youbear, can all leave traces in your skeleton. This gives thebioarchaeologist the ability to do more than just describe theanatomical details of ancient bones, but actually use theclues observed in the skeleton to decipher aspects of pastlifestyle and behavior. Biocultural approaches in bioarchae-ology emphasize the synergistic relationship of social, cul-tural, and physical forces in shaping the skeletal body (Arme-lagos et al. 1982).

Recently, bioarchaeologists have become interested in thestudy of social identity in the past. Identity is composed ofmultiple features that are connected together to create anindividual personhood, and can be an individual perceptionor imposed by a larger community. Gender, age, class, ethnicaffiliation, and religion all represent forms of social identities(Knudson and Stojanowski 2008), and one’s identity is notcomposed of one of these forms but rather an intersection ofmultiple social variables. How do we go from looking at dryand static bones to reconstructing social lives? The first keyhas been the greater contextualization of archaeological skele-tal remains. Recent studies have emphasized the deeperunderstanding of past life ways gained through the close andsimultaneous consideration of archaeological, historical, andethnographic sources of data along with skeletal analyses(Blakey and Rankin-Hill 2004; Buikstra and Beck 2006). Thesecond key comes from the realization that the human skele-ton is more than a record of ones’ life— it is literally a productof that life. While the shape and size of the human skeletalbody is the result of millions of years of evolutionary historyand trajectories laid down during genetic development, indi-vidual life history plays a significant role in creating each per-son’s unique skeletal morphology. Lived experiences over theentire life cycle, even experiences in utero, play a role in build-

ing the final skeleton that we observe in the archaeologicalrecord. Approaches that recognize the cumulative nature ofbiosocial influences over the lifetime are crucial to unravelingthe social lives of past people.

The Sex and Gender of Bone Loss

The study of social identity in bioarchaeology has particular-ly focused on identities based on gender, age, or health (Hol-limon 2011). I became interested in the sex and gender ofdisease early in my graduate career at the University ofToronto, where I focused on what is regarded as a well-known “female” disease— osteoporosis.

Osteoporosis is a loss or change in the amount (bone densi-ty) and/or organization of bone tissue with subsequentincrease in bone fragilty (or fracture). It is a growing healthconcern in the aging populations of developed countries; inthe U.S. alone it is reported that osteoporosis is a majorhealth threat for 44 million Americans, with one out of everytwo women, and one in four men over 50 expected to sufferfrom an osteoporotic-related fracture in their lifetime(National Institute of Health 2006). Women loose bone earli-er and more dramatically than men, and as such are at amuch great risk for osteoporosis. While bone loss is clearlyrelated to menopause and age, it is known that additionalfactors such as ethnicity, nutrition, physical activity, preg-nancy, and lactation all play an important role in bone main-tenance (Ward et al. 1995).

While there have been many studies of bone loss in bioar-chaeology that recognize the multifactorial etiology, boneloss in the past is still generally regarded to be an inevitableconsequence of menopause and aging (Macho et al. 2005).When I began my research in osteoporosis I was struck byhow many historical populations show differing patterns ofbone loss as compared to modern populations. Specifically,bone loss in the past is often seen in young-aged individuals,


A BIOARCHAEOLOGY OF SOCIAL IDENTITYSabrina C. Agarwal

Sabrina C. Agarwal is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of California Berkeley


is similar in both males and females, and there is a lowprevalence of fragility fractures. I have since realized thatthere are no given or universal sex-related patterns of boneloss geographically or temporally in the past. What work bymyself and other researchers has shown is that bone loss cantell us much more than just the deterioration of bony tissuewith age; it can also tell us about the social lives people hadbefore they aged.

A Historic Example

The study of bone loss I have made at two contemporaneousBritish Medieval archaeological samples, one excavated froma deserted medieval rural village, Wharram Percy, and theother from an urban setting in London, illustrates the varia-tion we see in aging and fragility of the skeleton. The ruralsample, Wharram Percy, dated between the eleventh and six-teenth centuries, is located in North Yorkshire, England(Mays 2007). The second sample was drawn from two com-bined urban archaeological samples excavated from the cityof London, England: St. Nicholas Shambles, an earlymedieval parish cemetery dated archaeologically to theeleventh and twelfth centuries (White 1988), and the EastSmithfield Black Death cemetery from the Royal Mint site inLondon, one of the first Black Death cemeteries dated toA.D. 1349 (Hawkins 1990). I examined patterns of age-relat-ed change in the microarchitecture of the trabecular bone(the honeycomb inside layer of bony tissue) in the vertebrae(specifically the 4th lumbar bone of the lower back) in boththe rural and urban skeletal samples— and the results weresurprisingly different.

In the rural Wharram Percy sample, both males and femalesshowed a loss of trabecular bone between young and middleage, with no change in trabecular structure seen in old age.These patterns of bone loss in young age, and the equal lossof bone in both sexes in old age, differ from modern popula-tions that show females to suffer bone loss post-menopauseand typically greater loss of bone overall as compared tomales. In contrast, in the urban sample only the femalesshowed a loss of bone between middle and old age, a patternsimilar to modern populations. So why does the rural sam-ple show such different patterns of age-related bone loss ascompared to modern populations, and why do patterns inrural Medieval women look so different as compared tourban Medieval women?

I have suggested that both reproduction and physical activitywould have played important roles in bone loss and fragilityin both of the medieval communities (Agarwal 2012). Repro-ductive behaviors, specifically high parity (the number of off-


Figure 1. Sabrina Agarwal in her lab with Graduate Student Melanie

Miller.

Figure 2. Peripheral quantitative tomography (pQCT) image of a

human vertebrae.

Figure 3. Graduate student Patrick Beauchesne in the Skeletal Biology

Lab UC Berkeley.


spring born) and extended breastfeeding, in the ruralmedieval women would have dramatically altered their life-time hormonal milieu as compared to modern women, andcould have buffered them against dramatic menopausalbone loss. Further, levels of physical activity for the ruralmedieval peasants would have been very high as comparedto modern populations (Gies and Gies 1990). Both sexeswould have had very arduous lifestyles that would have helpmaximize bone mass accretion during growth and helpedprevent bone loss later in life. In comparison, while theurban medieval communities would have more activelifestyles than our own, life in the urban setting came withmore gendered activities and occupations. The lack ofintense activity for urban women as compared to the ruralwomen could explain their more modern patterns of post-menopausal bone loss. Also, urban women would have haddifferent reproductive behaviors compared to rural women,with likely shorter periods of breastfeeding and more com-mon use of wet nursing (Gies and Gies 1981), which againcould explain their more modern patterns of bone loss.

Age and Gender Identity

Variation in bone loss in the medieval populations is not justrelated to reproduction or activity, but specifically to the gen-dered differences in these behaviors within and between thegroups. This means that patterns of bone loss, or variation inany aspect of morphology on the skeleton, can help us makevaluable inferences about social lives and identities. This hasled myself and my students at the Skeletal Biology Lab at UCBerkeley to continue research on the influences of variationin bone morphology, and how we can use this work toinform our understanding of age and gender in the past andpresent.

This includes work such as directly examining the effects ofreproduction on bone metabolism, looking at the synergisticlink between factors such as diet and activity, and looking theplasticity of skeleton during growth and development. It isincreasingly evident that what is really important is howinfluences are played out over the life course of an individ-ual, and the cumulative effect they may have on the skeletonthat we observe. Thinking of these influences over the lifecourse allows us to go beyond the skeletons we observe andcan give us a glimpse into the social worlds that the bodieswe look at once inhabited.

