Backbone of History

Health and Nutrition in the Western Hemisphere

Datos Bibliográficos

ID12208985
AutoresCharlotte Roberts (0000-0002-1612-4214, Durham University, autor de correspondencia)
Año2006
Volumen19
Número2
Páginas345-346
Fecha de publicación2006-07-17
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaSocial History of Medicine (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0951-631X • E-ISSN: 1477-4666
EditorialOxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1093/shm/hkl014
OpenAlexW2076598911
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas9

J. C. Rose and R. H. Steckel (eds), Backbone of History: Health and Nutrition in the Western Hemisphere , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. 654. £19.99. ISBN-10: 0521617448. The study of the health and welfare of our ancestors has many facets. Information on how people reacted and adapted to disease and trauma can also be accessed through a number of sources. However, the primary data derive from the skeletal remains of once living people who were buried in a variety of funerary contexts through time and space. These remains are studied by physical or biological anthropologists with the aim of integrating the biological data for disease derived from those remains with archaeological and historical data, where available, in order to explain the patterns seen. This study, or correctly termed palaeopathology, has had a long history dating back to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when individual human skeletons with disease or trauma (or animal bones) were examined and reported on, often with no consideration of the need to use archaeological/historical data to interpret the data. In the latter half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century, we have seen much development and improvement in the study of palaeopathology with hypothesis and question driven approaches to understanding past health using large skeletal samples. To a certain extent, scholars have made comparisons between health seen in skeletal samples from the same and differing time periods and locations. However, in order to do this with any scientific rigour, data have to be collected in the same standardised way, something that has yet to be agreed on by all researchers

Environmental health · Ethnology · Geography · Western hemisphere · Forensic Anthropology and Bioarchaeology Studies · Medicine · History