XI, 334 p. 23 illus., 12 illus. in color. online resource
SUMMARY
Bioarchaeologists who study human remains in ancient, historic and contemporary settings are securely anchored within anthropology as anthropologists, yet they have not taken on the pundits the way other subdisciplines within anthropology have. Popular science authors frequently and selectively use bioarchaeological data on demography, disease, violence, migration and diet to buttress their poorly formed arguments about general trends in human behavior and health, beginning with our earliest ancestors. While bioarchaeologists are experts on these subjects, bioarchaeology and bioarchaeological approaches have largely remained invisible to the public eye. Current issues such as climate change, droughts, warfare, violence, famine, and the effects of disease are media mainstays and are subjects familiar to bioarchaeologists, many of whom have empirical data and informed viewpoints, both for topical exploration and also for predictions based on human behavior in deep time. The contributions in this volume will explore the how and where the data has been misused, present new ways of using evidence in the service of making new discoveries, and demonstrate ways that our long term interdisciplinarity lends itself to transdisciplinary wisdom. We also consider possible reasons for bioarchaeological invisibility and offer advice concerning the absolute necessity of bioarchaeologists speaking out through social media
CONTENT
1: Bioarchaeologists Speak Out: An Introduction -- 2: Knowing Your Audience: Reactions to the Human Body, Dead and Undead -- 3: Bioarchaeological Evidence for Prehistoric Violence: Use and Misuse in the Popular Media -- 4: Bridging the Precontact and Postcontact Divide in Eastern North America: Prior Conditions Set the Stage for Historic-Period Outcomes -- 5: Misconceptions about the Bioarchaeology of Plague -- 6: Changing The Climate: Bioarchaeology Responds to Deterministic Thinking about Human-Environmental Interactions in the Past -- 7: Stone agers in the Fast-Lane? How bioarchaeologists can address the Paleo Diet myth -- 8: Ancient Migrations: Biodistance, genetics, and the persistence of typological thinking -- 9: Opening up the family tree: promoting more diverse and inclusive studies of family, kinship, and relatedness in Bioarchaeology -- 10: The Fallacy of the Transgender Skeleton -- 11: The Body-as-Evidence Paradigm in Domestic and International Forensic Anthropology -- 12: Contributions of Mummy Science to Public Perception of the Past -- 13: Writing Bioarchaeological Stories to Right Past Wrongs -- 14: Bioarchaeology and the Media: Anthropology SciComm in a Post-Truth Landscape.