References Cited

Agarwal, Sabrina C.2012 The Past of Sex, Gender, and Health: Bioarchaeology of

aging skeleton. American Anthropologist, in press.

Armelagos, G. J., D. S. Carlson, and D. P. Van Gerven1982 The Theoretical Foundations and Development of Skeletal

Biology. In A History of American Physical Anthropology,1930–1980, edited by F. Spencer, pp. 305–328. AcademicPress, New York.

Blakey, M. L., and L. M. Rankin-Hill (editors)2004 Skeletal Biology Final Report: The New York African Burial

Ground, Vol. 1 and 2. The African Burial Ground Project,Howard University for the United States General ServicesAdministration, Northeastern and Cribbean Region,Washington, D. C.

Buikstra, Jane E. and L. A. Beck (editors)2006 Bioarchaeology: The contextual analysis of human remains.

Academic Press, Burlington.Gies, F. and J. Gies1990 Life in a Medieval Village. Harper & Row, Publishers, New

York.Gies, J. and F. Gies1981 Life in a Medieval City. Harper & Row, Publishers, New

York.Hawkins, D.1990 The Black Death and the New London Cemeteries of

1348. Antiquity 64(244):637–642.Hollimon, S. E.2011 Sex and Gender in Bioarchaeological Research: Theory,

method, and interpretation. In Social Bioarchaeology, edit-ed by S. C. Agarwal and B. A. Glencross, pp. 149–182.Wiley-Blackwell, Malden.

Knudson, K. J., and C. M. Stojanowski2008 New Directions in Bioarchaeology: Recent contributions to

the study of human social identities. Journal of Archaeolog-ical Research 16:397–432.

Macho, G. A., R. L. Abel and H. Schutkowski2005 Age Changes in Bone Microstructure: Do they occur uni-

formly? International Journal of Osteoarchaeology15(6):421–430.

Mays, S.2007 Part Three: The human remains. In Wharram: a Study of

Settlement on the Yorkshire Wolds, XI: The Churchyard, edit-ed by S. Mays, C. Harding and C. Heighway, pp. 77–193,S. Wrathmell, general editor. York University Archaeologi-cal Publications, Vol. 13, York.

National Institute of Health2006 Osteoporosis Overview, pp. 1–10. NIH Osteoporosis and

Related Bone Diseases, Bethesda.Ward, J. A., S. R. Lord, P. Williams, K. Anstey, and E. Zivanovic1995 Physiologic, Health and Lifestyle Factors Associated with

Femoral Neck Bone Density in Older Women. Bone16(4):S373-S378.

White, W. J.1988 Skeletal Remains from the Cemetery of St. Nicholas Shambles,

City of London. London and Middlesex ArchaeologicalSociety, London.



Although we started our careers at very different times(Debra received her Ph.D. in 1983, Anna will likelycomplete hers in 2013), we have converged on a topic

that has captured our imaginations as well as kept us up atnight with images of people in pain and circumstances ofuntold horror. Our current research delves into the originsand evolution of culturally sanctioned violence used to sub-due, capture, enslave, or torture humans.

As anthropologists, we use bioarchaeology as a means toexplain human behavior. In this case, we want to understandthe biological impacts of prolonged periods of abuse at thehands of others or what it means to be literally worked to thebone as a slave, captive, or indentured servant. We work withtheories about the ways that nonlethal and lethal violence areused to subdue and exploit humans. Captivity, slavery, andtorture are very old and ancient practices, going back as faras there are written records. Bioarchaeology can makeimportant contributions to explaining how violence is usedto create and reinforce particular kinds of social orders.

Bioarchaeology is the analysis of human remains in a richlydetailed and nuanced context that integrates biological, cul-tural, and environmental data from a number of sources.Joanna Sofaer captures the essence of this kind of integratedresearch when she says “we cannot take an empiricist viewand assume that osteological data speak for themselves . . .as the body is simultaneously biological, representationaland material” (2006:11). Bioarchaeology is informed by theuse of frameworks, models, and theories that aid in thinkingthrough the different ways that bodies can reveal the effectsof past behaviors. The work we do in studying violence is aform of archaeological witnessing of horrific past events thathelps us sharpen our understanding of what motivates anddrives the systems of power that use violence (see Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2004). Shining a light on these com-plex behaviors can reveal how violence is embedded in socialstructures.

How can bioarchaeologists differentiate violence on the bodythat is related to captivity, bondage, or slavery from otherpossible causes? One example is a series of studies we con-ducted on a group of women who lived among an AncestralPueblo community around 1,000 years ago (Martin et al.2008). Integrating skeletal analysis, mortuary context,archaeological reconstruction, and neuropathology, we wereable to use multiple lines of evidence that all pointed to cap-tivity and enslavement. A subgroup of women showed injuryrecidivism, that is, repeated trauma and injury over thecourse of a lifetime (see Judd 2002 for one of the first stud-ies linking injury recidivism to violence in ancient societies).Indicators included healed cranial depression fractures like-ly due to blunt force trauma obtained during raiding andabduction of females. These women also had a variety ofhealed fractures on the lower body, as well as localized trau-ma to the joints (e.g., dislocated hip joint). These may be theresult of punishment or harsh treatment. These women alsohad indicators of poor health (infections, nutritional prob-lems). Months or years of hard labor resulted in pronouncedmuscle markers, traumatic osteoarthritis, and trauma-induced pathologies in these women. They were recoveredfrom burial contexts different from individuals who did nothave bodies wracked with trauma and pathology. In this case,the women seem to have been placed without any intention-ality or grave offerings and in abandoned pit structures.

Philip Walker (1989) found patterns of healed cranial depres-sion fractures on men and women from a southern Califor-nia group also from about 1,000 years ago. However, therewas not a pattern of injury recidivism or differential burialcontext, and this led him to suggest that the head woundswere related to ritualized violence during periods of environ-mental stress. In this study, Walker was the first bioarchae-ologist to show that blows to head severe enough to leave cra-nial depression fractures could have caused some braininjury. He made the initial connection between healed headwounds and long-term behavioral changes in the form of


A BIOARCHAEOLOGY OF CAPTIVITY, SLAVERY, BONDAGE, AND TORTURE

Debra Martin and Anna Osterholtz

Debra Martin is Professor of Bioarchaeology and Anna Osterholtz is a PhD Candidate and

Osteological Collections Manager in the Department of Anthropology, University of Nevada, Las Vegas.


migraine headaches, dizziness, impaired judgment, andother side effects of traumatic brain injury.

We extended Walker’s observations by working with a neu-ropathologist (Bradley Crenshaw) who examined the craniaof the Ancestral Pueblo females with head wounds. Welearned that brain injury results when external forces areapplied to the outside of the skull and are transmitted to thebrain. The damage occurs in two places: at the coup (wherethe blunt force is applied) and the contra-coup (where thebrain slams into the opposite side of the skull from the forceof hit). A multitude of side effects are possible, depending onwhich parts of the brain are most damaged. As an example,one female (age 30 at the time of death) had survived a crush-ing blow that affected a large area at the top of her head. Dr.Crenshaw analyzed the extent of her injuries and felt certainthat she would have had life-long behavioral challenges.Given the size, location, and status of her injury, she mayhave had problems not only with migraines and dizziness,but also with motor control, balance, and general coordina-tion. In addition to healed head wounds, this woman alsohad a dislocated hip that could have been from poor balanceand problems with motor coordination, both of which arelong-term side effects of traumatic brain injury.

