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This volume brings together the latest approaches in bioarchaeology in the study of sex and gender. Archaeologists have long used skeletal remains to identify gender. Contemporary bioarchaeologists, however, have begun to challenge the theoretical and methodological basis for sex assignment from the skeleton. Simultaneously, they have started to consider the cultural construction of the gendered body and gender roles, recognizing the body as uniquely fashioned from the interaction of biological, social, and environmental factors. As the contributors to this volume reveal, combining skeletal data with contextual information can provide a richer understanding of life in the past.

This volume uses bioarchaeological remains to examine the complexities and diversity of past socio-sexual lives. This book does not begin with the presumption that certain aspects of sex, gender, and sexuality are universal and longstanding. Rather, the case studies within—extend from Neolithic Europe to pre-Columbian Mesoamerica to the nineteenth-century United States—highlight the importance of culturally and historically contextualizing socio-sexual beliefs and practices.The Bioarchaeology of Socio-Sexual Lives highlights a major shortcoming in many scholarly and popular presentations of past socio-sexual lives. They reveal little about the ancient or historic group under study and much about Western society's modern state of heteronormative affairs. To interrogate commonsensical thinking about socio-sexual identities and interactions, this volume draws from critical feminist and queer studies. Reciprocally, bioarchaeological studies extend social theorizing about sex, gender, and sexuality that emphasizes the modern, conceptual, and discursive. Ultimately, The Bioarchaeology of Socio-Sexual Lives invites readers to think more deeply about humanity's diversity, the naturalization of culture, and the past's presentation in mass-media communications.

Archaeology has long dealt with issues of identity, and especially with ethnicity, with modern approaches emphasising dynamic and fluid social construction. The archaeology of the Iron Age in particular has engendered much debate on the topic of ethnicity, fuelled by the first availability of written sources alongside the archaeological evidence which has led many researchers to associate the features they excavate with populations named by Greek or Latin writers. Some archaeological traditions have had their entire structure built around notions of ethnicity, around the relationships existing between large groups of people conceived together as forming unitary ethnic units. On the other hand, partly influenced by anthropological studies, other scholars have written forcefully against Iron Age ethnic constructions, such as the Celts.The 24 contributions to this volume focus on the south east Europe, where the Iron Age has, until recently, been populated with numerous ethnic groups with which specific material culture forms have been associated. The first section is devoted to the core geographical area of south east Europe: Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania, Serbia and Slovenia, as well as Albania and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. The following three sections allow comparison with regions further to the west and the south west with contributions on central and western Europe, the British Isles and the Italian peninsula. The volume concludes with four papers which provide more synthetic statements that cut across geographical boundaries, the final contributions bringing together some of the key themes of the volume. The wide array of approaches to identity presented here reflects the continuing debate on how to integrate material culture, protohistoric evidence (largely classical authors looking in on first millennium BC societies) and the impact of recent nationalistic agendas.

This volume tackles the fundamental and broad-scale questions concerning the spread of early animal herding from its origins in the Near East into Europe beginning in the mid-10th millennium BC. Original work by more than 30 leading international researchers synthesizes of our current knowledge about the origins and spread of animal domestication. In this comprehensive book, the zooarchaeological record and discussions of the evolution and development of Neolithic stock-keeping take center stage in the debate over the profound effects of the Neolithic revolution on both our biological and cultural evolution.

Ancient DNA Typing is a comprehensive manual about the analysis of ancient and degraded DNA. It is an equally useful textbook and working tool for various disciplines such as: Anthropology, Archaeology, Forensic Medicine, Conservation Biology, Environmental Sciences and Food Engineering.The reader benefits from a clear division of strategies, methods and applications with many interesting examples of the analysis of historic skeletal and cultural remains. The book contains a detailed protocol chapter which serves as a lab manual with the most important methods for DNA extraction, PCR and electrophoretic analysis of degraded samples. The appendix helps to set up a PCR lab specializing in ancient DNA research and answers the most frequent questions concerning technical problems in investigations of degraded DNA.

In 2001, first reports of the human draft genome were published. Since then, genomes of many other organisms have been sequenced, including several primate species: the chimpanzee, rhesus macaque, gorilla, orangutan, gibbon, baboon, marmoset, tarsier, galago, lemur, and more recently Neanderthals. In a new era of'post-genome biology', scientists now have the vast amount of information revealed by genome research to confront one of the most challenging, fundamental questions in primatology and anthropology: What makes us human? This volume comprises a collection of articles on a variety of topics relevant to primate genomes, including evolution, human origins, genome structure, chromosome genomics, and bioinformatics. The book covers the cutting-edge research in molecular primatology and provides great insights into the functional diversity of primates. This valuable collection will benefit researchers and students, including primatologists, anthropologists, molecular biologists, evolutionary biologists, and animal behaviorists.

AOJA is an multilingual European project that collect studies in the fields of physical and cultural anthropology, and of the disciplines related to. It offers original researches by scholars of merit and young researchers, with particular attention to proposals by Asian and developing countries authors.

This heavily-illustrated book covers recent developments in archaeometry and offers a multidisciplinary approach to reconstructing complex cultural histories. It also presents a detailed history of human development in South America's Nasca region.

First published in 2004. The International Bibliography of the Social Sciences is an annual four volume publication covering Economics, Political Science, Sociology and Anthropology. It is compiled by the British Library of Political and Economic Science under the auspices of the International Committee for Social Science Information and Documentation. Some 100,000 articles (from over 2,700 journals) and 20,000 books are scanned each year in the process of compiling the International Bibliography. Coverage is international with publications in over 70 languages from more than 60 countries. All titles are given in their original language and in English translation