Living on the Edge

Harvey, Cohen, and Danforth examine health among the Tipu Maya of Colonial Belize in “Living on the Edge” through the prism of Naum’s (2011) concept of frontiers created under colonialism. The authors embrace a multi-method approach where diverse lines of independent but complementary data are assembled to characterize the health of the 588 Tipu Maya during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Harvey and colleagues’ analysis integrates data from ethnohistory, mortuary patterns, paleodemography, multiple expressions of subadult health (i.e., macro- and micro enamel defects, anemia, Harris Lines), adult health (i.e., specific and non-specific skeletal infection), traumatic injury, and cortical bone maintenance. Hypothesizing that the Tipu population living in the tumultuous Yucatán would demonstrate particularly high rates of skeletal pathological conditions (particularly violent trauma). Harvey and colleagues observed quite the opposite. They argue that the frontier nature of Tipu was itself a contested hybrid space—a kind of borderland, or “Third Space.” Living in this liminal zone between the different political spheres likely allowed for Tipuans to create a distinct identity and social experience that compared to other Colonial Maya communities, shielded them from greater degrees of biological stress and morbidity.

The Social Structuring of Biological Stress in Contact-Era Spanish Florida

Winkler and colleagues investigate the relationship between social status and well-being among the Guale from St. Catherines Island in Spanish Florida (A.D. 1607–1680). Specifically, they examine stress through dental caries, linear enamel hypoplasias, tooth size, and long bone length. Their analysis of mortuary data identifies postcontact social status variation on the basis of funerary offerings and proximity to the altar, and they integrate ethnohistorical evidence to enrich their interpretations. While Winkler and colleagues do not find any direct relationship between stress markers and mortuary offerings, there were spatial relationships between involving well-being and proximity (or distance) from the altar. While the study of colonialism in Spanish Florida has a long history, this work at St. Catherines Island represents new directions involving the spatial dimensions of mortuary and skeletal data on an intracemetery level. Winkler and colleagues conclude with discussions about their findings within the context of Spanish colonialism in Spanish Florida and the implications for bioarchaeology of colonialism.

The Bioarchaeology of Colonialism

Stojanowski assumes the monumental responsibility of integrating the chapters with the themes of Colonized Bodies, Worlds Transformed and proposing some visions and prospects for a postcolonial bioarchaeology and for bioarchaeologists in general. He calls on practitioners to engage with bigger questions and a larger theoretical framework, a bold and ambitious agenda for future bioarchaeological investigations.

Hybridity? Change? Continuity? Survival?

Ortiz and co-authors assemble diverse lines of evidence, namely biodistance data, mortuary patterns, ethnobotanical and zooarchaeological data, dress, and adornment from Magdalena de Cao during the Colonial period. They seek to understand the construction, manipulation, and negotiation of identity at this reducción and, although their sample is small, they find that the people from Magdalena were biometrically and morphologically most similar to Spanish comparative samples, rather than pre-Hispanic samples from the Central Andes. They contrast these observations with archaeological data and argue for evidence of material and cultural hybridity as well as the continuity of local beliefs and practices.

A Glimpse of the Ancien Régime in the French Colonies?

Danforth and colleagues report on demography, diet, mitochondrial DNA, and biological stress in remains from Moran, Mississippi, part of New Biloxi, a French colonial settlement. This study is unique, since at the time of this writing, skeletal remains were identified at only six French sites in the U.S. These authors test whether the historically documented policies implemented under “Code Noir” were actually practiced and enforced at the settlement, segregating the European settlers, enslaved Africans and their descendants, and Native Americans. The authors were surprised by the high number of young males of European ancestry they encountered. Stable isotope data indicated that their diets were dominated by C3 based plants and only one had C4 based diet. Although the human remains were small and few possessed high levels of enamel defects, Danforth and colleagues found low levels of physiological stress. They conclude that either the burials from Moran were not part of New Biloxi and did not suffer to the degree the settlers of New Biloxi suffered or there was strict enforcement of segregation, with the remains of other groups interred elsewhere, and the conditions were not as poor for the Moran group as historical documents about New Biloxi say.

Survival and Abandonment of Indigenous Head-Shaping Practices in Iberian America after European Contact

Tiesler and Zabala synthesize documentary evidence and osteological data to reveal a humanized history of the varied patterns of cultural resilience, adaptation, and elimination of head-shaping practices in Mesoamerica and the Andes. Throughout many regions of the pre-Hispanic Americas, a wide diversity of indigenous body modification practices combined artificial cranial deformation and other practices of identity, status, and gender. Perceived by the Spanish as a non-Western and “uncivilized” practice that was an affront to the new order in corporeal and theological terms, artificial cranial deformation was aggressively targeted for extirpation. Their analysis indicated head shaping was a vital practice of body modification that was assaulted, alienated, and sometimes transformed in creative and unexpected ways eliminated in the various Iberian strongholds of Hispanic America while progressively eliminated in more peripheral settings.

