This volume is a resource for bioarchaeologists interested in using a structural violence framework to better understand and contextualize the lived experiences of past populations. One of the most important elements of bioarchaeological research is the study of health disparities in past populations. This book offers an analysis of such work, but with the benefit of an overarching theoretical framework. It examines the theoretical framework used by scholars in cultural and medical anthropology to explore how social, political, and/or socioeconomic structures and institutions create inequalities resulting in health disparities for the most vulnerable or marginalized segments of contemporary populations. It then takes this framework and shows how it can allow researchers in bioarchaeology to interpret such socio-cultural factors through analyzing human skeletal remains of past populations. The book discusses the framework and its applications based on two main themes: the structural violence of gender inequality and the structural violence of social and socioeconomic inequalities.

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 project explores the biological impact of structural violence in institutionalized and impoverished populations in the late 19th and early 20th century United States. A structural violence framework serves as an explanatory framework to deepen bioarchaeologists' understanding of the relationship between identity and risk for different kinds of physiological stress for various segments of the populations included in this study. Two samples, one an institutionalized population from Rome, New York, and the other, a primarily impoverished population from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, were used to evaluate the impact of structural violence on those populations. This was assessed by analyzing human skeletal remains for the presence of non-specific indicators of physiological stress, dental disease, and trauma. The prevalence and distributions of these skeletal indicators were recorded and compared within and between populations to assess whether site, status, or biological sex had an impact on risk for physiological stress and/or trauma within and between impoverished and institutionalized populations from industrializing areas from the historic period in the United States. The results indicate that while site and status were significant indicators of risk, biological sex was not.

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.

Theoretical Approaches in Bioarchaeology emphasizes how several different theoretical perspectives can be used to reconstruct the biocultural experiences of humans in the past. Over the past few decades, bioarchaeology has been transformed through methodological revisions, technological advances, and the inclusion of external theoretical frameworks from the social and natural sciences. These interdisciplinary perspectives became the backbone of bioarchaeology and strengthened the discipline’s ability to address questions about past biological and social dynamics. Consequently, how, why, and when to apply external theory to studies of past populations are central and timely questions tied to future developments of the discipline. This book facilitates ongoing dialogues about theoretical applications within the field and interdisciplinary connections between bioarchaeology, biological anthropology, and other disciplines. Each chapter highlights how a theoretical framework originating from a social or natural science connects to past and future bioarchaeological research. For scholars and archaeologists interested in the theoretical applications of bioarchaeology, this book will be an excellent resource.

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

New methods for understanding healthcare in past societies “Provides unique and useful models that demonstrate how inferences can be made about communities of care in samples ranging in size from several dozen to several thousand. Authors weave together diverse lines of evidence—osteological, archaeological, ethnographic, clinical—in their historical and cultural contexts. Sophisticated analytical tools and theoretical frameworks position this book at the cutting edge of bioarchaeological research and illustrate the cultural relativity of care, caregiving, and healthcare in the past and present, and in Western and non-Western contexts.”—Alexis Boutin, coeditor of Remembering the Dead in the Ancient Near East: Recent Contributions from Bioarchaeology and Mortuary Archaeology Representing current and emerging methods and theory, this volume introduces new avenues for exploring how prehistoric and historic communities provided health care for their sick, injured, and disabled members. It adjusts and expands the bioarchaeology of care framework—a way of analyzing caregiving in the past designed for individual case studies of human skeletal remains—to detect and examine care at the population level. Covering a range of time from the Archaic period to the present, contributors discuss community settings including British hospitals and nursing homes, a shell burial mound site in Alabama, and the Mississippi State Asylum. These essays offer insights into the care given to children and those with reduced mobility, the social burden of health care, practices of euthanasia, and the relationship between care for the mentally ill and structural violence. A necessary extension to our understanding of the complexities of caregiving in the past, Bioarchaeology of Care through Population-Level Analyses shows that it is important to recognize the impact of disease or disability on both the individuals affected and their broader communities. Contributors demonstrate that flexibility in bioarchaeological modeling and methodology can result in robust and nuanced scholarship on caregiving in the past and the societies that provided that care. A volume in the series Bioarchaeological Interpretations of the Human Past: Local, Regional, and Global Perspectives, edited by Clark Spencer Larsen Contributors: Petra Banks | Anna-Marie C. Casserly | Briana R. Moore | Anna Osterholtz | Bennjamin J. Penny-Mason | Charlotte A. Roberts | Alecia Schrenk | Diana S. Simpson | Lori A. Tremblay