Human Remains: Challenges and Future Directions

Abstract

The study of human remains can occasionally reveal how people died in the past; however, much more importantly, it can elucidate key aspects of the living conditions in past societies. For example, such study can offer insights into the diet, demography, health, mobility, kinship and occupational patterns of human groups long past. This information can then be combined with mortuary archaeological, historical, environmental and other contextual data in order to furnish more comprehensive understandings of past lifeways. The current entry offers an overview of the information that can be extracted from the study of human skeletal remains, the key limitations that characterize this study but also the research trends that are becoming increasingly important, largely due to their high contemporary relevance.