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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.

Archaeological and ethnographic accounts of violence in small-scale societies represent a baseline for thinking about the ways that violence and masculinity originated and evolved, becoming entwine...

Zoonotic diseases—human diseases of animal origin—represent one of the world's greatest health challenges, both today and in the past. Since the Neolithic, zoonotic diseases have been one of the major factors shaping and influencing human adaptation. Archaeology is ideally situated to provide the long view on human–animal–pathogen relationships through combining cultural, environmental and biological datasets, yet long‐term studies of linked human and animal records have often been overlooked and undertheorized. The seven papers in this special issue “Zoonotic diseases: New directions in human–animal pathology” cover a range of diseases caused by bacterial, viral, and parasitic pathogens, from case studies drawn from across Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas. They speak to the diversity of human–animal–environment interactions that shaped disease emergence and transmission. They also review methodological advancements relating to disease identification and interpretation and discuss interdisciplinary approaches to effectively investigate these complex processes in the past. This introduction highlights their key themes and outcomes and identifies research priorities moving forward.

The bioarchaeological record has an abundance of scientific evidence based on skeletal indicators of trauma to argue for a long history of internal and external group conflict. However, the findings also suggest variability, nuance, and unevenness in the type, use, and meaning of violence across time and space and therefore defy generalizations or easy quantification. Documenting violence-related behaviors provides an overview of the often unique and sometimes patterned cultural use of violence. Violence (lethal and nonlethal) is often associated with social spheres of influence and power connected to daily life such as subsistence intensification, specialization, competition for scarce resources, climate, population density, territorial protection and presence of immigrants, to name just a few. By using fine-grained biocultural analyses that interrogate trauma data in particular places at particular times in reconstructed archaeological contexts, a more comprehensive view into the histories and experiences of violence emerges. Moreover, identifying culturally specific patterns related to age, sex, and social status provide an increasingly complex picture of early small-scale groups. Some forms of ritual violence also have restorative and regenerative aspects that strengthen community identity. Bioarchaeological data can shed light on the ways that violence becomes part of a given cultural landscape. Viewed in a biocultural context, evidence of osteological trauma provides rich insights into social relationships and the many ways that violence is embedded within those relationships.

This article identifies activity-related changes to, traumatic injuries on, and pathological conditions of the human remains of the Chinese immigrants from Carlin, Nevada, who were interred between 1885 and 1923. Chinese males came to the Americas to work as railroad laborers and miners, and when the railroad was completed many went home, but some found work in small towns. In Carlin, Chinese immigrants were employed as merchants, shopkeepers, cooks, laundry workers, and a variety of other occupations. Within this immigrant group, there were differences in the degree of physical labor each individual experienced. According to historical records, this was a time of increasing anti-Chinese sentiments, and there are accounts of intergroup conflict with the politically dominant settlers. However, little is known about the biological correlates of this sociopolitical inequality. An analysis of these correlates is assessed as a means for understanding patterns of social, economic, and political inequality between these immigrants and the local population. The findings demonstrate that socioeconomic and political inequality experienced by the Carlin individuals resulted in high rates of activity-induced changes, trauma, and pathological conditions. Furthermore, examination of the relationship between cranial trauma and other types of skeletal injuries supports research that has shown trauma to the head can predispose people to other types of trauma (accidental or deliberate). The results support the historical accounts of the time that indicate hard physical labor, accidental or deliberate trauma, and interpersonal conflict were part of the life history of this group of Chinese immigrants.

Significance Persistent interethnic violence has affected some global regions for centuries. Recent research reveals that major outbreaks are often prevented or limited by creative social action. In the prehispanic Northern Frontier of Mesoamerica, approximately 500–900 C.E., people of different ethnic backgrounds struggled for standing in a shifting sociopolitical landscape. Evidence is consistent with long-term social violence, but also with the use of the dead to communicate a range of symbolic messages. Complex arrays of human skeletal material commemorated past physical conflicts, possibly discouraging their repetition, while also connecting the living symbolically with a metaphysical realm inhabited by ancestors and deities. This article highlights the postmortem agency of the dead and illustrates their roles in structuring social relations.