Bioarchaeology of the Atlantic slave trade in the Americaswas pioneered by Michael Blakey (1998) with his oversight ofthe African Burial Ground Project. He and his students doc-umented the ways that the skeleton reveals the accumulativeeffects of subjugation and hard labor. Their findings showhow pronounced musculoskeletal markers and traumaticpathologies leave signs that suggest excessive, grueling, andlong hours of physical labor. The bones tell a story of indi-viduals being worked beyond their physical capabilities.

Dealing with the bioarchaeology of torture and executionshas also revealed that there are key patterns revealed on theskeleton. The assemblage at Sacred Ridge, Colorado, forexample, is made up of the remains of at least 33 peoplewho were killed, dismembered, and placed in a pit struc-ture around A.D. 800. Examination of the foot bones ofthese individuals shows a pattern of injury that is consis-tent with hobbling and torture, which would have been atremendously perfomative aspect during the massacre.Individuals would have been forced to watch their kinbeing hobbled by blows and cuts to the sides of the feet andtortured by beating the soles and tops of the feet. Peeling ofthe bony tissue as well as cut marks, buckling of the bone,and other marks consistent with torture and hobbling arepresent on adult remains of both sexes. Hobbling wouldhave made it impossible for the individual to physicallymove or flee; this has both physical and psychologicaleffects. Hobbling is visible through the damage to the sidesof the feet, caused by both blows and cutting of the liga-ments that stabilize the foot for walking and running. Tor-ture through beating the soles of the feet has a long anddiverse history worldwide. Torture cements the social con-trol of a captive by literally giving the aggressor power toinflict pain (or to stop the infliction of pain). These types ofinjury have absolutely no utility after death, and so musthave been perpetrated prior to death.

How Can These Data from the Bodies of Former Captives and Slaves Aid In Understanding ModernDay Slavery?

The current relevance of these types of behaviors cannot beoverstated. Media images and descriptions provide daily ref-erences to the global trafficking of humans in an under-


Figure 1: Debra Martin working in her bioarch lab with undergraduate

student, Kristin Halsey.

Figure 2: Anna Osterholtz in the Sheilagh Brooks Osteology Research

Lab at UNLV.


ground slavery movement that affects at least 27 million peo-ple worldwide. We also know that in war-torn regions andplaces defined by sectarian violence, people are kept captiveand are at times tortured or ceremonially executed as a wayof sending particular kinds of messages to the witnesses.

Using theories about the ways that violence permeates asocial system, direct violence is the physical bodily harmdone to individuals, and the bones of these people can revealat least some of that. As important is this is to document,even more so is structural violence that includes laws, socialprograms, and political economic systems that utilize the by-products of violence: subordination and fear in the mainte-nance of inequality. It is culturally sanctioned violence thatmakes direct and structural violence look and feel normal.

Bioarchaeology is uniquely suited to provide data on direct,structural, and cultural violence because it has the potentialto integrate evidence from many different levels of analysis.From the bones of those that suffered, to the manner thatthey were interred, to the larger community that they livedin, and finally to the regional context in which the politicaland economic events played out.

Still, there are many challenges in reconstructing captivity,slavery, bondage, and torture. Pain is notoriously difficult to

document and even more difficult to objectively score, sinceeach individual will feel pain at differing intensities. Equallydifficult for us as bioarchaeologists, and even more impor-tant for us when examining concepts such as torture in aperformative light, is the impact that another person’s painhas on a witness. In some ways, being forced to watch some-one you care for in pain may be as powerful as being sub-jected to such pain yourself. Not only is someone you carefor in distress, but you have no power to mitigate the situa-tion. Pain is inherently relatable, so the examination of painis a way to humanize work such as that seen at Sacred Ridge,where the scale of the massacre has a tendency to overwhelmindividual observations. Through our collective studies ofthese kinds of violence, we can get an idea of what that indi-vidual felt and imagine ourselves and our families in a simi-lar situation.

Bioarchaeology has only begun to scratch the surface ofunderstanding the biological effects and social contexts ofcaptivity, slavery, bondage and torture. These data from thebioarchaeological record show patterns in trauma and injurythat provide important insights into the ways that violence isused to inflict pain and suffering in the service of largerpolitical, social, and ideological agendas.

References Cited

Blakey, Michael L.1998 The New York African Burial Ground Project: An Exami-

nation of Enslaved Lives, a Construction of Ancestral Ties.Transforming Anthropology 7:53–58.

Judd, Margaret A.2002 Ancient Injury Recidivism: An Example from the Kerma

Period of Ancient Nubia. International Journal of Osteoar-chaeology 12:89–106.

Martin, Debra L., Nancy Akins, Bradley Crenshaw, and Pamela K.Stone

2008 Inscribed in the Body, Written on the Bones: The Conse-quences of Social Violence at La Plata. In Social Violence inthe Prehispanic American Southwest, edited by Deborah L.Nichols and Patricia L. Crown, pp. 98–122. University ofArizona Press, Tucson.

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, and Phillipe Bourgois (editors)2004 Violence in War and Peace, An Anthology. Blackwell Pub-

lishing, Malden.Sofaer, Joanna R.2006 The Body as Material Culture: A Theoretical Osteoarchaeolo-

gy. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.Walker, Philip L.1989 Cranial Injuries as Evidence of Violence in Prehistoric

Southern California. American Journal of Physical Anthro-pology 80:313–323.


Figure 3: Diagram showing torture and disarticulation of the foot bones.

The blue area represents places of bone crushing, green represents bone

peeling, and brown is missing digits. Slash marks on the tops of the

bones represent perimortem cut marks.


My relationship with violence has always been com-plicated. I was six years old when my father first putme in a boxing ring, and to this day my preferred

method of stress reduction is the heavy bag that hangs in mybasement. I fought in and out of the ring until I was eighteenand never considered my actions to be violent or thoughtmuch about the concept until I was twenty-one. That year Iwas working at a level-one trauma center in Atlanta, Georgiaas a security guard. On Thanksgiving Day, in the late after-noon, we got word that a gunshot victim was on his way in byambulance. I helped unload the stretcher, and he died as wewheeled him in to the ER. A few minutes later his motherarrived and was told her son was dead. She wandered out intothe parking lot and collapsed screaming “My God, I’ve lostboth of my sons today.” As it turned out, during dinner thebrothers had got into a fight and one of them drew a gun andshot the other. Now one was dead and the other was going toprison. It was at this moment that I began to see violence ina profoundly different way. Although I did not have the vocab-ulary to explain what I had seen, I would ultimately spend thenext half of my life studying the effects of interpersonal andinstitutional violence. The path was long and complicated,winding through forensic anthropology, archaeology, andultimately biological anthropology.

Today, I am constantly struck by how much change hasoccurred over the past decade in the theoretical and method-ological approaches to understanding violence in ancient andhistoric populations. Bioarchaeologists have begun to moveaway from the narrow lenses of trauma analysis or patternrecognition to the analysis of conflict patterns as they pertainto systems of power and violence. Over the past thirty years,the analysis of human skeletal remains from archaeologicalsites has shifted from a solely descriptive endeavor to a scien-tific subfield that embraces hypothesis testing in the contextof anthropological archaeology. The difference between skele-tal analysis and bioarchaeology is that the latter employs aninterdisciplinary and cross-cultural research tool that can aidin the analysis of a wide range of data on violence.

