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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. Lorna Tilley came to archaeology with an honours degree in psychology and work experience in areas of health practice, health status and health outcomes assessment, and health policy development. She has been sole or primary author of several articles on the bioarchaeology of care approach; the first of these Tilley and Oxenham was awarded Most Influential Paper by the International Journal of Paleopathology in April She has co-organized a symposium focusing on the Index of Care and furthering Bioarchaeology of Care methodology at the Society for American Archaeology Annual Meeting.
She has recently published research on an year old female with paraplegia from Bronze Age Tell Abraq, using isotopic analysis to give a perspective on the role that immigration and mobility may have on increased risk of disease and healthcare Differential diagnosis of a progressive neuromuscular disorder using bioarchaeological and biogeochemical evidence from a bronze age skeleton in the UAE. Her research interests include paleopathology, bioarchaeology of care, the Index of Care, subadult health, and mortuary practices.
The Bioarchaeology of Individuals (Bioarchaeological Interpretations of the Human Past: Local, Regional, and Global) Paperback – July 15, Stodder is a research associate in anthropology at the Field Museum. Ann M. Palkovich is associate professor emerita of anthropology at. The Bioarchaeology of Individuals (Bioarchaeological Interpretations of the Human Past: Local, Regional, and Global) () on giuliettasprint.konfer.eu *FREE *.
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Provides content that stimulates wide discussion and experimentation around the topic of health-related caregiving in the past Includes primary research and reflective commentary and theory development on all aspects of past caregiving Discusses the development of collaborative and cross-disciplinary research projects see more benefits.
Posted by Kristina Killgrove November 02, Traditionally, skeletal analysis in search of answers about human lives has fallen into two camps: the study of populations is the purview of bioarchaeologists, who want to know more about life in the past, and the study of individuals is the purview of forensic anthropologists, who want to put a name with the set of bones they have in front of them. This line has started to blur over the last few years in that bioarchaeologists are realizing they can craft stories of individual lives from the vast array of methods and techniques available to the 21st century researcher.
Osteobiography has become a hot topic, and many bioarchaeologists are using the data they generate from a skeleton to humanize the past, to sprinkle stories about daily life in with their more science-y charts and graphs. What's key about the technique of osteobiography, though, is that there is substantial evidence behind the story -- these are not simply fanciful reimaginings of an ahistorical past but sketches made from the outlines provided by scientific data drawn from the disciplines of osteology, medicine, and archaeology, among others.
This change in bioarchaeology -- from a population-focused discipline to one that recognizes the role of the individual in creating that population and in being created by that population -- has been long in coming but is sorely needed.
Humanizing the past not only helps us understand where we've been, it lets us share that information with the public in a way far more appealing than scatterplots. To this end, there's even a new book that, I'll admit, I own but haven't read yet called The Bioarchaeology of Individuals , a collection of osteobiographical narratives from most of the major players in American bioarchaeology.
There are, however, good ways to do osteobiography and bad ways to do it. Let's start with the bad, shall we? Eternally frozen in a protective embrace, the remains of an ancient family vividly testify to the enduring power of love. When a powerful earthquake struck Kourion, Cyprus, on July 21, A. In his History, the fourth-century A. Deconstructing just this caption is difficult.
First, what evidence do we have of social structure from Cyprus? I suspect there's a lot, but none of it is referenced to support the conclusion of a nuclear family.
Second, there are no references to the osteological evidence that support the age-at-death of the three individuals in the photo, and the ages seem strangely precise. Third, reconstructing a sequence of events from skeletal or even archaeological remains is difficult because of taphonomic processes that occur after death of a person or abandonment of a site. There is no mention of what other than the positioning of the skeletons leads him to the conclusion of a "protective embrace. Yeah, sure. Further in the article p. But none has analysed the evidence for care in a structured, systematic manner capable of providing access to the sort of information illustrated in the case study of M9.
It was obvious to me — particularly given my pre-archaeology experience — that a very rich source of information was being overlooked. True, the bioarchaeology of care only allows us to look at individual instances of care-giving this is elaborated in the attached article — but this case study focus provides a very intimate look at broader aspects of past lifeways. Not quantity, perhaps, but quality.
Could you apply it to historic and prehistoric contexts, or is it mainly a tool for prehistoric cultures and periods? This was entirely pragmatic — to make my task simpler, I wanted to deal with lifeways contexts in which it would be justifiable to assume that an individual with a disability would likely be known to all community members, and where it would also be justifiable to assume that, if care provision entailed substantial cost, that cost was likely to have been an impost born by the group as a whole. This made it easier to figure out how analysis and interpretation might work.
And how do documented approaches to healthcare particularly in early historic periods tally with what the archaeological evidence suggests? But how challenging to look for possible answers! Even putting forward possibilities later shown to be improbable opens our minds to considering a broader vision of the past. M9 comes from the Man Bac community. I think the bioarchaeology of care analysis revealing the agency of caregiving can pay rich dividends. An in-situ photograph from the early Vietnamese Neolithic site of Man Bac displaying the individual known as M9 immediately before removal.
Man Bac burials were typically supine and extended, but M9 was buried in a flexed position — this may reflect muscle contracture experienced in life and unbroken in death, or a deliberate mark of difference in mortuary treatment. How does your own methodology change or challenge this view?
The author questions whether archaeological evidence for disease can be used to infer a disability requiring care in the first place, and uses ethnographic analogy to support this position. This is of significant concern, because these terms have very different meanings. It is undeniably easier to infer the likely provision of care-giving from physical evidence in human remains than it is to identify the motivation s underlying this care, which are always going to be multiple and messy — because this is simply how life is.
Are you continuing projects in South East Asia, with on-going excavations in Vietnam? Anyone interested in exactly what my thesis covers can email me lorna. My partner did the actual IT production, so I take no credit for this aspect — which actually works! It was great to get my hands in the dirt again after the extended dissertation-writing vigil in front of the computer! The Man Bac excavation site in Vietnam where the individual M9 was found and excavated.
The archaeological site can be seen centre right, whilst a modern cemetery takes precedence in the foreground.
Cite chapter How to cite? When a powerful earthquake struck Kourion, Cyprus, on July 21, A. Southwest consists almost entirely of science methods, not previously known, population-level studies and is completely to archaeology. The body as material culture: A theoretical osteoarchaeology. People and Wildlife in Northern North America. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves. The Humans Who Went Extinct.
Dettwyler, K. American Journal of Physical Anthropology.
Tilley, L. International Journal of Palaeopathology.