Books in the Bioarchaeology and Social Theory series

This is particularly topical because there is a burgeoning awareness within anthropology regarding the centrality of mother-infant interactions for understanding the evolution of our species, infant and maternal health and care strategies, epigenetic change, and biological and social development.

This book explores how individuals, social groups, and entire populations are impacted by the tumultuous collapse of ancient states and empires.

This volume centers on the application of social theory to commingled remains with special focus on the cultural processes that create the assemblages as a way to better understand issues of meaning, social structure and interaction, and lived experience in the past.

This volume features bioarchaeological research that interrogates the human skeleton in concert with material culture, ethnographic data and archival research.

New Developments in the Bioarchaeology of Care evaluates, refines and expands existing concepts and practices in the developing field of bioarchaeological research into health-related care provision in the past.Evidence in human remains that indicates an individual survived with, or following, a serious pathology suggests this person most likely received some form of care from others. This observation was first made half a century ago, but it is only in the last five years that health-related caregiving has been accepted as a topic for bioarchaeology research. In this time, interest has grown exponentially. A focus on care provides a dynamic framework for examining the experiences of disease and disability in the past - at the level of the individual receiving care, and that of the community providing it. When caregiving can be identified in the archaeological record, bioarchaeologists may be able to offer unique insights into aspects of past lifeways.This volume represents the work of an international, diverse, cross-disciplinary group of contributors, each bringing their own particular focus, style and expertise to analyzing past health-related care. Nineteen chapters offer content that ranges from an introduction to the basic 'bioarchaeology of care' approach, through original case studies of care provision, to new theoretical perspectives in this emerging area of scholarship. This book creates a synergy that challenges our thinking about past health-related care behaviors and about the implications of these behaviors for understanding the social environment in which they took place.

The authors employ a wide range of perspectives, demonstrating how bioarchaeological evidence can be used to address a wide range of themes including social identity and marginalization, racialization, the nature of the body and fragmentation, and the emergence of medical practice and authority in the United States.

This volume will examine the varied roles that women and children play in period of warfare, which in most cases deviate from their perceived role as noncombatants. Using social theory about the nature of sex, gender and age in thinking about vulnerabilities to different groups during warfare, this collection of studies focuses on the broader impacts of war both during warfare but also long after the conflict is over.The volume will show that during periods of violence and warfare, many suffer beyond those individuals directly involved in battle. From pre-Hispanic Peru to Ming dynasty Mongolia to the Civil War-era United States to the present, warfare has been and is a public health disaster, particularly for women and children. Individuals and populations suffer from displacement, sometimes permanently, due to loss of food and resources and an increased risk of contracting communicable diseases, which results from the poor conditions and tight spaces present in most refugee camps, ancient and modern.Bioarchaeology can provide a more nuanced lens through which to examine the effects of warfare on life, morbidity, and mortality, bringing individuals not traditionally considered by studies of warfare and prolonged violence into focus. Inclusion of these groups in discussions of warfare can increase our understanding of not only the biological but also the social meaning and costs of warfare.

This volume has three goals: The first goal of this edited volume is to present theoretical and methodological discussions on impairment and disability. The second goal of this volume is to emphasize the necessity of interdisciplinarity in discussions of impairment and disability within bioarchaeology.

As scholars have by now long contended, global neoliberalism and the violence associated with state restructuring provide key frameworks for understanding flows of people across national boundaries and, eventually, into the treacherous terrains of the United States borderlands. The proposed volume builds on this tradition of situating migration and migrant death within broad, systems-level frameworks of analysis, but contends that there is another, perhaps somewhat less tidy, but no less important sociopolitical story to be told here. Through examination of how forensic scientists define, navigate, and enact their work at the frontiers of US policy and economics, this book joins a robust body of literature dedicated to bridging social theory with bioarchaeological applications to modern day problems. This volume is based on deeply and critically reflective analyses, submitted by individual scholars, wherein they navigate and position themselves as social actors embedded within and, perhaps partially constituted by, relations of power, cultural ideologies, and the social structures characterizing this moment in history.Each contribution addresses a different variation on themes of power relations, production of knowledge, and reflexivity in practice. In sum, however, the chapters of this book trace relationships between institutions, entities, and individuals comprising the landscapes of migrant death and repatriation and considers their articulation with sociopolitical dynamics of the neoliberal state.

This book examines how the shifts in the early 19th century in New York City affected children in particular. What emerges are life histories of children-of infants, toddlers, younger children, older children, and adolescents-during this time of transition in New York City.

Bioarchaeologists who study human remains in ancient, historic and contemporary settings are securely anchored within anthropology as anthropologists, yet they have not taken on the pundits the way other subdisciplines within anthropology have.

Foreword.- Chapter 1. A Bioarchaeology of Purposeful Pain.- Part 1. No Pain, No Gain: Ideals of Beauty and Success.- Chapter 2. Fashionable but Debilitating Diseases: Tuberculosis Past and Present.- Chapter 3. Bound to Please: The Shaping of Female Beauty, Gender Theory, Structural Violence, and Bioarchaeological Investigations.- Chapter 4. Meaningful Play, Meaningful Pain: Learning the Purpose of Injury in Sport.- Part 2. Rituals of Pain and Practice.- Chapter 5. Pious Pain: Repetitive Motion Disorders from Excessive Genuflection at a Byzantine Jerusalem Monastery.- Chapter 6. Bioarchaeology of Therapeutic Tattoos: The Case of the Iceman.- Chapter 7. Intentionally Modified Teeth Among the Vikings - Was it Painful?.- Chapter 8. "I Thought I Was Going to Die": Examining Experiences of Childbirth Pain Through Bioarchaeological and Ethnographic Perspectives.- Chapter 9. The Purposeful Pain of Drug Addiction: A Biocultural Approach.- Part 3. The Politics of Pain: Power and Social Control.- Chapter 10. The Politics of Pain: Gaining Status and Maintaining Order Through Ritual Combat and Warfare.- Chapter 11. Pain as Power: Pain as a Mechanism for Social Control.- Chapter 12. Binding, Wrapping, Constricting, and Constraining the Head: A Consideration of Cranial Vault Modification and the Pain of Infants.- Chapter 13. Performing Identity and Revealing Structures of Violence Through Purposeful Pain.- Index.

This is particularly topical because there is a burgeoning awareness within anthropology regarding the centrality of mother-infant interactions for understanding the evolution of our species, infant and maternal health and care strategies, epigenetic change, and biological and social development.