In his article “Bioarchaeology as Anthropology” (2003:27),Armelagos notes that “scientists’ perceptions of their disci-pline clearly influence how they frame their research agen-da.” Bioarchaeology is at its best when infused with a four-field approach to the analysis of human remains. This is par-ticularly true when bioarchaeologists are exploring the topicof violence. I was fortunate to receive my M.A. and Ph.D. ina true four-field department. I took courses in linguistics,cultural theory, archaeology, and biological anthropology. Mydissertation included chapters on taphonomy, bioarchaeolo-gy of the Greater Southwest, and violence theory. As a facul-ty member in that same department, I now find myself serv-ing as a committee member for graduate students in all foursubfields. What I have to offer these students and my col-leagues is an understanding of the necessity of a holisticapproach to violence studies.

My work ranges from pre-Hispanic archaeological sites insouthern Zacatecas, Mexico to drug cartel violence in CiudadJuarez and is embedded in a biocultural model. What I findexciting about the new directions that bioarchaeology is takingin 2012 is that not only are we seeing more researchersembracing a biocultural approach in their analysis and inter-pretations of skeletal material evidencing violent trauma, butthere is an attempt to incorporate an interdisciplinary method-ology in order to have a meaningful dialogue around the ideasof interpersonal and institutional forms of violence. This iscrucial if we are going to engage in a narrative of violence thatcan be understood not as a bifurcated analysis of literal versusmetaphorical but rather as a complicated aesthetic.

Bioarchaeology offers a useful approach to the classificationand interpretation of traumatic injuries that are often indica-tive of conflict and violence (Walker 2001). Bioarchaeologyaccomplishes this by bridging the chasm between biologyand the social and environmental dimensions of the popula-tions being engaged. This approach has allowed me to moveseamlessly between projects that focus on the pervasive,ancient, and infinitely varied forms of violence that are gen-


THE BIOARCHAEOLOGY OF VIOLENCEINFUSING METHOD WITH THEORY

Ventura R. Perez

Ventura R. Pérez is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of Massachusetts Amherst.


erally a poorly understood cen-tral facet of human life. Thestarting point is always theskeleton or the body and thephysical manifestation of theviolence, but my real interestslie in the normalization of theuse of violence. By combiningthe skeletal data with archaeo-logical, ethnohistoric, historic,and/or contemporary docu-mentation, I am able to createpotent models for understand-ing past populations.

An example in my ownresearch comes from theGreater Southwest where therange of variability in the dis-articulated and extremely

processed human remains from a number of sites makessuspect the notion that one overarching activity, such asmini-armies carrying out public executions, warfare, witch-craft retribution, or cannibalism, could account for the dif-ferences. All of these are quantifiable in their placement,type of modification, degree of breakage, and pattern of cut-ting, but represent what I have termed “check-list” osteology,where the data is without context. This reflects why it isimportant that bioarchaeology continues to move away fromits reliance on data collection that considers only the pres-ence or absence of taphonomic information and, in doing so,focuses on a descriptive account of the processed humanremains, largely ignoring or, at best, glossing over the manycategories of human behavior that produce such assem-blages.

If we were to simply look at the taphonomic sequencing onthe remains at the Ancestral Pueblo sites of Peñasco Blancoand La Plata, and the epiclassic site of La Quemada, wewould see considerable overlap in how the remains were cul-turally modified. However, when we layer in a more complexanalysis of the cutmarks and processing, we begin to see thatsome of the disarticulated assemblages have nothing to dowith violence and everything to do with burial rites, venera-tion, or consecration. Burial rites (unrelated to violence perse) may be occurring simultaneously with acts of violenceand intimidation.

It takes careful examination of each assemblage as part ofthe total site reconstruction to see the difference. My analy-sis of these three sites started with a detailed analysis of per-

imortem and postmortem tool-induced alterations on thehuman remains. The human remains were analyzed for pat-terns pertaining to health, trauma, and postmortem modifi-cation. Bones were then coded for the presence or absence ofcultural and noncultural taphonomic processes. The place-ment, orientation, and form of cutmarks were then used toidentify the types of tools that produced the marks, as well asto infer cultural processing as there is a direct correlationbetween tool type and mark characteristics (see Pérez et al.2008 for detailed references).

The taphonomic analysis was the first step discriminatingbetween direct forms of violence (i.e., sharp force trauma)and veneration (postmortem mortuary practices). The nextstep was to develop an explanatory model for the violencethat did not use a single disciplinary lens. This is becausesuch models are not sufficient to provide the temporal andspatial expanse or the cross-cultural analysis that an inter-disciplinary approach to the study of violence offers (Pérez2010). The theoretical framework I developed for analyzingthe violence at Peñasco Blanco, La Plata, and La Quemadauses the concept of the “politicization of the dead” (Pérez2012). This is based on the idea that the corpse is a transi-tional object for the victors and the vanquished that centerson the passage from life to death. The body is not only social-ly constructed as an object of knowledge but is also cultural-ly shaped by the actual practices and behaviors of the group.This means the manipulation of the corpse holds signifi-cance for both those committing violence to the corpse andthe community to which the corpse belongs.


Figure 2.Measurements taken of cross-sectioned replica of bone with cut-

marks to determine the maximum width and depth of the cutmark kerf.

Figure 1: Ventura R. Pérez at age

six, photo by Grant Elementary

School, Moline, Illinois


Thus, the manifestation of the physical violence exemplifiesintricate social and cultural dimensions. This is why White-head (2005:23) argues that acts of violence and warfareshould be viewed as cultural performances that may be unfa-miliar to “Western cultural experience.” His concept of thepoetics of violence is one to which I ascribe and continue tobuild on using a biocultural paradigm. I argue most of theviolence practiced in human societies is not considereddeviant behavior. In fact, it is often seen as honorable whencommitted in the service of conventional social, economic,and political norms, and this is what Galtung (1990) and oth-ers are referring as structural violence. These social and cul-tural contexts are what give violence its power and meaning.They create a normalizing force known as cultural violence.To see violence as only an aberrant behavior committed sole-ly by deviants blinds us to the role violence has and contin-ues to play in the foundation of many human societies. Thesymbolic aspects of violence have the potential to createorder and disorder depending on the specific social contextwithin which the violence is expressed. This is the apparentparadox of violent studies. Most cultures feel their safety liesin their ability to control violence with violence. While peo-ple fear and abhor violent acts they see as senseless, they aremore than willing to condone the “legitimate” use of vio-lence to promote social control and economic stability. Sluka(1992:28) refers to this apparent paradox as the dual natureof conflict. Violence and conflict often have the ability tounite, create stability, and be progressive while at the sametime generating the antithesis of these positive forces.

Bioarchaeology can be a powerful tool in deciphering thephysical alterations left on the human corpse along with thedeath space and place it occupies offers similar challenges.The presence of offerings and types of preparation of thebody can be related to politics, gender, power, and ritual. Forpopulations that practice ancestor veneration, death does notend a person’s participation in the life and activities of his orher community. Instead, it initiates a different mode of par-ticipation. The re-incorporation of the dead is often madetangible through material objects and human remains.These mortuary practices often create artifacts on the bonesthat can be misinterpreted as violent trauma. The identifica-tion of violence and trauma requires a nuanced and detailedanalysis of both material culture and human remains. Thus,for the new bioarchaeologist the examination of culturaltaphonomic indicators allowed the recognition between ven-eration and violent trauma. By placing skeletal assemblagesinto the larger cultural and environmental dynamics itbecomes possible to explore the fundamental ways in whichviolence is linked to cultural and social factors within popu-lations.

