Mortuary And Bioarchaeological Perspectives On Bronze Age Arabia

This volume brings together expert s in archaeology and bioarchaeology to examine continuity and change in ancient Arabian mortuary practices. While most previous investigations have been limited geographically to Egypt and the Levant, this volume focuses on the lesser-studied southeastern Arabian Peninsula, showing what death and burial can reveal about the lifestyles of the region’s prehistoric communities. In case studies from Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Bahrain, contributors explore the transition from the earliest to the most complex mortuary monuments in the Bronze Age and beyond. They consider sociopolitical and environmental factors that may have influenced mortuary practices and what skeletal biogeochemistry can reveal about changing mobility and access to food resources. They also discuss sites that illustrate more nuanced shifts in burial traditions that took place during the evolution of the Hafit to the Umm an-Nar cultures, a period of transformation often neglected because the semi-nomadic lifestyle of this intermediary culture left behind a limited archaeological record. Burial patterns reveal a shift from cairns to communal tombs that offers new insight into the relationship between the mortuary landscape and the living, while the presence of animal bones interred with human remains embodies the significance of herd management as symbols of both territoriality and reproduction. By using skeletal remains as a rich source of scientific data that complements studies of burial context, this volume represents an important turning point for mortuary research in the region. Its novel interdisciplinary and international perspective provides a synthesis of new ideas and interpretations that will guide future archaeological research in Arabia and beyond. A volume in the series Bioarchaeological Interpretations of the Human Past: Local, Regional, and Global Perspectives, edited by Clark Spencer Larsen Contributors: Eugenio Bortolini | Charlotte Marie Cable | Guillaume Gernez | Jessica Giraud | Richard Thorburn Howard Cuttler | Aurea Izquierdo Zamora | Olivia Munoz | Jill A. Weber | Benjamin W. Porter | Alexis Boutin | Debra L. Martin | Kathryn M. Baustian | Anna J. Osterholz | Peter Magee

This edited volume brings together experts in archaeology and bioarchaeology to examine continuity and change in ancient Arabian mortuary practices. While most previous investigations have been limited geographically to Egypt and the Levant, this volume focuses on the lesser-studied southeastern Arabian Peninsula.

This book provides a comprehensive and detailed review of the evidence for Early Bronze Age mortuary rituals on the Oman Peninsula, describing the research conducted, synthesizing the resulting data, and presenting a complete view of the state of knowledge on the topic.

This handbook examines human responses to climatic and environmental changes in the past,and their impacts on disease patterns, nutritional status, migration, and interpersonal violence. Bioarchaeology—the study of archaeological human skeletons—provides direct evidence of the human experience of past climate and environmental changes and serves as an important complement to paleoclimate, historical, and archaeological approaches to changes we may expect with global warming. Comprising 27 chapters from experts across a broad range of time periods and geographical regions, this book addresses hypotheses about how climate and environmental changes impact human health and well-being, factors that promote resilience, and circumstances that make migration or interpersonal violence a more likely outcome. The volume highlights the potential relevance of bioarchaeological analysis to contemporary challenges by organizing the chapters into a framework outlined by the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals for 2030. Planning for a warmer world requires knowledge about humans as biological organisms with a deep connection to Earth's ecosystems balanced by an appreciation of how historical and socio-cultural circumstances, socioeconomic inequality, degrees of urbanization, community mobility, and social institutions play a role in shaping long-term outcomes for human communities. Containing a wealth of nuanced perspectives about human-environmental relations, book is key reading for students of environmental archaeology, bioarchaeology, and the history of disease. By providing a longer view of contemporary challenges, it may also interest readers in public health, public policy, and planning.

This book had its genesis in a series of 6 popular and well-attended ASOR conference sessions on Household Archaeology in the Ancient Near East. The 18 chapters are organized in three thematic sections: Architecture as Archive of Social Space; The Active Household; and Ritual Space at Home.

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

"Breaks new ground regarding how to think about colonial encounters in innovative ways that pay attention to a wide range of issues from health and demography to identity formations and adaptation."—Debra L. Martin, coeditor of The Bioarchaeology of Violence "Amply demonstrates the breadth and variability of the impact of colonialism."—Ken Nystrom, State University of New York at New Paltz European expansion into the New World fundamentally altered Indigenous populations. The collision between East and West led to the most recent human adaptive transition that spread around the world. Paradoxically, these are some of the least scientifically understood processes of the human past. Representing a new generation of contact and colonialism studies, this volume expands on the traditional focus on the health of conquered peoples by considering how extraordinary biological and cultural transformations were incorporated into the human body and reflected in behavior, identity, and adaptation. By examining changes in diet, mortuary practices, and diseases, these globally diverse case studies demonstrate that the effects of conquest reach further than was ever thought before—to both the colonized and the colonizers. People on all sides of colonial contact became entangled in cultural and biological transformations of social identities, foodways, social structures, and gene pools at points of contact and beyond. Contributors to this volume illustrate previously unknown and variable effects of colonialism by analyzing skeletal remains and burial patterns from never-before-studied regions in the Americas to the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. The result is the first step toward a new synthesis of archaeology and bioarchaeology. Contributors: Rosabella Alvarez-Calderón | Elliot H. Blair | Maria Fernanda Boza | Michele R. Buzon | Romina Casali | Mark N. Cohen | Danielle N. Cook | Marie Elaine Danforth | J. Lynn Funkhouser | Catherine Gaither | Pamela García Laborde| Ricardo A. Guichón | Rocio Guichón Fernández | Heather Guzik | Amanda R. Harvey | Barbara T. Hester | Dale L. Hutchinson | Kristina Killgrove | Haagen D. Klaus | Clark Spencer Larsen | Alan G. Morris | Melissa S. Murphy | Alejandra Ortiz | Megan A. Perry | Emily S. Renschler | Isabelle Ribot | Melisa A. Salerno | Matthew C. Sanger | Paul W. Sciulli | Stuart Tyson Smith | Christopher M. Stojanowski | David Hurst Thomas | Victor D. Thompson | Vera Tiesler | Jason Toohey | Lauren A. Winkler | Pilar Zabala

Through an unprecedented multidisciplinary and global approach, this book documents the dramatic several-thousand-year history of leprosy using bioarchaeological, clinical, and historical information from a wide variety of contexts, dispelling many long-standing myths about the disease. Drawing on her 30 years of research on the infection, Charlotte Roberts begins by outlining its bacterial causes, how it spreads, and how it affects the body. She then considers its diagnosis and treatment, both historically and in the present. She also looks at the methods and tools used by paleopathologists to identify signs of leprosy in skeletons. Examining evidence in human remains from many countries, particularly in Europe and including Britain, Hungary, and Sweden, Roberts demonstrates that those affected were usually buried in the same cemeteries as others in their communities, contrary to the popular belief that they were all ostracized or isolated from society into leprosy hospitals. Other myths addressed by Roberts include the assumptions that leprosy can’t be cured, that leprosy is no longer a problem today, and that what is called “leprosy” in the Bible is the same illness as the disease with that name now. Roberts concludes by projecting the future of leprosy, arguing that researchers need to study the disease through an ethically grounded evolutionary perspective. Importantly, she advises against use of the word “leper” to avoid perpetuating stigma today surrounding people with the infection and resulting disabilities. Leprosy will stand as the authoritative source on the subject for years to come. A volume in the series Bioarchaeological Interpretations of the Human Past: Local, Regional, and Global Perspectives, edited by Clark Spencer Larsen