Bioarchaeology

An Introduction to the Archaeology and Anthropology of the Dead

Mark Q. Sutton

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351061094
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Sciences sociales
• Sous-sujet: Archéologie

Bioarchaeology covers the history and general theory of the field plus the recovery and laboratory treatment of human remains.

Bioarchaeology is the study of human remains in context from an archaeological and anthropological perspective. The book explores, through numerous case studies, how the ways a society deals with their dead can reveal a great deal about that society, including its religious, political, economic, and social organizations. It details recovery methods and how, once recovered, human remains can be analyzed to reveal details about the funerary system of the subject society and inform on a variety of other issues, such as health, demography, disease, workloads, mobility, sex and gender, and migration. Finally, the book highlights how bioarchaeological techniques can be used in contemporary forensic settings and in investigations of genocide and war crimes.

In Bioarchaeology, theories, principles, and scientific techniques are laid out in a clear, understandable way, and students of archaeology at undergraduate and graduate levels will find this an excellent guide to the field.

Chapter 1

The discipline of bioarchaeology

Introduction: what is bioarchaeology?

Everybody dies, and each society deals with that fact in some manner. Those practices can vary widely in both contemporary and past societies (e.g., Parker Pearson 2003; Matsunami 2010; Tarlow and Stutz 2013). Some of the dead are buried, some are cremated, some are mummified, some are worshiped, some are hidden, and some are forgotten. Which of these and other approaches were practiced depended on the beliefs of the society of the deceased and sometimes those of their enemies.

What were the various belief systems regarding the dead? How did different groups treat their dead? Why did they use the methods they used? What is the meaning of those practices? How did things change through time? Why? What are the practical applications of understanding past practices?

These questions, and many others, are ultimately anthropological in nature. Anthropology is the study of humans, and anthropologists want to learn all they can about people and societies, including their social, political, religious systems, and much more. Within the domain of anthropology, ethnography is the study of a living society, while ethnology is the comparative study of culture and society. One of the strengths of ethnography and ethnology is the ability to directly observe human behavior and to ask questions of the participants.

Archaeology is the study of past societies. However, unlike ethnography, archaeologists cannot directly observe human behavior and must infer such behaviors from the context and patterns of material remains. Among the materials recovered in archaeological investigations are human remains (the past people themselves), and the “very presence of human remains affects archaeological interpretation” (Stutz 2018:324). Thus, human remains, if present, become central in an archaeological study. Bioarchaeology now forms the “interpretive framework” in the analysis of human remains in an effort to be able to address anthropological questions (Ortner 2006:xiv).

The initial step in bioarchaeology is to describe the remains themselves (typically bone) and identify any disease or trauma. Next, the cultural context of the remains must be considered, so the archaeological data regarding the remains and associated artifacts or facilities are crucial. In addition, bioarchaeology uses data obtained from a variety of other subdisciplines to add to the analysis, such as biological anthropology, forensics, ecology, and public health (Martin and Osterholtz 2016:39), among others. It is truly interdisciplinary.

With a few exceptions, early studies of human remains were made in isolation and not integrated with other archaeological data. Thus, paleoethnobotanists or botanists analyzed the plant remains; zooarchaeologists or zoologists examined the animal remains; others dated the sites; and bioarchaeologists, biologists, or human anatomists evaluated human skeletal remains and those data sets were not typically integrated into an overall understanding of a site or its anthropological context. As a result, many still see bioarchaeology as being descriptive, while anthropology is seen as humanistic, and it is difficult to envision an integration of those approaches. But the field does now integrate these aspects into a general biocultural approach that seeks to use bioarchaeological data to examine socioeconomic conditions experienced by human communities of the past.

Not all scholars share this definition. For example, in the United Kingdom (UK), the term “bioarchaeology” (first coined in 1972) is commonly used to refer to the biological constituents from a site, such as faunal and botanical remains (Buikstra 2006a:xvii), although it is now often linked to the field of human osteoarchaeology (see Roberts 2006, 2009). In the United States, the study of faunal and botanical remains in an archaeological site is generally called archaeobiology (Sobolik 2003).

In forensics, analysis of human remains is focused on medico-legal issues (Ubelaker 2019); that is, efforts to solve crimes or to identify the missing. In these situations, the social or religious system of a deceased individual is not germane to the question of who may have killed them (there are exceptions, such as a religiously motivated murder). Nevertheless, both bioarchaeologists and forensic investigators begin with the same basic data set: the human remains themselves.

What constitutes human remains?

Initially, the definition of human remains seems obvious: a deceased person, in whole or part. Following this, most legal definitions in the United States generally specify a “dead body.” For example, the Nevada Revised Statute, Section 451.005, specifies human remains as “the body of a deceased person … the body in any state of decomposition and the cremated remains of a body,” the general implication being a complete body of some sort (Joyce 2015:175). Certainly, most skeletal or mummified remains would fall into such a category and everyone would view them as human remains.

But what about fragmentary remains, such as parts lost in life through trauma? For example, are the bones of an amputated leg from a Civil War soldier who survived the wound considered human remains? What about the terminal phalanx from the finger of someone who had an accident with a power saw or a person who had a finger removed as part of a mourning ceremony?

What about human material lost in the normal course of life without trauma? Such material could include hair (humans typically lose 50 to 100 hairs a day), fingernail clippings, and sluffed skin cells. Are these human remains? Everyone loses their primary teeth (deciduous, or “baby,” teeth) as they mature. Are such loose and isolated teeth considered human remains? What about remains such as blood, proteins, or DNA? What about paleofeces?

