Bones of Complexity: Bioarchaeological Case Studies of Social Organization and Skeletal Biology eds. by Haagen D. Klaus, Amanda R. Harvey, and Mark N. Cohen (review)

Bones of Complexity is the seventeenth volume published since 2007 in the University Press of Florida's Bioarchaeological Interpretations of the Human Past series. The series, like others focusing on bioarchaeology from other presses and new journals like the International Journal of Paleopathology (started in 2011), is an example of the growing importance of bioarchaeology as an interdisciplinary approach to understanding humanity's past. Volumes and articles that apply bioarchaeological techniques to various topics in prehistory such as violence, identity, ethnicity, care-giving, colonization, the origins of agriculture, and even childhood abound. However, the work under review here is the first edited volume to explicitly take on the issue of socio-political complexity and its impact on human biology as expressed in skeletal remains.

While not a book specifically focused on the eastern Mediterranean region, I believe the volume includes several chapters that will be of interest to readers of JEMAHS. Moreover, for those readers who would like to know more about what light bioarchaeological research can shed on the cultures and polities of the eastern Mediterranean, I think they will find this work an accessible and enlightening read. The volume includes seventeen chapters with an introductory chapter by the editors and a concluding chapter by them and Marie Danforth. In between are fifteen chapters, unevenly divided into three sections. The first section (three chapters) looks at growth and stature, the second (three chapters) examines aspects of sex and gender, and the third (nine chapters) contains case studies that use bioarchaeological data to assess the impact of complexity on human bodies or otherwise understand the nature of socio-political complexity.

As with any edited volume, some chapters are stronger than others. However, those chapters that deal with contexts from the eastern Mediterranean are some of the volume's strongest. For example, chapter five by Sonia Zakrzewski examines six Egyptian skeletal samples represented by 150 adult individuals and nearly 1,000 long bones from the Badarian (5500–3800 BC) to Middle Kingdom (2040–1785 BC) periods. Zakrzewski analyzes mean estimated adult stature across both sexes and a measure of sexual dimorphism in estimated height across this 3,500-year timespan. She finds that the development of social hierarchy involved increased skeletal diversity linked to sexual dimorphism and that the greatest degree of dimorphism occurred at the same time as the development of social ranking. However, she found no differences in stature between archaeologically identified social statuses in the samples. The author attributes the increased sexual dimorphism to an increasing distinction in social roles between males and females and possibly better nutrition and medical care for men.

Chapter 6 by Lynne Schepartz and colleagues poses two questions: (1) does rank in Mycenaean society correlate with skeletal or dietary differences? and (2) are there gender-based patterns in Mycenaean diet and health? Their skeletal sample comes from twelve chamber tombs and three tholoi from the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1500–1000 BC) site of Pylos and includes 179 individuals. Schepartz et al. hypothesize that those individuals from tholoi should, if rank accorded them greater access to dietary resources, show evidence of greater protein consumption and less dependence on carbohydrate-rich cereal grains that would result in greater dental pathology. Analyzing distributions of stable light isotope values, they confirm that individuals buried in tholoi have statistically higher δ15^N ‰ values indicating greater protein consumption than those individuals from chamber tombs. Isotope values also indicate that males from chamber tombs had greater access to protein than females from chamber tombs. They note that dental caries rates and ante-mortem tooth loss is greater among chamber tomb individuals. Finally, they report that women have more caries and tooth loss than men. In all, their study supports the reconstruction of life...