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Author: Clark Spencer Larsen
Edition: Paperback Reprint edition (March 2002) (272 pages)
ISBN: Clark Spencer Larsen
Publisher: Princeton Univ Press
Price: $22.95
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From Publisher: The dead tell no tales. Or do they? In this fascinating book, Clark Spencer Larsen shows that the dead can speak to us--about their lives, and ours--through the remarkable insights of bioarchaeology, which reconstructs the lives and lifestyles of past peoples based on the study of skeletal remains. The human skeleton is an amazing storehouse of information. It records the circumstances of our growth and development as reflected in factors such as disease, stress, diet, nutrition, climate, activity, and injury. Bioarchaeologists, by combining the methods of forensic science and archaeology, along with the resources of many other disciplines (including chemistry, geology, physics, and biology), "read" the information stored in bones to understand what life was really like for our human ancestors. They are unearthing some surprises. Table of Contents:
PREFACE ix
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xv
INTRODUCTION Tales from the Dead: "What Bones Tell Us about Our Past, and Why We Should Know 3
CHAPTER 1 The Lives and Lifestyles of Ancient Hunter-Gatherers: "Poor, nasty, brutish and short" in the American Great Basin? 13
CHAPTER 2 Skeletons from Stillwater. Good Times and Bad Times 35
CHAPTER 3 From Foraging to Farming. A Regional Perspective 65
CHAPTER 4 Going Global: Bioarchaeology of the Foraging-to-Farming Transition 96
CHAPTER 5 Europeans Arrive: Circumstances and Settings for Native Population Collapse in the Americas 121
CHAPTER 6 Bioarchaeology of Population Decline and Extinction in Spanish Florida 145
CHAPTER 7 Sot-Weed to Sangamo: Life and Death in Frontier North America 179
Chapter 8 On to Sangamo Country: Colonizing the Midwest 203
Chapter 9 Life's Transitions: The Bioarchaelogical past 228
Index 237
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