Looking at Life in Death

Hi all! I hope everyone had a wonderful spring break for those who took their break last week. After a rejuvenating break, I can go back to the BONE lab with a very optimistic and positive attitude!



This week in the BONE lab, as usual, was great! I finished inputing data from the field records into Dr. Baker's data base and also started cleaning Burial 8. What was amazing was getting to see skeletal remains of "Breech Birth Lady" and her baby. Just as a warning, I will be showing pictures of the remains below. The skeletal remain dubbed "Breech Birth Lady" was found in a Kerma period grave where the skeletal remains was found with the remains of her baby still in her pelvis which obviously was the result of a breech birth. The first picture below is of the mother and the second is of her infant.

After inputting the data from field forms so I can use R to get some statistics, I had a discussion with Dr. Baker about the direction my project could go in. First, I will be looking at the head orientation of the remains and looking at patterns between sites. After that, I will hopefully be looking at grave goods and also looking at patterns using R. I will probably not be looking at the health status and focus mainly on the cultural side of bioarchaeology since I do not have the osteological background and isotope analysis hasn't been done on a lot of the remains yet. Some sites don't have grave goods so Dr. Baker is hoping that hopefully with R analysis if we'll see whether the lack of grave goods as a pattern in some sites is proof of graves of an earlier time period or from people who migrated from different areas outside of Nubia. More exciting new is that we'll be getting carbon-dating results next week from the skeletal remains so we can finally tell the age of the remains! On the field records some remains are predicted as being between 24-55. 

As for this week's article discussion, we discussed the origin of bioarchaeology and how exactly bioarchaeology falls into the very broad category of anthropology. For years, skeletal biology and archaeology were two totally separate categories that were studies as two individual disciplines. Skeletal biology, however, was heavily influenced by culture history where skeletal biologists engaged in studies which implied a differential evolution of different races. This problem was eventually overcome and gradually archaeologists began to put together the importance of looking at biology and culture together. Bioarchaeology falls into the category of anthropology that incorporates physical/biological anthropology, forensic anthropology, and archaeology. Depending on who you're trained by, Annie says some bioarchaeologists, like her, focus more on the biological/forensic side of anthropology while other focus more on the archaeological part. Bioarchaeology is quite an oddball of a subject to study.



Anyways, I hope everyone enjoyed learning more about the background of bioarchaeology and learning where it stands in Anthropology. Thank you for following my posts and I hope to see you all next week!