Violence and the role of violence have emerged recently as topics important to understanding the prehistory of the northern Southwest. Recent excavations at Castle Rock and Sand Canyon pueblos, two thirteenth-century sites in the Mesa Verde region of southwestern Colorado, bring new data to bear on these subjects. Field contexts and the results of bone and myoglobin analyses indicate that nonlethal and lethal violence occurred in both of these villages and that additional modifications to bodies and bones occurred near the time of death. Around A.D. 1280, at least eight individuals at Sand Canyon Pueblo died violently, and at least 41 individuals died at Castle Rock. During or after the warfare event that ended the occupation of Castle Rock, some bodies were dismembered, bones were broken, crushed, and heat altered; a few bones were reamed, and the end of one bone was polished. Several incidents of violence and probable anthropophagy (the consumption of human flesh) have been documented in the Mesa Verde region for the mid-A.D. 1100s; however, this analysis of violent events in the late A.D. 1200s establishes a critical link between probable anthropophagy and warfare, and links both with the depopulation of the region.

Evidence of human violence in the Northern San Juan region of the American Southwest has stimulated a variety of inferences, including interpersonal strife, cannibalism, raiding, and warfare. We summarize existing information on regional violence and discuss new research results from excavations in the Sand Canyon locality. The analysis explores similarities and differences in patterns of violent deaths through time and across the region and explains these similarities and differences with respect to population movement and changing political systems.

The article by Billman et al. contributes to a growing body of data that demonstrates the complex variability of the Pueblo world during the twelfth century. Although the article's title promises a comprehensive review of major cultural and environmental processes (drought, warfare, cannibalism, regional interactions), relatively little theory regarding these processes informs their research design, and much of their interpretation is based on weak inferences. Their empirical data are not used to test alternative hypotheses or rigorously examine expectations derived from modeling. Dynamic aspects of cultural patterns relating to migration, settlement, environment, abandonment, mortuary behaviors, conflict, and group identity are implicated in their research but are not adequately contextualized. Our response to the study by Billman et al. is intended to provide a critical yet constructive commentary, propose fresh ways of thinking about what assemblages of disarticulated and broken bones might mean, and reformulate how research questions are being asked.

Science or Sacrilege: Native Americans, Archaeology and the Law. 1996. 60 minutes, color. video by Nicholas Nicastro. For more information contact University of California Extension Center for Media and Independent Learning, Berkeley, CA 94704 (510/624-0460).

Information about the health status of the earliest inhabitants of North America provides a chronology of health problems that spans more than a thousand years. Studies of disease in ancient times add an important dimension to our understanding of the life struggles of a largely unknown past. In this article, we provide a brief overview of health conditions and quality of life in North America before contact and colonization. Data on health in ancient societies are inferred from the analysis of a wide range of archaeologic materials, but human bones and teeth form by far the largest body of evidence. For several regions in the United States, there are health chronologies spanning hundreds of years. For example, Walker, using a multimethod approach involving the analysis of skeletal lesions and detailed reconstruction of the environment, demonstrated that Indians of southern California who lived in marginal island environments (about 800 BC to AD 1150) showed greater evidence of health problems than those who lived on the mainland, where food was more abundant and diverse.1 He also showed increased rates of infectious diseases over time. There has been a shift toward conducting population-level analyses that shed light on epidemiologic characteristics of the health of ancient societies by providing frequencies and patterning of disease within and between populations.2 Much of the recent paleopathology literature emphasizes temporal and spatial variability in patterns of disease and the shift in many parts of North America at different times from an economy based on gathering and hunting to agriculture. Although not all groups in North America adopted full-blown maize agriculture, many did, and it has been the focus of intense debate.2 The study of North American archaeologic remains has been under protest by native groups because historically they have had little say over the excavation and curatorship of their ancestors' remains.3 These protests led to legislation passed in 1990 entitled the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (US Public Law 101-601). This law ensures that Native Americans have the final say regarding the nature of studies that rely on ancestral and historic human remains. In many ways, this legislation has redefined the nature of archaeologic research in the United States and has opened new venues of study as Native Americans and anthropologists have begun working together to reconstruct the past.4

