Bioarchaeology of Care through Population-Level Analyses

Alecia Schrenk, Lori A. Tremblay

• Publisher: University of Florida Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781683402596
• eBook ISBN: 9781683402756
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

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 

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Foreword
• 1. New Perspectives on Past Health Care: Opportunities for Bioarchaeological Analyses of Population-Level Health Care in the Past
• 2. Conceptual Approaches to the Bioarchaeology of “Community” Care Using Knowledge from Personal Experiences of Caregiving (Nursing)
• 3. Care of the Chyldren: An Introduction to Composite Life Course Analysis of Nonadults in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Population of England, ca. 1450–1600
• 4. The Bioarchaeology of Care for Individuals with Reduced Mobility in Non-Sedentary Societies
• 5. The Burden of Care: Exploring the Relationship between Morbidity Load and Need for Care at the Middle Archaic (6000–3000 BC) Site of Carrier Mills, Illinois
• 6. Communities of Care and Violence: Using a Contextual Approach in Bioarchaeology to Demonstrate the Intersection between Seemingly Disparate Behaviors in the Past
• 7. The Crumbling of the State Asylum: Structural and Physical Violence and the Loss of Moral Treatment
• 8. Conclusions to a Community of Care: Expanding the Bioarchaeology of Care to Population-Level Analyses
• List of Contributors
• Index