Within the research on violence, the challenges facing bioar-chaeologists include the substantial range of different defi-nitions and the equally substantial range of opinions aboutwhich definitions should carry authoritative weight. This isdue in part to the prismatic nature of violence; similaractions can have vastly different consequences in temporallyand spatially distinct cultures. It is for this reason I think itis critical to identify your positionality and to define how youwant your audience to understand your definition of vio-lence. Trauma analysis and violence theory are not mutuallyexclusive, but they are not interchangeable. As mentionedabove, the word “violence” is loaded and it should beunpacked by the researcher at the onset of his or her work.We are beginning to see cultural, structural, and direct formsof violence being used by bioarchaeologists to clarify therange of violence being seen within a given population.However, I would caution my colleagues to move beyondGaltung’s (1990) work on these concepts and to be clearabout the genealogy of the theoretical perspectives you areinfusing in your work. Specifying the genealogy of the vio-lence paradigms upon which you are drawing becomes moreimportant if you choose to nest the ideas of cultural, struc-tural, and direct violence into a system of poetics that are cul-turally and historically specific and or embedding structuralviolence within broader theoretical modeling like debt theo-ry or critical structural-Marxist theory.

Crapanzano (1986:238) noted “Violence rarely, if ever, existsin a pure form. It always has a narrative dimension.... Weplay with our stories in ways we cannot with the violenceitself.” The performance and memory of the violence beingdiscussed by bioarchaeologists are not static but are givennew life by our work. They are being shaped and are shapingthe cultural and structural violence implicit within the sys-tems in which we work. That being said, I am excited by thepromise of what is to come in violence research in bioar-chaeology.

References Cited

Armelagos, George J.2003 Bioarchaeology as Anthropology. In Archaeology Is Anthro-

pology, edited by S. D. Gillespie and Deborah L. Nichols,pp. 27–41. Archaeological Papers of the American Anthro-pological Association, No. 13. American AnthropologicalAssociation, Arlington, Virginia.

Crapanzano, Vincent1986 Waiting: The Whites of South Africa. Vintage Books, New

York.Galtung, Johan1990 Cultural Violence. Journal of Peace Research 27(3):291–305.



Pérez, Ventura R.2010 From the Editor: An Introduction to Landscapes of Vio-

lence. Landscapes of Violence 1(1):Article 1.2012 The Politicization of the Dead: Violence as Performance,

Politics as Usual. In Bioarchaeology of Violence, edited byDebra L. Martin, Ryan P. Harrod, and Ventura R. Pérez.University of Florida Press, Gainesville.

Pérez, Ventura R., B. A. Nelson, and Debra L. Martin2008 Veneration of Violence? A Study of Variations in Patterns

of Human Bone Modification at La Quemada. In SocialViolence in the Prehispanic American Southwest, edited byDeborah L. Nichols and Patricia L. Crown, pp. 123–142.University of Arizona Press, Tucson.

Sluka, Jeffrey A.1992 The Anthropology of Conflict. In The Paths to Domination,

Resistance, and Terror, edited by C. Nordstrom and J. Mar-tin, pp. 18–36. University of California Press, Berkeley.

Walker, Philip L.2001 A Bioarchaeological Perspective on the History of Vio-

lence. Annual Review of Anthropology 30:573–596.Whitehead, Neil L.2005 War and Violence as Cultural Expression. Anthropology

News 46:23–26.


sity, and David Wiley of Stratovan Corp. offered technical adviceon scanning or geometric morphometrics. Ronny Islam andMichael Kim of NextEngine provided technical advice on theoperation of ScanStudio. Mark Seeman of Kent State Universi-ty graciously loaned us the fluted-point casts used in this study.We are responsible for any errors or omissions.

Selected Citations

For a complete list of citations, please contact Michael Shott at the aboveemail.Crompton, Shirley2007 3D Lithic Analysis. Electronic document, http://epubs.

stfc.ac.uk/bitstream/1752/ CAA07Crompton_1.doc. Accessed14 May 2009.

O’Higgins, Paul, and Nicholas Jones2006 Tools for Statistical Shape Analysis. Hull York Medical School.

Electronic document, http://hyms.fme.googlepages.com/resources. Accessed 13 October 2009.

Shott, Michael J.2008 equal o nll roofht w ded l e vsbr cted: A Proposal for Conserva-

tion of Private Collections in American Archaeology. The SAAArchaeological Record 8(2):30–35.

Shott, Michael J., and Brian W. Trail2010 Exploring New Approaches to Lithic Analysis: Laser Scanning

and Geometric Morphometrics. Lithic Technology 35:195–220.Slizewski, Astrid, and Patrick Semal2008 Experiences with Low and High Cost 3D Surface Scanner.

Quartär 56:131–138.Smith, Nicholas E., and Suzanne G. Strait2008 PaleoView3D: From Specimen to Online Digital Model.

Palaeontologia Electronica 11(2). Electronic document,http://palaeo-electronica.org/2008_2/134/index/html.Accessed 17 December 2009.

SHOTT, from page 17 <

Nominations Soughtfor $10,000 J. I. Staley Prize

Send letters or inquiries to:J. I. Staley Prize

School for Advanced ResearchPO Box 2188, Santa Fe, NM 87504

staley.sarweb.org

Deadline for the 2013 prize is Oct. 1, 2012

This award recognizes innovative books in anthropology that add new dimensions to our

understanding of the human species.

Schoo l for Advanced Research

SAR


In early Neolithic Vietnam, a young man survived fromearly adolescence into adulthood completely paralysedfrom the waist down and with very limited use of his upper

body. Dependent on others for meeting his most basic needs,Burial 9’s survival was only possible because of the high-qual-ity, dedicated, and time-consuming care he received.

Looking after those who are unable to look after themselvesis a behavior that defines what it is to be human. Evidencesuggests health-related care has been practiced within thehuman family at least the last 100,000 years, and some biol-ogists even claim caregiving was essential human evolution.Certainly, our response to the health needs of others embod-ies a wealth of information about ourselves and our commu-nity, reflecting cultural norms and values; collective knowl-edge, skills and experience; social and economic organisa-tion; and, more prosaically, access to the resources that allowthe support of someone experiencing disability. It followsthat where healthcare practice can be identified in thearchaeological record, it has the potential to provide important— and possibly unique— insights into the lives ofthose under study.

This is where the bioarchaeology of care comes in.

“Bioarchaeology of care” can be employed as an umbrellaterm to include any and all bioarchaeological research intohealthcare provision. More narrowly defined, it’s a term I’veappropriated in my Ph.D. research to describe a specificmethodology I’ve developed for identifying and interpretingevidence for health-related care. In what follows I’m going todescribe this new approach.

Definitions, Qualifications and Caveats

First, some background. In archaeology, the experience ofpathology during life is expressed in human remains throughlesions in bone or anomalies in preserved soft tissue. Health-related care provision is inferred from physical evidence thatan individual survived with, or recovered from, a disease orinjury likely to have resulted in serious disability. “Care” isoperationally defined as the provision of assistance to an indi-vidual experiencing pathology who would otherwise have been

unlikely to survive to achieved age-of-death. “Disability” refersto a state (temporary or longer-term) arising from an impair-ment in body function or structure that is associated with activ-ity limitations and/or participation restrictions, and givenmeaning in relation to the lifeways in which it is experienced.

