Human Osteology reference books and a few books written using osteological data.
Human osteology is the study of the human skeleton. Many disciplines consider human osteological data important tools for explaining both the past and the present. While artifacts tell us about peoples’ cultures, osteology tells us about peoples’ activities, illnesses, and population makeup—though some cultural data can also be worked out from peoples’ remains.
In the early decades of archeology, human skeletal remains were often passed up for the more “interesting” things in the grave like funerary offerings. Every once in a while, a skull or an abnormal pathological bone was collected to show a doctor friend back home. Eventually, someone got the bright idea to bring medical doctors to some excavations and they were able to study skeletons to get some basic (sometimes wildly inaccurate) information about the people. When archeologists realized there was a fair amount of data that could be collected from skeletons, they began keeping more representative samples. In the 1960s and 1970s, more archeologists began to get training in human anatomy, and soon after, Jane Buikstra coined the term bioarcheology. Bioarcheologists (like me) are trained to excavate and study remains of past people by applying the same archeological techniques all archeologists use, except we focus mainly on graves as opposed to structures or other features. In the lab, the analysis of human remains from archeological contexts provides a large amount of information about past lived experiences.
Bioarcheologists have to answer a long list of questions—the first one being, is it human? Well, if the remains were excavated from a cemetery or known burial feature, then it’s pretty cut and dry. However, sometimes features get mixed up due to looting or some other kind of post-depositional disturbance; human remains can get comingled with animal remains. Another situation is when we are going through decades-old collections and come across a box of skeletal material. More often than you’d expect, human and animal remains were mixed together when the excavators couldn’t tell the difference. Bones get broken and fragmented post-deposition and if someone is not specifically trained in human osteology, it can be hard to distinguish human from nonhuman bone. In these situations, the different remains need to be separated as there are specific ethical guidelines that govern handling human remains with dignity and respect.
After identifying the remains as human, if enough of the skeleton is preserved, data on age, sex, stature, health, nutrition, disease, and activity patterns can all be collected. A person’s life story can come together before your eyes. However, one person cannot represent a past population in its entirety any more than you can represent your entire population. In order to be useful, data on multiple individuals do a better job at reconstructing past lifeways. Were people short or tall? Did a specific disease show up in multiple individuals? Did folks live dangerous lives where they got hurt doing hard jobs or were they victims of interpersonal violence? While it might sound like bioarcheologists are basically biologists, the interpretations we make from skeletal remains from an archeological context can sometimes reveal cultural information regarding past lifeways, thereby fitting squarely into the field of archeology!
A special note should be made about the study of human remains in the New World. Due to the differential treatment of human and funerary remains in America, where European American skeletons were historically reburied while Native American skeletons were curated like artifacts, a federal law called the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA for short, was passed in 1990 to protect Native American human remains, associated and non-associated funerary goods, and items of cultural patrimony. This required many institutions to repatriate these materials. While many insensitive archeologists bemoaned the potential loss of data, the law made everyone take a step back and assess what stories we are qualified to tell. While human remains can tell us a lot about past cultures, it’s important to consider the wishes of the descendants before subjecting ancestors to scientific examination.
“Archeology is…” Series Information
In this series we plan to highlight the many and various things that Are Archeology, from Art to Zoology and everything in between. We hope you enjoy learning a bit more about the variety of things that archeologists do and specialize in and maybe it will inspire you to be an archeologist even if you love learning about things in another field. You can find all the entries here.
