The remains of past people are a testament to their lived experiences and of the environment in which they lived. Synthesising the latest research, this book critically examines the sources of evidence used to understand and interpret violence in bioarchaeology, exploring the significant light such evidence can shed on past hierarchies, gender roles and life courses. The text draws on a diverse range of social and clinical science research to investigate violence and trauma in the archaeological record, focussing on human remains. It examines injury patterns in different groups as well as the biological, psychological and cultural factors that make us behave violently, how our living environment influences injury and violence, the models used to identify and interpret violence in the past, and how violence is used as a social tool. Drawing on a range of case studies, Redfern explores new research directions that will contribute to nuanced interpretations of past lives.

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.

Case studies on violent deaths from the past and present vividly illustrate how anthropologists construct meaning from the victim's bones.

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.

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, the Tennessee River Valley, 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 that 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, they also expand 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 is the first volume 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. Contributors: Cheryl P. Anderson | Cate E. Bird | William E. De Vore | David H. Dye | Julie M. Fleischman | Julia R. Hanebrink | Ryan P. Harrod | Keith P. Jacobi | Ashley E. Kendell | Krista E. Latham | Justin Maiers | Debra L. Martin | Alyson O’Daniel | Anna J. Osterholtz | Marin A. Pilloud | His Excellency Sonnara Prak | Tricia Redeker Hepner | Sophearavy Ros | Al W. Schwitalla | Dawnie Wolfe Steadman | J. Marla Toyne | Vuthy Voeun | P. Willey  A volume in the series Bioarchaeological Interpretations of the Human Past: Local, Regional, and Global Perspectives, edited by Clark Spencer Larsen

A synthetic treatment of the study of human remains from archaeological contexts for current and future generations of bioarchaeologists.

"The remains of past people are a testament to their lived experiences and of the environment in which they lived. Synthesising the latest research, this book critically examines the sources of evidence used to understand and interpret violence in bioarchaeology, exploring the significant light such evidence can shed on past hierarchies, gender roles and life courses. The text draws on a diverse range of social and clinical science research to investigate violence and trauma in the archaeological record, focussing on human remains. It examines injury patterns in different groups as well as the biological, psychological and cultural factors that make us behave violently, how our living environment influences injury and violence, the models used to identify and interpret violence in the past, and how violence is used as a social tool. Drawing on a range of case studies, Redfern explores new research directions that will contribute to nuanced interpretations of past lives"--