Microscopic analysis of bone is used to examine the physiological processes which underlie skeletal indicators of nutritional deficiency and poor health. Microradiographs were made from 185 adult human femora from archeological cemeteries in Sudancese Nubia. A variety of microstructural features—especially the density and morphology of osteons—provided information on rates of remodeling and mineralization. Among the Nubian burials, the youngest and oldest adult females show the strongest indications of problems with bone maintenance. These problems are related to nutritional stress among the reproducing young females and aging in older females. In addition, the important role of collagen in bone formation and turnover is discussed as an important factor to be considered in isotopic and elemental analyses of bone.

Nubian bone recovered from an X-group cemetery (A.D. 350 to 550) exhibits a pattern of fluorescence identical to that of modern tetracycline-labeled bone. When it is viewed under ultraviolet light at 490 angstroms, fluorophors are visible as a characteristic yellow-green fluorescence on surfaces that were actively mineralizing at the time of exposure. Contamination of stored grains provided the proper environment for cultivation of tetracycline-producing Streptomycetes. Evidence for exposure to antibiotics in an archeological population is relevant to studies of the evolution of R factors and to the interpretation of health and disease within the population.

by DEBRA L. MARTIN, ALAN H. GOODMAN, and GEORGE J. ARMELAGOS Department of Anthropology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Mass. 01003, U.S.A. 20 I 81 Pfeiffer (CA 21:793-94) has presented a comparison of age-atdeath estimates of six adults from a Late Archaic burial site in Ontario. Age estimates based on macroscopic observations of the pubic symphyses are compared with those based on microstructural observations of undecalcified thin sections from femoral midshafts. By examining the "degree of correspondence" of the microstructural age estimates with estimates by the more traditional method, Pfeiffer attempts to determine the accuracy of the microscopic technique. She concludes that when macroscopic analysis is impossible "one can confidently substitute microstructural age estimates for the more traditional pubic-symphysis age estimates" (p. 793). We shall show that the data presented do not support this conclusion and attempt to explain the lack of concordance between age estimates. At issue are problems of small sample size, Pfeiffer's interpretation of these data, problems in the use of the aging technique, and lack of concern with factors other than age which may affect the microstructure of compact bone. Our purpose is not to argue that microstructure should not be used for aging, but rather to point out that it may be affected by factors such as nutrition and disease stress. Variation in age estimates such as Pfeiffer presents for older individuals supports a tentative hypothesis that such stresses may have been active in the population under study. Pfeiffer's data include results of pubic-symphysis age estimation by two methods (table 1), one based on the McKern and Stewart (1957) methodology and the other on the Gilbert and McKern (1973) standards. These are compared with femoral-microstructural age estimates based on the norms of Ahlqvist and Damsten (1969). Pfeiffer contends that the macrostructural ages determined from the pubic symphyses are comparable with the microstructural ages. She presents results of a t-test comparing microstructural ages with the less variant Gilbert and McKern macroscopic ages and then, at another point, cites a comparable McKern and Stewart age. She does not present the results of a comparison of microstructural ages with the McKern and Stewart macroscopic ages. This is unfortunate, since the mean presented for the McKern and Stewart ages (31.3 in table 1) is incorrect. We calculate a mean of 30.3 years, 3.7 years less than the microstructural mean age. Our comparison of the McKern and Stewart ages with the microscopic ages produced a Student's t = 2.02 (two-tail, p < .10, d.f. = 8). Such a small probability with such a small sample size gives reason for concern. The microstructural ages may be significantly overestimated. When Pfeiffer's data are examined more closely, one sees that the differences between microstructural and macrostructural ages are highly variable by individual; the range of differences extends from 0.2 to 14.1 years. Struck by the variability in age estimates generally found in the older individuals, we compared the microstructural ages of three older individuals (Burials 3, 10, and 19) with their macroscopic ages by the two standards. Both comparisons yielded highly significant t values (t = 3.48 for McKern and Stewart [two-tail, p ? .05] and t = 3.23 for