What healthcare comprised depended on the nature of dis-ability, context in which it occurred, and care recipient char-acteristics. For bioarchaeology of care research purposes,this care may be divided into “direct support” (e.g., provi-sioning, nursing, physical therapy) or “accommodation” ofdifference (e.g., strategies that enable a level of participationin social and/or economic activity). Care may begin as “sup-port” and convert to “accommodation” as an individual recov-ers (but is left with some disability)—or vice versa.

There are obvious provisos. Care can only be inferred with ref-erence to what is known about the contemporary social, cul-tural, economic, and physical environments. What constituteshealth, disease, and disability is understood very differently indifferent cultures; the bioarchaeology of care can only postu-late disability where there is evidence of significant physicalimpairment. Furthermore, everybody experiences disease intheir own way— disability for one person may not be a dis-ability (or not the same disability) for another. Assumption ofthe need for care— as well as the conclusion that care was provided— must always err on the side of caution.

Finally, the bioarchaeology of care approach can only beemployed at a case-study level— at least when dealing withskeletal remains (the focus of the rest of this article). Mostpathologies won’t ever manifest in bone, and this means thatin any prehistoric community the extent of past burden of disease— and consequently frequency of caregiving inresponse to this— must remain unknown.

Interrogating the Evidence for Care Giving: The Bioarchaeology of Care Methodology

The bioarchaeology of care methodology comprises four dis-tinct stages of analysis, each building upon the observationsand conclusions of the previous one. Although unplanned,these stages parallel those of Christopher Hawke’s famous


THE BIOARCHAEOLOGY OF CARELorna Tilley

Lorna Tilley is a Doctoral Student at the School of Archaeology and Anthropology, Australian National University.


“Ladder of Inference”—the first stage concentrating ondescription and measurement, and the last wholly dedicatedto interpretation.

All stages of the bioarchaeology of care necessarily derive fromthe set of human remains displaying evidence of disability.These remains possess the dual identity of “actor” and “arti-fact”; actor, because the skeletal elements represent a once-liv-ing person who faced the challenges of disability, and artifactbecause the skeletal indicators of disability only exist by virtueof the care that helped this person to survive long enough forthe pathology to register in bone. This reading of the bones assimultaneously signifying individual (subject) and invention(object) underpins the analysis of care in prehistory.

Stage 1 is triggered by human remains showing evidence ofliving with, or following, a serious pathology. It records everyaspect of the remains, their recovery context, and details ofcontemporary lifeways. Indicators of pathology aredescribed, and diagnosis is attempted. If specific diagnosis isimpossible, lesion characteristics may still provide clues todisease impact. The information recorded at Stage 1 is thefoundation for all subsequent analyses.

Stage 2 considers the likely clinical and functional impacts ofthe pathology on the subject. Modern clinical sources areused to assess likely clinical impacts. Human biology hasremained the same over millennia, allowing extrapolationfrom current knowledge of disease symptoms and complica-tions. Tuberculosis or a compound limb fracture elicited thesame basic physiological responses in the past as they do inthe present. Estimating functional impact looks at the likelydemands, obstacles, and opportunities in the contemporarylifeways environment, and evaluates the probable effects ofpathology symptoms on the subject’s ability to undertaketasks of daily living, or to participate in their community,without assistance. The goal of the second stage is to estab-lish whether, on balance of probability, the individual experi-enced a disability requiring either “direct support” or“accommodation” in order to survive. If the answer is yes,then we infer care.

Stage 3 identifies what— in broad terms— this care likelycomprised. The goal is to produce a “model of care” withinthe parameters of the possible and the probable given thecontemporary context. This model also considers how manypeople may have been involved in caregiving (in small groupscare likely involved most members, to compensate forincreased resource demands and/or reduced economic con-tribution of caregivers) and duration of care-provision. Thefine details of care will always be inaccessible. For example, inany particular case we can’t know whether herbal remedieswere used, or whether caregiving required prayers, spells, orexorcism. But basic practices don’t change. Haemorrhagesmust be staunched; bedridden individuals kept well-nour-ished, clean, comfortable, and regularly repositioned to aidcirculation and prevent pressure sores; people with high feverkept hydrated. Often the more practical components of treat-ment can be deduced with some confidence from knowledgeof the likely clinical and functional impacts of disease.

Stage 4 unpacks and interprets the model of care developedover the first three stages. It explores what the constituent elements— singly or in combination— suggest both aboutcontemporary social practice and social relations and aboutgroup and individual (care-recipient) identity.

While each case of care is unique, there is a fundamentalprinciple to be observed in all cases of health-related care:recognition that care is the product of agency. Caregiving isan intentional, goal-directed response to a perceived healthcrisis, and often consists of complex, interrelated, continu-ously refined and negotiated behaviors carried out over time.The decisions reached in relation to giving and receiving carehold the key to interpretation, and Stage 4 focuses on thelikely choices made (and aspects of identity underlyingthese) that contributed to achieving the care outcomesobserved in the skeletal remains under study.

In relation to caregiving, questions might consider, for exam-ple, what options were likely available for caring, whichappear to have been adopted, and why; comparison of thepotential costs and benefits of choices available and thoseselected; what the ability to provide care suggests aboutgroup organization, practice, and history; and what the deci-sion to give care, as well as the type and extent of care given,suggest about general norms and values of the group.

In relation to receipt of care, a picture is drawn of what, with-in that lifeways context, the likely “normal” role of someonefrom the same demographic as the care-recipient may havebeen. What was the likely impact of disability on the care-recipient’s ability to fulfil this role? What alternative roleswere available? What sort of personality characteristicsmight have been needed to manage pathology-imposed limitations— and what sort of personality might have


Figure 1: Lorna at Kuelap


inspired others to support or accommodate this particularindividual’s needs, possibly in difficult circumstances?Attempting to identify characteristics of a person knownonly through their bones is speculation, but it’s speculationbased on a solid platform of reasoning. There is little as inti-mate as the experience of disability. We can never know withcertainty how a prehistoric individual coped, but in cases ofextreme disability we might be able to infer some broad char-acter traits and behavioral strategies that were called upon.

Figure 2 illustrates the bioarchaeology of care methodologyin action, using the example of the young man from Neolith-ic Vietnam introduced earlier. Although abbreviated, it givessome idea of the information available from the remains ofsomeone who lived with disability (see Tilley and Oxenham2011 for detail).

What Next— And Why?

In the bioarchaeological literature there are many cases ofsurvival with disability. For example, the NeandertalShanidar 1 survived cranial trauma, amputation of the rightarm, various other injuries and osteomyelitis (Trinkaus andZimmerman 1982)—suggesting “support” during acuteinjury and “accommodation” afterwards. Born with amesomelic form of dwarfism, Romito 2 survived in moun-tainous, Mesolithic Calabria (Frayer et al. 1987); his remainsdisplay upper and lower limb abnormalities rendering “nor-mal” male hunter-gatherer activity impossible— suggesting“accommodation.” In the early Italian Neolithic a womansurvived for years with the increasingly savage effects oftuberculosis (Canci et al. 1996), impacts of which includepulmonary haemorrhage, respiratory infection, fever, pain,and finally, in this instance, spinal disintegration resulting inreduction or loss of lower body mobility— suggesting initial“accommodation” followed by “support.”

In some studies the likelihood of care is briefly acknowl-edged, although not elaborated. But in most it’s ignored, andvaluable information is lost. Wherever evidence in humanremains meets the criteria for inferring care, there is a rolefor a bioarchaeology of care analysis.

