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Climate change is an indisputable threat to human health, especially for societies already confronted with rising social inequality, political and economic uncertainty, and a cascade of concurrent environmental challenges. Archaeological data about past climate and environment provide an important source of evidence about the potential challenges humans face and the long-term outcomes of alternative short-term adaptive strategies. Evidence from well-dated archaeological human skeletons and mummified remains speaks directly to patterns of human health over time through changing circumstances. Here, we describe variation in human epidemiological patterns in the context of past rapid climate change (RCC) events and other periods of past environmental change. Case studies confirm that human communities responded to environmental changes in diverse ways depending on historical, sociocultural, and biological contingencies. Certain factors, such as social inequality and disproportionate access to resources in large, complex societies may influence the probability of major sociopolitical disruptions and reorganizations-commonly known as "collapse." This survey of Holocene human-environmental relations demonstrates how flexibility, variation, and maintenance of Indigenous knowledge can be mitigating factors in the face of environmental challenges. Although contemporary climate change is more rapid and of greater magnitude than the RCC events and other environmental changes we discuss here, these lessons from the past provide clarity about potential priorities for equitable, sustainable development and the constraints of modernity we must address.

This article presents outcomes from a Workshop entitled "Bioarchaeology: Taking Stock and Moving Forward," which was held at Arizona State University (ASU) on March 6-8, 2020. Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the School of Human Evolution and Social Change (ASU), and the Center for Bioarchaeological Research (CBR, ASU), the Workshop's overall goal was to explore reasons why research proposals submitted by bioarchaeologists, both graduate students and established scholars, fared disproportionately poorly within recent NSF Anthropology Program competitions and to offer advice for increasing success. Therefore, this Workshop comprised 43 international scholars and four advanced graduate students with a history of successful grant acquisition, primarily from the United States. Ultimately, we focused on two related aims: (1) best practices for improving research designs and training and (2) evaluating topics of contemporary significance that reverberate through history and beyond as promising trajectories for bioarchaeological research. Among the former were contextual grounding, research question/hypothesis generation, statistical procedures appropriate for small samples and mixed qualitative/quantitative data, the salience of Bayesian methods, and training program content. Topical foci included ethics, social inequality, identity (including intersectionality), climate change, migration, violence, epidemic disease, adaptability/plasticity, the osteological paradox, and the developmental origins of health and disease. Given the profound changes required globally to address decolonization in the 21st century, this concern also entered many formal and informal discussions., (© 2022 American Association of Biological Anthropologists.)

Skeletal and mummified remains from South America have had a significant impact on the progress of paleopathological research. In 1997, John Verano synthesized the state of paleopathological research, identifying trends and highlighting future potentials. The goal of this contribution is to consider Verano's observations on advances in soft tissue paleopathology within the context of the development of the field of mummy studies. As his article was published near the midpoint between the present and the early 1970s, when the modern form of mummy studies began to form, considering his observations in this context allows researchers the opportunity to consider how the field has progressed since the late 1990s., (Copyright © 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

The bioarchaeology of care is a framework through which researchers can begin to infer the level of care an individual may have required based on the presence of paleopathological evidence. To date, all of the research that has employed the framework has been based on evidence derived from skeletal material. This special issue was organized in order to highlight how the analysis of mummified soft tissue, as well as other sources of data commonly associated with mummified remains, such as coprolites and intestinal contents, has the potential to provide valuable insight into the reconstruction of care in the past., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)