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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.)

Although extensive deposits of disarticulated, commingled human bones are common in the prehispanic Northern Frontier of Mesoamerica, detailed bioarchaeological analyses of them are not. To our knowledge, this article provides the first such analysis of bone from a full residential-ceremonial complex and evaluates multiple hypotheses about its significance, concluding that the bones actively represented interethnic violence as well as other relationships among persons living and dead. Description of these practices is important to the discussion of multiethnic societies because the frontier was a context where urbanism and complexity were emerging and groups with the potential to form multiethnic societies were interacting, possibly in the same ways that groups did before the formation of larger multiethnic city-states in the core of Mesoamerica.

Increasing violence and inter-group conflict in the American Southwest is prevalent into the 13th and 14th centuries AD. In the northern Mogollon region during this time period, the site of Grasshopper Pueblo experienced a shift in social organization as population movements occurred in response to regional stressors. The skeletal remains of 187 adult individuals from the site are analyzed for nonlethal and lethal trauma, musculoskeletal stress markers, and pathology as indicators of changing social dynamics. Nonlethal, healed trauma is present in all adult age groups and both sexes. Approximately one-third (n=63) of the population has healed cranial depression fractures. Females and males are fairly equal in the proportion of cranial injuries incurred; however more females are injured overall when post-cranial injuries are added. Musculoskeletal stress markers do not differ substantially among age groups or between sexes. Heavy musculature development is also similar for groups with and without cranial depression fractures. The results of this study suggest that interpersonal violence was ubiquitous within the pueblo and may have escalated as the community grew in size. Immigrants from other parts of the Southwest may have sought refuge at Grasshopper only to find that the community was experiencing its own social stress., (Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

La Cueva de Dos Cuchillos, near San Francisco de Borja, is a mortuary cave site in Chihuahua, Mexico. Dating to the late Prehistoric period, commingled human skeletal remains were interred in this cave and are thought to belong to the Tarahumara cultural group. Skeletal analyses indicate that a minimum of 10 adults and 7 subadults were interred at this site. Of these, three individuals exhibited signs of perimortem trauma. This included chop marks on one adult male and perimortem neck fractures on two other individuals. In order to investigate these indications of violence and place the remains in the larger social and political landscape, archeological, ethnographic and ethnohistoric data on the Tarahumara and other groups in the region was examined. This included information on intergroup interactions between the Tarahumara and other local cultures. The results of the analysis indicate that the wounds on these three individuals could be consistent with reports of regional intergroup performative violence. Due to the combination of multiple types of evidence in this case, it is suggested that at least some people at this site were victims of either regional intergroup performative violence, or conflict with non-local groups traveling in this important trade corridor., (Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)