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Introduction

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The Bioarchaeology of Space and Place

Abstract

Bioarchaeology in the Maya area has always confronted a series of substantial challenges. The tropical setting and complex mortuary programs of the Maya act to break apart and disintegrate bones, and then scatter them across the landscape where they are documented and recovered archaeologically in an often inconsistent manner. For these reasons, researchers faced with typically small, piecemeal datasets with variable amounts of contextual information have struggled to conform to traditional bioarchaeological approaches that focus on population-specific data for comparative analysis. However, in recent years, the broader field of bioarchaeology has increasingly shifted its focus to include a series of new approaches that not only provide a wider variety of methodological techniques, but importantly that rely heavily on historical, archaeological, and taphonomic contextualization of human bone. Rather than forcing skeletal data into broad or inappropriate analytical categories, greater attention is directed at reconstructing and interpreting aspects of individuals’ lived experiences and of the treatment of bodies following death. Modern mortuary analysis benefits from a much greater contribution by bioarchaeologists in the field, who can decipher taphonomic clues to recognize often subtle aspects of cultural treatments and distinguish these from the effects of natural diagenesis and bioturbation. Often directed by theoretical concepts of the body and personhood, this disciplinary transition has been particularly strong in the Maya area, in large part because both modern and ancient Maya groups have been documented and portrayed in an incredibly rich and diverse set of written and artistic sources spanning almost the last 4,000 years. This volume, which was based on a session organized for the 2011 meetings of the Society for American Archaeology in Sacramento, serves to highlight the creative and interdisciplinary nature of Maya bioarchaeology and more generally to demonstrate the significant potential for bioarchaeology of incorporating nuanced contextual readings of mortuary contexts.

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  1. Department of Anthropology, Michigan State University, 408 Giltner Hall, East Lansing, MI, 48824, USA

    Gabriel D. Wrobel

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    Gabriel D. Wrobel

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Wrobel, G. (2014). Introduction. In: Wrobel, G. (eds) The Bioarchaeology of Space and Place. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-0479-2_1

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