Conclusion

Frontiers and borders are likely to remain significant on the world stage in the twenty-first century in political, economic, and sociocultural contexts. Frontiers are dynamic areas where identities are created, contested, maintained, negotiated, or manipulated. Different aspects of frontiers and borders are illustrated in this volume, and by taking the border and the frontier as a point of departure, this collection of studies seeks to shift the analytical focus from center to someplace else, from locus of power to places of contested power, and from places with presumed stability to places of presumed disorder, tension, and instability. There is much work in this area for bioarchaeologists, and with this volume we hope to concurrently open more venues to frontiers and borders studies and to raise many more questions.

Living on the Border

Tombos is located at the Third Cataract of the Nile River in modern-day Sudan and marks an important literal and figurative boundary between Egyptian and Nubian interaction. During the New Kingdom Period (1400–1050 BCE), the cemetery at Tombos in Upper Nubia exhibits the use of Egyptian mortuary practices, including monumental pyramid complexes, likely used by both immigrant Egyptians and local Nubians. Despite the influence of Egyptian culture during this colonial period, there are several public displays of Nubian identity in burial practices found at Tombos. This mixture of Egyptian and Nubian burial practices extends into the postcolonial period at Tombos. Paleopathological analyses indicate that the Nubian and Egyptian individuals living at colonial Tombos enjoyed access to nutritional food resources and displayed low levels of skeletal markers of infection, traumatic injury, and strenuous physical activity. While the Tombos sample is likely not representative of all Egyptian-Nubian interaction during the New Kingdom, the individuals examined appear to have benefited from the relationship. In contrast with many situations of frontier interaction, the bioarchaeological evidence indicates a relatively peaceful coexistence between Egyptians and Nubians at Tombos, and the construction of a new biologically and culturally entangled community.

Across the River

The author seeks to contribute to the field of frontier studies with bioarchaeological data, in the hopes of understanding how living in relative proximity, but under different sociopolitical organizations, may affect health. The goal of this research is to examine differences in overall health between two groups that have been characterized in the literature as “Romans” and “barbarians.” The research uses skeletal remains to address how the daily life of people under Roman-Byzantine control compared to that of their neighbors, the “barbarians” to the north. Comparing two contemporaneous populations from the territory of modern Romania—and dating from the third to the sixth centuries CE—the study examines health status and traumatic injuries. One collection comes from the territory under Roman-Byzantine control, the site of Ibida (Slava Rusă) from the Roman province of Scythia Minor, and the other originates from the Târgşor site, located to the north of the Danube frontier, in what was considered the “barbaricum.” Separated by a definite frontier, the Danube River, meant to (at least ideologically) segregate them to their divided worlds, these populations might have been more interconnected than the carefully promulgated imperial doctrine would have us believe.

Marginalized Motherhood

This chapter addresses the notion of frontier by presenting our work from a Hungarian-speaking Székely community located at the eastern edge of Transylvania. Few bioarchaeologists are familiar with the Székely population, and virtually all lines of bioarchaeological inquiry are located at the frontier of knowledge production in this area. While our local colleagues working across this region have a rich, multidisciplinary and nuanced understanding of Székely history, few scholars from outside the region are familiar with the population. The chapter describes the discovery of a regionally unique mortuary context discovered during salvage excavations in 2007. Skeletal remains of seventy individuals dated to the seventeenth century CE were recovered from inside of a Reform Church in a small Székely village. Bioarchaeological analyses provide an opportunity to better understand questions related to the bioarchaeology of fetuses, infants and children, maternal health and physiological stress during pregnancy, and religious ideology related to infant death and the archaeology of grief.

