Mesoamerican Osteobiographies

A rapidly growing approach within bioarchaeology that focuses on understanding people of the past in their sociocultural contexts

Drawing from a variety of sites throughout Mesoamerica, this volume presents a collection of osteobiographies, which analyze skeletons and their surroundings alongside historical, archaeological, ethnographic, and other contextual data to better understand the life experiences of individuals. This approach allows for a focus on the processes by which individual social identities are created, negotiated, and altered.

In these chapters, contributors address what individual bodies reveal about their societies, what burials can tell us about the ways people were remembered, and what information about disease and health indicates about lifestyles. Each case study compiles a range of available data to gain insights into a specific time and place. Re-creating the lives of individuals from locations in Belize, Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras, the volume includes descriptions of everyday activities, the social roles of priests and merchants, memorial practices, and many other spheres of human life.

Mesoamerican Osteobiographies demonstrates how the diverse, culturally laden, and complex archaeological record of Mesoamerica can uniquely contribute to bioarchaeology, in part due to the region’s many unusual and elaborate mortuary contexts. The different contributions in this volume show that the osteobiography approach can be integrated into existing research frameworks, both in Mesoamerica and around the world, to answer meaningful biocultural questions about the lives and deaths of ancient people.