Our knowledge of what happened in prehistory will alwaysbe partial. When we focus on issues such as care, which areintrinsically emotive, value-laden, and ultimately reliant oninterpretation, it will also be contentious. However, thebioarchaeology of care methodology provides a structured,systematic, and transparent framework for analysis,enabling inference and interpretation to be scrutinized, chal-lenged, and— where appropriate— changed.

Equally important, a bioarchaeology of care focus opens theway to a level of engagement with prehistory that helps us to

meet our responsibilities, as archaeologists, to (re)producethe past in a way that captures the complexity, the sophisti-cation, and the humanity of those who have gone before. Inthis case, the focus on caregiving in the past also provides anew perspective for looking at the meaning and practice ofthis behavior in the present.

References Cited

Canci, Alessandro, Simona Minozzi, and S. M. Borgognini Tarli1996 New Evidence of Tuberculous Spondylitis from Neolithic

Liguria (Italy). International Journal of Osteoarchaeology6(5):497–501.

Frayer, David W., William A. Horton, Roberto Macchiarelli, andMargherita Mussi

1987 Dwarfism in an Adolescent from the Italian late UpperPalaeolithic. Nature 330:60–62.

Tilley, Lorna, and Marc F. Oxenham2011 Survival Against the Odds: Modeling the social implica-

tions of care provision to seriously disabled individuals.International Journal of Paleopathology 1(1):35–42.

Trinkaus, Erik, and M. R. Zimmerman1982 Trauma among the Shanidar Neandertals. American Jour-

nal of Physical Anthropology 57(1):61–76.


Figure 2: The four stages of the bioarchaeology of care methodology

applied to the case of a young man from Neolithic Vietnam who lived

with quadriplegia.


Settling in a new land with different landscapes andfood choices, strange customs, and unfamiliar peoplecan be an overwhelming experience filled with chal-

lenges and opportunities, and this holds true for immigrantsof today and the distant past. My father, who emigrated fromChina as a young adult, along with his mother and siblings,tells of sailing under the Golden Gate Bridge on Thanksgiv-ing Day in 1951. Friends met them at the port and took themto a traditional Thanksgiving dinner— turkey, potatoes, pies,the works. “America really is the land of plenty!” To their cha-grin, they eventually learned that Americans didn’t feast likethat every day, but they were still overwhelmed by the newfoods. Over time, my family’s diets and palates changed, andso too did the chemical make-up of their bones. Thoughundetected by them, their strontium, carbon, and nitrogenisotope ratios were changing by virtue of their newly con-sumed food and drink. Fortunately for bioarchaeologists, wecan detect dietary changes through isotope testing and usethat information to identify immigrants at archaeology sitesand examine how immigrants differed from locals in termsof health and lived experience.

Throughout time, immigration and forcible relocation, as inslavery, abductions, and human trafficking (see Martin andOsterholtz, this issue) has led to major transformations indemography and cultural practices for both local and nonlo-cal groups, and it can contribute to new kinds of hierarchies.These can lead to very different life experiences and healthoutcomes for the foreigners and locals. Thus, a goal of abioarchaeological study of migration (and foreigners, moregenerally) is to explore how that “outsider” status may haveshaped one’s heath. Did outsiders suffer poorer health rela-tive to the locals? My aunt, for example, suffered from tuber-culosis shortly after her arrival to the U.S. and was placed ina tuberculosis sanitarium where she eventually recovered.She likely contracted the disease on the crowded 19-dayocean journey in the bottom level of the ship. That particularimmigrant experience shaped other aspects of her health,

both short and long term. Did immigrants of the distant pastalso have greater risks for disease? How else did their expe-riences differ from the locals? And importantly, how can wedetect immigrants in a skeletal sample?

Trophy Heads and Strontium Isotope Analysis

I became interested in using bioarchaeological techniques toidentify foreigners and examine their health profile in mystudy of the Wari Empire (A.D. 600–1000) from the central,highland Peruvian Andes. I, along with my colleague KellyKnudson, used strontium isotope analysis to determinewhether human trophy heads from the site of Conchopatawere local or foreign (Tung and Knudson 2011). Wari iconog-raphy depicted Wari warriors carrying trophy heads, but itwas unclear if they were the heads of (local) venerated ances-tors or foreign enemies (Figure 1).

Before I describe our findings, I briefly explain some basictenets of strontium isotope analysis, which is a techniquethat can help establish whether a person is from the areawhere they were buried (i.e., local or foreign). Various levelsof strontium isotopes are found in different types and agesof bedrock, and because those vary in the Andes (and otherworld regions), we can estimate whether a person grew up ina particular geological zone. The ratio between 87Sr and thestable 86Sr (87Sr/86Sr) is constant as it moves through thefood chain. Thus, the bedrock and soil, the plants grown inthat soil, and the animals and humans that eat those plantsall have the same strontium isotope ratio. As Douglas Priceand colleagues (Price et al. 1994) first demonstrated in theirstudy of a Southwest population at Grasshopper Pueblo, thismakes it an ideal technique for determining whether an indi-vidual is from a particular region. If the strontium isotoperatio obtained from a skeleton is distinct from that of thelocal area, then the person is likely a foreigner.

Local strontium isotope ratios can be determined by testing


THE BIOARCHAEOLOGY OF MIGRATIONTiffiny Tung

Tiffiny A. Tung is a Professor at the Department of Anthropology, Vanderbilt University.


local soils and archaeological samples of local small animalsthat don’t range far and wide (i.e., they eat only locally grownfoods). Comparing the strontium isotope ratio in teeth andbones provides further distinctions, revealing whether child-hood was spent in one locale and adulthood in another.

Because teeth form in the early years, the strontium (andother) isotopes from a child’s food source are forever“locked” into the dental enamel. In contrast, bone is con-stantly remodeling, so strontium isotope ratios obtainedfrom bone reveal the geological locale of one’s food source inthe last few to 10 years of life, depending on which bone issampled. My father, for example, should have strontium iso-tope ratios in his teeth that match the soils of their familyfarm near Chongqing in Sichuan province, China, and hisbones should reveal the mixed source of foods in his adultdiet.

At the Wari site, we determined the local strontium isotoperatio with local soil and local, modern guinea pigs that con-sumed local foods. Results showed that the burials underhouse structures were local— as expected— and that the vastmajority of trophy heads from ritual structures were foreign.

This, along with iconographic data that depicted Wari war-riors carrying bound prisoners and trophy heads, furtherconfirmed that the trophy heads were foreign captivesbrought back to the site for sacrifice and transformation into

war trophies. After identifying the locals and foreigners,questions about differences in health profiles and exposureto violence could be addressed. The mostly foreign trophyheads exhibited slightly more violence-related cranial traumathan did the locals and significantly more cribra orbitalia, alesion on the orbital roof indicative of general physiologicalstress (Tung 2012). This suggested that these two groups,who differed by place of origin, had quite distinct lifeways.

Body Modification and Strontium Isotope Analysis

In some regions, the study of body modification practicescan be used to differentiate locals and foreigners. My great-aunt was an obvious foreigner— her tiny, bound feet markedher, and many other Chinese women, as foreign-born in theBay Area where many Chinese settled. In the ancient Andes,it was the head, not the feet, which visibly marked people’splace of origin. At the urban center of Tiwanaku in highlandBolivia, occupied in the sixth to eleventh centuries A.D.,Deborah Blom identified nonlocals based on cranial modifi-cation styles (Blom 2005). Reshaping of the skull must occurin infancy when the bones are malleable, so this bodily


Figure 1: Wari warriors wearing trophy heads appear on enormous

ceramic vessels from ritual buildings at Conchopata. It was unclear

whether the trophy head was from a local venerated ancestor or a foreign

enemy until strontium isotope analysis was conducted.

