Theme:
5. All Roads Lead to Rome: Multiscalar Interactions
Session format:
Regular session
Title:
Indicators of Nonprivileged Populations from Funerary Contexts: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Assessing Disparities in Past Populations
Content:
The social status of past populations can be inferred from a wide range of archaeological indicators such as mortuary analysis (location and characteristics of the graves), diet (through archaeobotany and archaeozoology), health (linked to nutrition or malnutrition), and work patterns (deduced from osteological material). All these indicators show differentiated and unequal access to strategic resources between individuals, which creates different social statuses within a population. We therefore call ‘privileged’ those who hold the capacity to rule over the majority. In contrast, the large majority of the population. Commonly, burial complexes represent the most abundant source of information for the assessment of the social position and inequality of individuals in a society. The other main source of information comes from the bioarchaeological analysis of human remains. The study of human bones can inform us about the life patterns of the individuals (heavy physical work or equestrian practices among others), signs of physiological stress related to poor and deficient diets (e.g., caries, dental hypoplasia, cribra orbitalia, and cribra cranii, rachitis), signs of deficient hygiene levels, and even the causes of death. The analysis of dietary stable isotopes can also complement osteological analysis. In addition, the paleogenomics analysis can link the previous indicators to the origin of the individuals, and family connections or even depict the presence of hereditary diseases, representing a very effective connection between genetics and archeology. We invite contributions that cover topics about privileged and unprivileged societies using different bioarchaeological, genetic, and archaeological methods, such as funerary archaeology, genetic analyses, dietary stable isotope analyses (δ¹³C and δ¹⁵N), and various osteological methods for assessing the life conditions the analyzed individuals have lived in. We are most interested in the contributions with a specific focus on the period from the 3rd to the 8th Century AD and post-classical times.
Keywords:
Inequality, dietary stable isotopes, paleogenomics, paleopathology, funerary archaeology, bioarchaeology
Session associated with MERC:
no
Session associated with CIfA:
no
Session associated with SAfA:
no
Session associated with CAA:
no
Session associated with DGUF:
no
Session associated with other:
Main organiser:
Pere Gelabert (Austria) 1
Co-organisers:
Maurizio Marinato (Italy) 2
Brina Zagorc (Austria) 1
Mario Novak (Croatia) 3
Affiliations:
1. University of Vienna
2. Università degli Studi di Padova
3. The Institute for Anthropological Research
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