The Bioarchaeology of Individuals

1. Osteobiography and Bioarchaeology

1 1 d  Osteobiography and Bioarchaeology Ann L. W. Stodder and Ann M. Palkovich This book is a compilation of osteobiographies—interpretations of the lives of people whose remains were excavated from archaeological sites. The foundation of each chapter is the study of an individual beginning with the skeleton and then expanding the analytical and interpretive scale from the grave outward to understand this person’s context in life and in death. We asked the contributors to tell the story of one individual: someone they had encountered as a burial during excavation, or as a skeleton in a larger collection; someone whose life touched theirs, whom they identified with, whose investigation posed an intellectual challenge. We provided the template for the individual profiles that appear at the beginning of each chapter and issued the deceptively simple instruction that contributors present the individual and their investigation in a manner accessible to students and nonexperts, without glossing the scientific aspect of their methods, or oversimplifying the problems and limitations inherent in the research. The resulting essays tell the stories of people who lived at vastly different times (ranging from 3200 B.C. to A.D. 1848) and in vastly different contexts: Bronze Age Thailand, a remote oasis in Egypt, an island in the western Pacific, a family farm in nineteenth-century Canada, ancient Turkey, Viking Iceland, Cypress , ancient Peru, a small farming village in Maya Belize, medieval Portugal, the American Southwest, Teotihuacán. These are the biographies of people who lived in urban and rural settings, in the tropics and the desert and the northern forests. This volume is about people, not just bones: they were parents, children, farmers, masons, artisans, immigrants, nomads, warriors, healers. The contributors use oral history and legends, ancient texts and imagery, ethnographic and ethnohistoric sources, death records and tombstones, analysis of bone chemistry and ancient DNA, evidence of habitual activity patterns inscribed on the skeleton, genetic traits recorded in the teeth and bones, and indicators of health and disease in childhood and beyond. The wide range of information and methods brought to the research exemplifies the creative, interdisciplinary nature of bioarchaeology. As students of the explicitly scientific, adaptation-oriented “new physical 2 · Ann L. W. Stodder and Ann M. Palkovich anthropology” and “new archaeology,” we learned that our purpose was to analyze skeletal populations to document major biocultural trends in human adaptation; individuals were seldom the subject of research, and case studies were rarely published. Justification of the study of human remains is most often framed as the contribution to understanding big questions about the evolution of our species, such as the impact of agriculture or the emergence and reemergence of diseases (e.g., Armelagos 2003). But over several decades of adaptation -oriented work with an emphasis on statistical analysis of large assemblages of (typically well-preserved) skeletons, we set aside the opportunity to ask many other kinds of questions about the lives of people in the past. Unusual individuals were deleted as outliers or “abstracted” in the drive to generate higher-level data characterizing age and sex groups, social classes, and populations (Joyce 2005: 149). The increasingly sophisticated analytical methods that we bring to skeletal and archaeological analysis continue to expand our understanding of our past (Hunt 2001; Larsen 2006), but distance the study of skeletal remains from the lives of the people we study (Goldstein 2006). None of the work reported in these essays was done in isolation; the populational data provides the context for interpreting the skeletal morphology and life history of these individuals as much as the archaeological data. We see the study of individuals as a complementary domain to the populational framework of bioarchaeology. Both approaches are essential to the relevance of the field. As written by the late Phillip Walker, “The information about historical events encoded in the skeletons of our ancestors can be thought of as a complex message from the past that we can decode through bioarchaeological research. Each individual skeleton has a unique story to tell about that individual’s life as well as the evolutionary events that constitute the history of our species” (2008: 26). With roots in the work of Krogman and Angel (Buikstra 2006: 348), the term “osteobiography” was coined by Saul in 1961 (Saul 1972; Saul and Saul 1989). The life-history approach in analysis of human remains is not new, but it is more welcome in the current research climate. The emerging realm of socially oriented bioarchaeology (Sofaer 2006; Gowland and Knüsel...