Bioarchaeology of the Indus Valley Civilization: Biological Affinities, Paleopathology, and Chemical Analyses

The term “bioarchaeology” has its intellectual origins in the United Kingdom and the United States in the 1970s. Its meaning has evolved over the years (see Buikstra, 2006: xvii–xix), but it is now generally agreed to refer to reconstructions of past people’s lives based on a multidisciplinary analysis of archaeological human remains. Research designs are based on individual‐ or population‐level data; bioarchaeologists can focus either on the life histories of individuals or the characteristics of past populations. Bioarchaeology is one of the few fields of inquiry that emphasizes integration of three subdisciplines of anthropology: biological anthropology, archaeology, and sociocultural anthropology. Data from human skeletal remains are contextualized within the ecological, social, and cultural contexts of the past human lives using the archaeological record, but inferences and explanations increasingly consider social and cultural processes. Topics often considered in bioarchaeology include: (1) the biological relationships within and between past populations, (2) health and disease, (3) demography, (4) diet, (5) migration, (6) habitual activity patterns, (7) characteristics of growth and development, and (8) ante‐ and postmortem cultural modifications of the dead. State‐of‐the‐art technologies, such as high‐resolution radiography, computed tomography, isotopic and ancient DNA (aDNA) analyses are now routinely applied to address many of these research questions. ChAPter 11