The determination of what constitutes human remains is generally made based on the nature and context of the remains, their age, and whether they were associated with a group whose belief systems might consider any human material “human remains.” Certainly, the remains of an actual deceased person would qualify, while remains that could be lost in life are generally not considered “human remains.” Nevertheless, there is considerable gray area with this issue.

The development of the discipline

A very brief history of the development of what we now call bioarchaeology is presented here (for more detailed histories, see Buikstra et al. [2011], Baker and Agarwal [2017], Larsen [2018]). The discipline initially arose out of early interest in classifying and quantifying morphological variation in modern human populations into racial groups. Other goals included an understanding of the position of modern humans in relationship to early fossil forms, such as Homo erectus and Neandertals, and to other primates (Armelagos et al. 1982). A great deal of effort was also expended in an attempt to discern and standardize morphological measurements that would be the most useful for the analysis of biological affinity in human populations. Much of this early work had strong elements of racism, sexism, and biological determinism.

A focus on measurement and classification

Much of the early osteological work was centered on the measurements of crania, most of which were retained in the considerable museum collections of human skeletal materials that were acquired in the late 1800s and early 1900s from archaeological sites in North America (Buikstra 2006b:7–20; also see Redman 2016; Stone 2018). The study of crania gave rise to the subfield of craniometry, which was frequently used in phrenology, a technique to determine character, personality traits, and criminality on the basis of the shape of the head (skull) in living people. The general approach of craniometric classification was criticized early on (Virchow 1896; Boas 1912), but such protests were ignored or attacked (Radosavljevich 1911; Shapiro 1959).

Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840) was a physician who is often referred to as the father of physical anthropology. His primary work was on the variation in cranial morphology (shape) to determine various races of modern humans (Cook 2006). Blumenbach (1776) used measurements (although no accurate measuring devices had been invented yet) on a collection of crania to describe his earliest views on racial classification and human variation. Based on his analysis, Blumenbach (1776) developed a classification of five “races” of humans: (1) Caucasian or white; (2) Mongolian or yellow, including all East Asians and some Central Asians; (3) Malayan or brown, including Southeast Asian and Pacific Islanders; (4) Ethiopian or black, including sub-Saharan Africans; and (5) American or red, including American Indians.

Blumenbach believed in a “degenerative” model of race; that is, that Adam and Eve were Caucasian and all other races came about by degeneration from the original Caucasian. Interestingly, at the same time, he argued that the different races resulted from living in different environments, and that there were no fundamental differences between the “races.”

Samuel George Morton (1799–1850), also a physician, conducted studies on cranial shape and capacity (e.g., size of the brain). Using skull metrics from Peru, Mexico, and the “Moundbuilders” of North America (see Willey and Sabloff 1993:22–28, 39–45), he demonstrated that they were all the same “race” (Morton 1839; also see Cook 2006:35, 41), a major finding of the time. Further, he argued that cranial capacity was the determining factor in intelligence and the capacity for culture. In his seminal work, Crania Americana, Morton (1839) measured the volume of a series of skulls of different races and determined that Caucasians had the largest brains, Native Americans the second largest, and Negros the smallest. At the time, these theories were popular, as they reinforced the prevailing opinion. Upon his death in 1851, the Charleston Medical Journal (in South Carolina) noted that “we of the South should consider him as our benefactor, for aiding most materially in giving to the negro his true position as an inferior race.”

Morton was criticized by Stephen Jay Gould (1981) as having “mismeasured” the skulls to find his desired numbers to “prove” his thesis. Gould (1981) argued that (1) Morton selected and/or deleted skulls from his sample depending on whether they fit his theory; (2) seeds were used to measure cranial capacity, an unreliable and unreproducible method; (3) the normal variation in populations was not considered; and (4) rounding the numbers was done to support his theory. Others (e.g., Cook 2006; Lewis et al. 2011) believed that Morton did not intentionally mismeasure and that, despite not having proper tools, his measurements were fairly accurate. The small sample size and issues with skeletal variation remain problematic with Morton’s work.

Pierre Paul Broca (1824–1880), another physician, measured cranial capacity and asserted that men had larger brains than women (implying men were more intelligent) and that “superior races” had larger brains than “inferior races.” Modern scientists reject such “research” for using a priori expectations and scientific racism. In his analysis of prehistoric human skeletal material, Broca (1871, 1875) developed techniques of anthropometric craniometry still used today. Broca made other contributions to the field of neurology (see Schiller 1992).

Aleš Hrdlička (1869–1943) was one of the main originators of physical anthropology in America (Brace 1982; also see Cook 2006). Hrdlička founded the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in 1928 and created the American Journal of Physical Anthropology in 1918, which is still the foremost journal in the field. Hrdlička considered Broca to be the principal founder of physical anthropology and viewed France as the mother country of that science (Brace 1982; Buikstra and Beck 2006). Hrdlička was a proponent of standardizing anthropometric measurements (Stewart 1947), with particular emphasis on measurements of the crania to determine biological affinity. He developed measurement tools that are still used today. Hrdlička was also interested in the origins of Native Americans and in preserving the Smithsonian collections (Buikstra 2006b:21; also see Ubelaker 2006).

Earnest A. Hooton (1887–1954) was also one of the main pioneers of physical anthropology in America (Brace 1982; also see Cook 2006). Hooton was a professor and researcher at Harvard University for more than four decades and educated most of the physical anthropologists that were hired by universities and colleges in the middle part of the twentieth century. Hooton (1918) made many contributions, including data on the peopling of the Americas. He also analyzed the remai...