This volume uses osteobiography and individual-level analyses of burials retrieved from the La Plata River Valley (New Mexico) to illustrate the variety of roles that Ancestral Pueblo women played in the past (circa AD 1100-1300). The experiences of women as a result of their gender, age, and status over the life course are reconstructed, with consideration given to the gendered forms of violence they were subject to and the consequences of social violence on health. The authors demonstrate the utility of a modern bioarchaeological approach that combines social theories about gender and violence with burial data in conjunction with information from many other sources-including archaeological reconstruction of homes and communities, ethnohistoric resources available on Pueblo society, and Pueblo women's contemporary voices. This analysis presents a more accurate, nuanced, and complex picture of life in the past for mothers, sisters, wives, and, captives.

Evidence amassed in Troubled Times indicates that, much like in the modern world, violence was not an uncommon aspect of prehistoric dispute resolution. From the civilizations of the American Southwest to the Mesolithic of Central Europe, the contributors examine violence in hunter-gatherer as well as state societies from both the New and Old Worlds.
Drawing upon cross-cultural analyses, archaeological data, and skeletal remains, this collection of papers offers evidence of domestic violence, homicide, warfare, cannibalism, and ritualized combat among ancient peoples. Beyond the physical evidence, various models and explanations for violence in the past are explored.

Evidence amassed in Troubled Times indicates that, much like in the modern world, violence was not an uncommon aspect of prehistoric dispute resolution. From the civilizations of the American Southwest to the Mesolithic of Central Europe, the contributors examine violence in hunter-gatherer as well as state societies from both the New and Old Worlds.
Drawing upon cross-cultural analyses, archaeological data, and skeletal remains, this collection of papers offers evidence of domestic violence, homicide, warfare, cannibalism, and ritualized combat among ancient peoples. Beyond the physical evidence, various models and explanations for violence in the past are explored.

Every year, there are over 1.6 million violent deaths worldwide, making violence one of the leading public health issues of our time. And with the 20th century just behind us, it's hard to forget that 191 million people lost their lives directly or indirectly through conflict. This collection of engaging case studies on violence and violent deaths reveals how violence is reconstructed from skeletal and contextual information. By sharing the complex methodologies for gleaning scientific data from human remains and the context they are found in, and complementary perspectives for examining violence from both past and contemporary societies, bioarchaeology and forensic anthropology prove to be fundamentally inseparable. This book provides a model for training forensic anthropologists and bioarchaeologists, not just in the fundamentals of excavation and skeletal analysis, but in all subfields of anthropology, to broaden their theoretical and practical approach to dealing with everyday violence.

Every year, there are over 1.6 million violent deaths worldwide, making violence one of the leading public health issues of our time. And with the 20th century just behind us, it's hard to forget that 191 million people lost their lives directly or indirectly through conflict. This collection of engaging case studies on violence and violent deaths reveals how violence is reconstructed from skeletal and contextual information. By sharing the complex methodologies for gleaning scientific data from human remains and the context they are found in, and complementary perspectives for examining violence from both past and contemporary societies, bioarchaeology and forensic anthropology prove to be fundamentally inseparable. This book provides a model for training forensic anthropologists and bioarchaeologists, not just in the fundamentals of excavation and skeletal analysis, but in all subfields of anthropology, to broaden their theoretical and practical approach to dealing with everyday violence.

This volume integrates data from researchers in bioarchaeology and forensic anthropology to explain when and why group-targeted violence occurs. Massacres have plagued both ancient and modern societies, and by analyzing skeletal remains from these events within their broader cultural and historical contexts this volume opens up important new understandings of the underlying social processes that continue to lead to these tragedies. In case studies that include Crow Creek in South Dakota, Khmer Rouge-era Cambodia, the Peruvian Andes, and northern Uganda, contributors demonstrate that massacres are a process?a nonrandom pattern of events that precede the acts of violence and continue long afterward. They also show how massacres have varying aims and are driven by culture-specific forces and logic, ranging from small events to cases of genocide. Many of these studies examine bones found in mass graves, while others focus on victims whose bodies have never been buried. Notably, the volume expands widely held definitions of massacres to include structural violence, featuring the radical argument that the large-scale death of undocumented migrants in Arizona's Sonoran Desert should be viewed as an extended massacre. This volume is the first to focus exclusively on massacres as a unique form of violence. Its interdisciplinary approach illuminates similarities in human behavior across time and space, provides methods for identifying killings as massacres, and helps today's societies learn from patterns of the past. A volume in the series Bioarchaeological Interpretations of the Human Past: Local, Regional, and Global Perspectives, edited by Clark Spencer Larsen.

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 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.

Commingled and Disarticulated Human Remains:Working Toward Improved Theory, Method, and Data brings together research that provides innovative methodologies for the analysis of commingled human remains. It has temporal and spatial breadth, with case studies coming from pre-state to historic periods, as well as from both the New and Old World. Highlights of this volume include: standardizes methods and presents best practices in the field using a case study approach demonstrates how data gathered from commingled human remains can be incorporated into the overall interpretation of a site explores best way to formulate population size, using commingled remains Field archaeologists, bioarchaeologists, academic anthropologists, forensic anthropologists, zoo archaeologists, and students of anthropology and archaeology will find this to be an invaluable resource.

