Bioarchaeology, evolving paradigms

Abstract

Paradigms reflect the context for producing knowledge and interpreting results within scientific research. The earliest paradigms associated with physical anthropology in the United States were tethered to the fixity of characters and essentiality of traits within categories. Thus the earliest physical anthropological explorations of human skeletal and dental remains were typological. Cultural ecology and the new physical anthropology emphasized environmental interactions and evolutionary process. The incorporation of these paradigms informed studies of human skeletal and dental remains within physical anthropology and dislodged the typological approach. Modern paradigms associated with the osteological paradox, social bioarchaeology, quantitative genetics and migration, developmental biology, and cultural adaptation and resilience were granted agency through cultural ecology and the new physical anthropology. The evolution of these paradigms represents unprecedented outgrowth in biological anthropology and provides the epistemological foundations for research that involves the human skeleton and dentition in an archaeological context through the new millennium.