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The Poetics of Violence in Afroeurasian Bioarchaeology

  • Book
  • May 2024

Overview

Editors:
  1. Roselyn A. Campbell

    1. University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, USA

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  2. Anna J. Osterholtz

    1. Mississippi State University, Starkville, USA

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  • Examines how the bony consequences of violent performance can be a mechanism for identity formation and negotiation
  • First volume to offer direct physical evidence for how violence was enacted and understood within different societies
  • Includes case studies of the application of poetics theory from Europe, Asia, and Africa

Part of the book series: Bioarchaeology and Social Theory (BST)

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Keywords

  • Bioarchaeology of Violence
  • Poetics Theory
  • Poetics of Violence
  • Old World Archaeology
  • Bioarchaeology of the Eastern Hemisphere
  • Neil Whitehead concept of poetics
  • Poetics of Violence in the Early Neolithic
  • Mass Killings and their Possible Biocultural Contexts
  • Copper Age mass burial assemblage
  • Violence in Iron Age Denmark
  • Violence in Ancient Egypt
  • Performative violence and the formation of social structure
  • Skeletal evidence of human sacrifice
  • violence during the Neolithic to the Late Iron Age Thailand
  • trade and violence Silk Road

About this book

This volume explores violence in bioarchaeological case studies from various cultures, geographic regions, and time periods throughout the Eastern Hemisphere through the lens of Neil Whitehead's concept of poetics. It emphasizes the role and power of performance and ritual in violent acts, and how different types of violence are used within societies. Whitehead’s poetics of violence model has primarily been applied to Western Hemisphere assemblages and indigenous groups, and this is the first volume dedicated to the application of this theoretical model to Europe, Asia, and Africa.

Developed from a symposium organized at the American Association of Physical Anthropologists annual meeting in 2018, this volume keeps a tight focus on the direct link between physical evidence for violence in human remains and the contextualized interpretations of how that violence may have functioned within an individual’s society. This type of theoretical interpretation, which treats violence as ameaningful act firmly embedded within its cultural context, rather than as an aberration, is rarely applied to archaeological assemblages and human remains from the Eastern Hemisphere. This is the first volume to offer direct physical evidence for how violence was enacted and understood within different societies in the past. This volume aims to make these rigorous theoretical studies available to students and professionals in archaeology, anthropology, and bioarchaeology, and to provide a model for other researchers to interpret evidence of violence in human remains from archaeological contexts.

Editors and Affiliations

  • University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, USA

    Roselyn A. Campbell

  • Mississippi State University, Starkville, USA

    Anna J. Osterholtz

About the editors

Roselyn A. Campbell received her PhD in Archaeology from the Cotsen Institute at UCLA. She has conducted archaeological and bioarchaeological fieldwork in Egypt, Peru, Spain, Ethiopia, the U.K., and the western United States. Her research encompasses anthropological approaches to violence and trauma in the past, the history and evolution of cancer in hominin remains, ancient Egyptian archaeology and funerary practices, health and disease in the past, and portrayals of archaeology in popular culture. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in Biological Anthropology at the University of California, Riverside, as well as the Assistant Director of the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy and the co-founder and Executive Director of the Paleo-oncology Research Organization.

Anna J. Osterholtz received her PhD from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She has excavated and analyzed skeletal remains from Europe (Croatia, Romania, and Cyprus), the Near East (the UAE, Jordan, and Israel), and the Americas (Mexico, Belize, and the US), focusing on the social role of violent performance and mortuary processing in identity formation and negotiation. She is also a specialist in the analysis of commingled and fragmentary bone assemblages. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Biological Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology and Middle Eastern Cultures at Mississippi State University. 

Bibliographic Information

  • Book Title: The Poetics of Violence in Afroeurasian Bioarchaeology

  • Editors: Roselyn A. Campbell, Anna J. Osterholtz

  • Series Title: Bioarchaeology and Social Theory

  • Publisher: Springer Cham

  • eBook Packages: History, History (R0)

  • Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024

  • Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-031-49718-6Due: 13 June 2024

  • Softcover ISBN: 978-3-031-49721-6Due: 13 June 2024

  • eBook ISBN: 978-3-031-49719-3Due: 13 June 2024

  • Series ISSN: 2567-6776

  • Series E-ISSN: 2567-6814

  • Edition Number: 1

  • Number of Pages: XV, 281

  • Number of Illustrations: 17 b/w illustrations, 33 illustrations in colour

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