Bioarchaeology of Care Through Population-Level Analyses

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 healthcare 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 healthcare, 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