Figure 2: Students who collaborate with Tiffiny Tung are preparing den-

tal enamel samples in the Isotope Laboratory in the Department of

Earth and Environmental Sciences at Vanderbilt University. Students

are Jasmine Kelly (Martin Luther King Jr. High School) and Jared

Sninsky (Vanderbilt University).


marker of identity was imposed early in life by parents orother community members, forever marking one’s culturalaffiliation. Blom found that local, highland populations elon-gated the skull, making it slope upward, while nonlocals flat-tened the skull from front to back (known as fronto-occipitalmodification), and both types were observed at Tiwanaku,suggesting that it was a cosmopolitan center with diversepopulations residing there (or at least being buried there).

Blom’s findings were further tested by Kelly Knudson andcolleagues (Knudson et al. 2004) using strontium isotopeanalysis, which showed that three out of ten sampled indi-viduals were foreign (Knudson et al. 2004). However, allthree had been previously identified as dedicatory offeringsbased on associated artifacts and their burial in a ceremoni-al complex (Couture and Sampeck 2003). Thus, it is unclearwhether they represent voluntary migrants who settled at theurban center and assimilated into Tiwanaku society orwhether they were people or ancestral mummy bundlesabducted specifically for use as dedicatory offerings.Nonetheless, the cranial modification and strontium isotopedata show that Tiwanaku was an urban and ceremonial cen-ter used by people from diverse areas, in some cases as a newresidential destination and for others as a final mortuary andceremonial resting place.

Patrilocality vs. Matrilocality

Bioarchaeological techniques can also be used to investigategender-based migration patterns. If sex-based differences inmigration are detected, then it may be possible to recon-struct community organization as it relates to rules of mar-riage. At Conchopata, mentioned above, the strontium iso-

tope ratios from the “normal burials” (i.e., not trophy heads)showed that men and women were local, suggesting region-al endogamy.

Across the globe, at a Late Stone Age (~4,500 years ago) sitenear Eulau, Germany, Wolfgang Haak and colleagues (Haaket al. 2008) found that male and child burials had strontiumisotope ratios expected for the local region, while the adultfemales did not. Thus, they suggest that this group practicedexogamy, and that they were patrilocal: nonlocal femalesmoved to the male’s residence and then had and raised chil-dren in the local area. This would explain why the males andchildren had local strontium isotope ratios and the femalesdid not.

I, along with my colleague Steve Wernke, are examining sim-ilar research questions at an Inka and early Spanish colonialsite in southern, highland Peru, where male and femaleburials have been excavated from Inka-era burial towers(A.D. 1450–1532) and a colonial chapel (A.D. 1540–1575)(Figure 4). The two waves of colonialism— first Inka, then Spanish— may have altered marriage practices in thatperipheral region.


Figure 3: The ritual room from where human trophy heads were recov-

ered at the Wari site of Conchopata, Peru.

Figure 4: Tiffiny Tung excavating human burials at the Inka and early

Spanish colonial site of Malata in southern, highland Peru.


Modern Applications of the Bioarchaeology of Migration

According to the Pew Hispanic Center, there were an esti-mated 11.2 million people identified as “illegal immigrants”in the U.S. in 2010. Sadly, many people die trying to enter theU.S. without detection, whether on crowded ships from Asiaor crossing the desert from Mexico. Those who die at theMexico-U.S. border are often unidentified, their bodies neverclaimed. The majority come from Latin America, especiallyMexico, and bioarchaeological techniques are helping toidentify those unclaimed corpses. While DNA testing is onemethod of identification, it requires that family membersreveal that a loved one attempted to cross the border and thatthey give a sample for DNA testing, requirements that leavemany silent. Strontium isotope analysis, in contrast, can beused to narrow down the regions from where a migrantcame without asking family members to identify themselvesor necessarily give bio-specimens. Chelsey Juarez (Juarez2008) has been creating a modern strontium isotope map ofMexico by analyzing teeth of Mexican immigrants whosebirth locations are known, and she has identified three dis-tinct regions thus far: (1) Mexico City; (2) Jalisco and Guana-juato; and (3) Michoacan. She then examines the strontiumisotope ratios of teeth from corpses found at the border tosee if they match any of the known regions in Mexico. As shecontinues to document the strontium isotope ratios fromother regions in Mexico and Latin America, her work is pro-viding an important first step in identifying a deceased per-son’s place of origin. This will increase the likelihood of apositive identification, so once-unidentified bodies can berepatriated to the family for mourning and proper burialrites.

In the investigation of migration patterns in the past andpresent, bioarchaeological methods provide reliable ways todetect the movement of people across the landscape. Thesestudies can then help to clarify our understandings of whatmotivates a person to leave a land with known kith and kinfor a strange, new place filled with odd customs, unintelligi-ble languages, and total strangers. Although that journeymay sometimes lead to death, violence, or a compromisedstate of health, problems in one’s homeland and/or theallure of novel economic opportunities, possible marriagepartner, among other benefits, have and will continue tomotivate people to migrate to new lands.

References Cited

Blom, Deborah E.2005 Embodying Borders: Human Body Modification and

Diversity in Tiwanaku Society. Journal of AnthropologicalArchaeology 24(1):1-24.

Couture, N., and K. Sampeck2003 Putuni: A History of Palace Architecture at Tiwanaku. In

Tiwanaku and Its Hinterland: Archaeology and Paleoecologyof an Andean Civilization, edited by Alan L. Kolata, pp.226-263. Urban and rural archaeology. vol. 2. SmithsonianInstitution Press, Washington, D.C.

Haak, Wolfgang, Guido. Brandt, Hylke N. de Jong, ChristianMeyer, Robert Ganslmeier, Volker Heyd, ChrisHawkesworth, Alistair W. G. Pike, Harold Meller, andKurt W. Alt

2008 Ancient DNA, Strontium Isotopes, and OsteologicalAnalyses Shed Light on Social and Kinship Organizationof the Later Stone Age. Proceedings of the National Academyof Science 105(47):18226-18231.

Juarez, Chelsey2008 Strontium and Geolocation, the Pathway to Identification

for Deceased Undocumented Mexican Border-Crossers: APreliminary Report. Journal of Forensic Science 53(1):46-49.

Knudson, K., J., T. D. Price, J. E. Buikstra and D. Blom, E.2004 The Use Of Strontium Isotope Analysis To Investigate

Tiwanaku Migration And Mortuary Ritual in Bolivia andPeru. Archaeometry 46:5-18.

Price, T. Douglas, Clark M. Johnson, Joseph A. Ezzo, JonathanEricson, and James H. Burton.

1994 Residential Mobility in the Prehistoric Southwest UnitedStates: A Preliminary Study Using Strontium IsotopeAnalysis. Journal of Archaeological Science 21:315–330.

Tung, Tiffiny A.2012 Violence, Ritual, and the Wari Empire: A Social Bioarchaeol-

ogy of Imperialism in the Ancient Andes. University Press ofFlorida, Gainesville.

Tung, Tiffiny A., and Kelley J. Knudson2011 Identifying Locals, Migrants, and Captives in the Wari

Heartland: A Bioarchaeological and Biogeochemical Studyof Human Remains from Conchopata, Peru. Journal ofAnthropological Archaeology 30:247–261.


New Directions in Bioarchaeology

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