New Kingdom Egyptian Colonialism in Nubia at the Third Cataract

Buzon and Smith depart from some of the chapters in that they examine the relationship between indigenous groups and “more local” foreign powers that are not European but peoples from Ancient Egypt and Nubia in the Third Cataract of the Nile. They bring together mortuary analysis, strontium isotope indicators of geographic origins, biological affinities, skeletal evidence of traumatic injuries and activity patterns, evidence of nutritional deficiencies, and infectious disease from human remains that date before, during, and after the New Kingdom Egyptian occupation of Upper Nubia at the sites of Tombos and Kerma. They note that culture contact and colonial entanglements can be long-term, spanning many millennia and that the Quincentennial/First Contact models, while valuable, are insufficient to examine the transitions in social, political, and economic relations in these colonial contexts. Using the earlier burials from Kerma as the baseline, Buzon and Smith present a nuanced picture of cultural identity at Tombos during and after Egyptian rule, with evidence for the assertion and subsequent revival of Nubian identity, as well as hybridity and continuity of the Egyptian burial practices that predominated during the colonial period.

Transcending Conquest

There are twelve chapters divided into three sections: 1) life, death, and mortuary practices; 2) colonial entanglements, frontiers, and diversity; and 3) identity and the body under colonialism. The first and second sections offer a global perspective on the effects of colonialism and culture contact on community health: indigenous converts living in the frontier, peripheral towns, lower class suburbanites within major urban centers, and recent European immigrants. The contributions move beyond indigenous communities. Class, ethnicity, hybridity and contact longevity (entanglement) flesh out that colonialism was not a one-way process of cultural exchange, health decline, extirpation, or even a bad thing. The chapters’ undercurrent is resilience, with bioarchaeological data providing evidence of dietary and health changes reflecting the various degrees different communities responded and adjusted to colonialism. Colonized Bodies, Worlds Transformed‘ssecond accomplishment is to define bioarchaeology of colonialism that is not focused on diet, disease, and demography. Colonized Bodies, Worlds Transformed successfully justifies the value of diverse approaches that use body modification (Tiesler and Zabala), human skeletal morphology (Buzon and Smith, Danforth et al.,Ortiz et al., Ribot et al.), and ancient DNA (Danforth et al.) to explore what a bioarchaeology of colonialism can offer—the study of identity, hybridity, and ethnogenesis.

Effects of Colonialism from the Perspective of Craniofacial Variation

Ribot, Morris, and Renschler compare two distinct case studies of Africans in order to investigate identity, origin, and population affinity of diasporic populations. In the first case study from Cobern Street in Cape Town, South Africa, the authors integrate stable isotope data and burial data with craniometric variation. In the second case, craniometric data are studied in a sample of Africans from the Morton Collection derived from a group of enslaved people brought to Colonial Cuba. In the Cobern Street setting, they find evidence of both first and second-generation immigrants or imported slaves from sub-Saharan Africa, as well as the possible presence of people of Asian descent (either slaves or immigrants). In contrast with the Cobern Street case study, Ribot and colleagues find high levels of diversity represented in the Morton sample, with some individuals from a single origin within Central, West, or East Africa, some individuals exhibiting multiple possible African origins, and finally, some other individuals exhibiting complex patterns of heterogeneity which may reflect origins and admixture from Asia, Europe, or Mesoamerica.

Imperialism and Physiological Stress in Rome, First to Third Centuries A.D.

Killgrove presents new bioarchaeological perspectives on life in middle Imperial Rome (first–third centuries A.D.). She challenges the core versus periphery models for understanding migration, diet, and disease and questions whether life in urban Rome and the metropolitan area was good with access to resources and sociopolitical capital–or whether life was a “pathopolis” with infectious disease, poor sanitation, and low quality food resources. She compares archaeological and historical narratives with bioarchaeological data and her own work at two cemeteries, Casal Bertone and Castellaccio Europarco to broaden baseline understandings of physiological stress. There is diversity in biological stress levels, however, and much remains to be unearthed to understand the etiology of this diversity. Killgrove explores the explanations for why certain groups, some of them lower class groups, had higher frequencies of physiological stress, citing lead exposure, poor sanitation, and lack of access to clean water and high quality food sources to explain these patterns. This contribution is among a handful of pioneering bioarchaeological investigations of imperial Rome that challenge previous dichotomizing views of life in Rome in the core versus the periphery. Most critically, she integrates the important component of class to the different effects of life under imperial rule.