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Preface A goal of this book is to implement what I call a“bioarchaeology of imperialism,” which aims to document how archaic states and empires affected demographic profiles,community organization,population health,incidences of violence,and funerary and ritual treatment of human bodies.I propose that premodern states and the expansion of these entities affected morbidity patterns and rituals involving the body in profound ways for both conquering and subject populations. A staggering amount of previous archaeological research demonstrates that many other aspects of social and political life can be strongly impacted by imperial policies and practices (see Alcock et al. 2001; Feinman and Marcus 1998), so this is likely to also hold true for biological health status and the ways in which people, through their bodies, were socially molded and manipulated for imperial ends. However, in studies of ancient empires, a bioarchaeological perspective is still lacking. Thus, this book builds on those foundational archaeological studies of empire and offers a complementary yet distinctive view gleaned from hundreds of human skeletons evaluated in their mortuary and ritual contexts. A bioarchaeological perspective on imperialism is ideally suited for documenting particular aspects of health and lifeways of peoples who left no written record. In bioarchaeology, the human skeletal remains are the record; they are the bony diary of people’s lives. Bioarchaeological inquiry can tell us about the lived experiences of people from the prehistoric past; it provides a direct means of analysis by focusing on the human body itself. The skeletal indicators of age, sex, pathological lesions, bone fractures, and postmortem modifications to the body are analyzed because they show how human bodies were inscribed with individual actions, and they show how social structures and the environment may have profoundly affected one’s behavior and health. Bioarchaeological data reveal such things as the demographic makeup of families and communities, which can be used to examine the form and nature of community organization. Skeletal data, in conjunction with archaeological context, also disclose information about dietary practices, disease load, and the physical traumas that people endured, whether at the hands of an attacker or as a result of hard, physical labor. Together, these data can be used to reconstruct narratives about an in- xvi  Preface dividual, burial group, family, and community. This in turn allows scholars to reconstruct how lives were experienced during particular swaths of time: in this case,during a time of state rule and imperial domination in the ancient Peruvian Andes. Although human skeletal remains are commonly examined to assess aspects of health and disease—tasks that are undertaken in this work—this study is also concerned with how the human body (and representations of it) is inscribed with meaning; this complementary aspect of skeletal analysis brings us closer to understanding the lived experience of populations from the distant past. Thus, by fully integrating skeletal and contextual data, this book aims to provide insights into both “health, disease, and diet” (sensu Larsen 1997) and the“body as material culture” (sensu Sofaer 2006). While these two aspects of the human body in prehistory have traditionally been approached separately, I illustrate how they are mutually constitutive by showing how archaeological bodies (mummies and skeletons) were inscribed with traces of biological status and cultural identity. Data obtained from archaeological bodies can thus be marshaled to address a variety of anthropological questions,such as how ancient imperial expansion affected both biological and social aspects of people’s lives. In writing about how individuals and communities were affected by Wari imperialism, I present the data and interpretations in some detail, for I want the correlates and the analytical and interpretive process to be transparent, both for the experienced bioarchaeologist and for the student of anthropology. I devote a chapter to each category of data, showing how they support or refute particular hypotheses,and I include interpretations that are informed both by the patterns in osteological data and by the all-important archaeological context. When the osteological and archaeological data can support alternative interpretations,I indicate what those might be. Thus, for some readers, my interpretations may not seem conclusive enough. However, given the nature of equifinality that arises with some categories of osteological and archaeological data, I have opted to include alternative interpretations rather than exclude them.I hope that my future research and studies by other scholars eventually produce more conclusive data, which will in turn lead to more questions. Every so often in this book, I make analogies to modern state institutions or...

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