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With one million dead, and just as many forced to emigrate, the Irish Famine (1845-52) is among the worst health calamities in history. In the first bioarchaeological study of Great Famine victims, Jonny Geber uses skeletal analysis to tell the story of how and why the Irish Famine decimated the lowest levels of nineteenth century society.

Through an unprecedented multidisciplinary and global approach, this book documents the dramatic 7,000-year history of leprosy using bioarchaeological, clinical, and historical information from a wide variety of contexts, dispelling many longstanding myths about the disease.

Highlights new directions in the study of social identities in past populations. Building on the field-defining research in Bioarchaeology and Identity in the Americas, contributors expand the scope of the subject regionally, theoretically, and methodologically.

Integrates data from researchers in bioarchaeology and forensic anthropology to explain when and why group-targeted violence occurs. By analysing skeletal remains within their broader cultural and historical contexts this volume opens up important new understandings of the underlying social processes that continue to lead to these tragedies.

Using bioanthropological case studies from around the world, this volume explores how people in the past created, maintained, or changed their identities while living on the edge between two or more different spheres of influence.

As researchers become increasingly interested in studying the lives of children in antiquity, this volume argues for the importance of a collaborative biocultural approach. Contributors draw on fields including physiology, archaeology, sociocultural anthropology, paediatrics, and psychology to show that a diversity of research methods is the best way to illuminate the complexities of childhood.

Offers an interdisciplinary view of the migration, mobility, ethnicity, and social identities of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican peoples. In studies that combine bioarchaeology, ethnohistory, isotope data, and dental morphology, contributors demonstrate the rewards of such integrative work when applied to large regional questions of population history.

Brings together experts in archaeology and bioarchaeology to examine continuity and change in ancient Arabian mortuary practices. While most previous investigations have been limited geographically to Egypt and the Levant, this volume focuses on the lesser-studied southeastern Arabian Peninsula.