Queering Prehistory on the Frontier

The Mierzanowice Culture (MC) is the name given to an archaeological complex that existed from about 2400/2300–1600 BCE, in the Early Bronze Age of Central Europe. Mierzanowice Culture cemeteries provide a unique opportunity to investigate and theorize the relationship between sex and gender in prehistory, due to their tradition of mirror-opposite, seemingly sex-differentiated burials. This chapter questions interpretations of these burial characteristics in terms of rigid, sex-based binaries, and investigates whether they may correspond more closely with social constructions of identity, including gender and status. Furthermore, it explores the relationship between salient biological and social categories and health in Mierzanowice communities. Although the case study explored in this chapter was based on a small sample of individuals, a few patterns have begun to emerge. Certain aspects of burial orientations may correspond more to gender than to sex. Furthermore, it is not out of the realm of possibility that some atypical burial orientations may correspond to a non-binary gender category. This preliminary study also indicated that while all individuals were at fairly equal risk of perimortem trauma, females were more likely than males to incur antemortem trauma.

Introduction

Bioarchaeology is a powerful tool that brings invaluable empirical data on health and trauma, as well as interpretation to frontier and border studies. The studies included in the volume offer a view of border and frontier existence from the ground up—how ordinary people ascribe, deny, or assume cultural differences, and how they actively enact and modify their notions of belonging and identity within specific temporal-spatial contexts. The frontier type varies based on what each author is exploring and on the specific aspect the researchers chose to investigate in each chapter. Therefore, the aim of this volume is to examine the multitude of meanings and definitions borders and frontiers can have, while the theme of complexity, in one form or another, permeates throughout all the essays in this volume.

A Mass Grave outside the Walls

This chapter focuses on the Roman frontier province of Scythia Minor during the fourth–sixth centuries CE, in an attempt to get a glimpse of how life on the frontier might have worked. In the fourth century, Ibida, a major urban center in the northern part of Scythia Minor, was the largest settlement after the capital Tomis. A non-specific mortuary assemblage, known as feature M141, was identified in 2008 when scattered human remains were discovered during the archaeological investigation of the foundation of the walled enclosure’s tenth tower. The way these human remains were processed and treated in a mortuary context fundamentally differs from the other two burial assemblages found at the site. There is compelling evidence that the remains of these individuals were subjected to a violent, irreverent, and unceremonious treatment, instead of the prescribed funerary ceremony and interment common in Scythia Minor during the late Roman Empire.

Life on the Northern Frontier

This chapter discusses the bioarchaeological evidence for biological stress in two eleventh-century cemetery populations from Northern Iceland. Iceland was initially settled in ninth century CE, and its marginal location and challenging sub-arctic climatic conditions provided the first generations of settlers with a host of environmental and social challenges. The results of our analysis point to a population that endured periodic hardships as evidenced by high rate of infant death and the presence of various stress markers in the skeletal material. Conversely, the evidence also points to a people successfully counteracting the negative aspects of their physical environment by introducing various social and cultural buffering mechanisms to ensure their survival.

Isotopes, Migration, and Sex

The Egyptian oases were dynamic borderlands where culture, economic practices, and politics diverged from the Nile Valley. The cultural identities of the individuals inhabiting these frontiers during the Romano-Christian era (50–450CE) are predominantly lost to history, save for scant textual sources that describe socioeconomic activities. In this chapter, we explore these identities further by utilizing stable oxygen isotope analysis in conjunction with textual sources to discuss the mobility of adults from the Kellis 2 Cemetery, Dakhleh Oasis, Egypt. Results from this analysis indicate females came from isotopically similar environments and were stationary, while males were migrating more frequently for work-related activities. These data complement the limited textual evidence allowing for more detailed reconstruction of economics, kinship, and residence patterns during the Romano-Christian era, and lend to a definition of Egyptian frontier identity.

Funerary Practice and Local Interaction on the Imperial Frontier, First Century CE

The rugged, mountainous landscapes dividing the Parthian and Roman Empires routinely served as an arena for military campaigns and violent conflict between empires competing for territorial expansion. Local alliances were cyclically forged, broken, and mended, yet these interactions are rarely represented in the archaeological record. How were military campaigns conducted in the Caucasus frontier? How did foreign soldiers interact with local communities? This chapter examines the case study of an unusual first century CE burial that integrates aspects of both Roman and Parthian funerary practice and is associated with large-scale feasting events at the site of Oğlanqala in Naxçıvan, Azerbaijan. By integrating osteological and isotopic analyses with a regional approach to funerary practice, this chapter sheds light on underrepresented local experiences and intersectional identities in response to Roman campaigns.