Bioarchaeology: a synthetic approach

Abstract

When one reads archaeological publications on funerary remains, one might think that the deceased was sacrificed to accompany the burial of a pot [34]. One could easily blame archaeologists for this predicament, but it also has its roots in a research tradition within biological anthropology that tends to provide biological data to the archaeologist who provides the social and cultural meaning. Due to empirical divergence this approach encourages archaeologists and anthropologists tend to address parallel rather than synthetic questions. Burials are often only used to develop a notion of time-successive funerary traditions that support a chronological framework. This means that the event represented in the burial is left underdeveloped or erroneously identified as a tradition. Bioarchaeology addresses archaeological questions through a contextual approach combining the biological identity of the deceased with their cultural and archaeological context. It therefore aims to synthesise the biological and cultural aspects of the funerary record to address archaeological questions and better place burials in their cultural, social, and political context. The goal of this treatment is to introduce bioarchaeology, its origin and purpose, and to attempt to place such studies within French archaeological and anthropological scholarship.