"The tragedies of violence have seldom been told with such a compelling use of the biocultural perspective. Building on a solid methodological foundation, we are served theoretical perspectives that are unusually rich and nuanced in their application to the case studies. This collection of case studies is a valuable contribution to the bioarchaeological literature."--George Armelagos, Emory University Human violence is an inescapable aspect of our society and culture. As the archaeological record clearly shows, this has always been true. What is its origin? What role does it play in shaping our behavior? How do ritual acts and cultural sanctions make violence acceptable? These and other questions are addressed by the contributors to "The Bioarchaeology of Violence." Organized thematically, the volume opens by laying the groundwork for new theoretical approaches that move beyond interpretation; it then examines case studies from small-scale conflict to warfare to ritualized violence. Experts on a wide range of ancient societies highlight the meaning and motivation of past uses of violence, revealing how violence often plays an important role in maintaining and suppressing the challenges to the status quo, and how it is frequently a performance meant to be witnessed by others. The interesting and nuanced insights offered in this volume explore both the costs and the benefits of violence throughout human prehistory. Debra L. Martin, Lincy professor of anthropology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, is coeditor of "Troubled Times: Violence and Warfare in the Past." Ryan P. Harrod is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. Ventura R. Perez is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and editor-in-chief of the online journal "Landscapes of Violence."

The goal of this monograph is to emphasize with empirical data the complexity of the relationship between climate change and violence. Bioarchaeology is the integration of human skeletal remains from ancient societies with the cultural and environmental context. Information on mortality, disease, diet and other factors provide important data to examine long chronologies of human existence, particularly during periods of droughts and life-threatening climate changes. Case studies are used to reconstruct the responses and short and long-term adaptations made by groups before, during and after dramatic changes in weather and climate. Interpersonal and group violence is also analyzed. The authors find that while in some cases there is an increase in trauma and violence, in other cases there is not. Human groups are capable of avoiding violent altercations and increasing broad networks of cooperation that help to mitigate the effects of climate change. A case study from the U.S. Southwest is provided that shows the variable and surprising ways that ancient farmers in the past dealt with long term droughts.

Commingled and Disarticulated Human Remains:Working Toward Improved Theory, Method, and Data brings together research that provides innovative methodologies for the analysis of commingled human remains. It has temporal and spatial breadth, with case studies coming from pre-state to historic periods, as well as from both the New and Old World. Highlights of this volume include: standardizes methods and presents best practices in the field using a case study approach demonstrates how data gathered from commingled human remains can be incorporated into the overall interpretation of a site explores best way to formulate population size, using commingled remains Field archaeologists, bioarchaeologists, academic anthropologists, forensic anthropologists, zoo archaeologists, and students of anthropology and archaeology will find this to be an invaluable resource.

Bioarchaeology is the analysis of human remains within an interpretative framework, including a wide range of contextual information. This comprehensive and much-needed manual provides both a starting point and a reference for archaeologists working in this integrative field. The authors cover a range of bioarchaeological methods and theory including: * Ethical issues involved in dealing with human remains, specifically related to NAGPRA * Field and taphonomic clues * Lab and Forensic techniques * Best practices methods for Excavation techniques * Special applications of Bioarchaeology * Theoretical frameworks of Bioarchaeology With case studies from over twenty years each of bioarchaeological research, the authors integrate theoretical and methodological discussion with a wide range of field studies, from different geographic areas, time periods, and data types, to demonstrate the full scope of this important field of study.

Frontiers and territorial borders are places of contested power where societies collide, interact, and interconnect. Using bioanthropological case studies from around the world, this volume explores how people in the past created, maintained, or changed their identities while living on the edge between two or more different spheres of influence. Essays in this volume examine borderland settings in cultural contexts that include Roman Egypt, Iron Age Italy, eleventh-century Iceland, and the precontact American Great Basin and Southwest. Contributors look at isotope data, skeletal stress markers, craniometric and dental metric information, mortuary arrangements, and other evidence to examine how frontier life can affect health and socioeconomic status. Illustrating the many meanings and definitions of frontiers and borderlands, they question assumptions about the relationships between people, place, and identity. As national borders continue to ignite controversy in today's society and politics, the research presented here is more important than ever. The long history of people who have lived in borderland areas helps us understand the challenges of adapting to these dynamic and often violent places. A volume in the series Bioarchaeological Interpretations of the Human Past: Local, Regional, and Global Perspectives, edited by Clark Spencer Larsen

Injury recidivism is a continuing health problem in the modern clinical setting and has been part of medical literature for some time. However, it has been largely absent from forensic and bioarchaeological scholarship, despite the fact that practitioners work closely with skeletal remains and, in many cases, skeletal trauma. The contributors to this edited collection seek to close this gap by exploring the role that injury recidivism and accumulative trauma plays in bioarchaeological and forensic contexts. Case examples from prehistoric, historic, and modern settings are included to highlight the avenues through which injury recidivism can be studied and analyzed in skeletal remains and to illustrate the limitations of studying injury recidivism in deceased populations.

Bioarchaeology is the analysis of human remains within an interpretative framework that includes contextual information. This comprehensive and much-needed manual provides both a starting point and a reference for archaeologists, bioarchaeologists and others working in this integrative field. The authors cover a range of bioarchaeological methods and theory including: Ethical issues involved in dealing with human remains Theoretical approaches in bioarchaeology Techniques in taphonomy and bone analysis Lab and forensic techniques for skeletal analysis Best practices for excavation techniques Special applications in bioarchaeology With case studies from bioarchaeological research, the authors integrate theoretical and methodological discussion with a wide range of field studies from different geographic areas, time periods, and data types, to demonstrate the full scope of this important field of study.