Transcending Conquest

Abstract

There are twelve chapters divided into three sections: 1) life, death, and mortuary practices; 2) colonial entanglements, frontiers, and diversity; and 3) identity and the body under colonialism. The first and second sections offer a global perspective on the effects of colonialism and culture contact on community health: indigenous converts living in the frontier, peripheral towns, lower class suburbanites within major urban centers, and recent European immigrants. The contributions move beyond indigenous communities. Class, ethnicity, hybridity and contact longevity (entanglement) flesh out that colonialism was not a one-way process of cultural exchange, health decline, extirpation, or even a bad thing. The chapters’ undercurrent is resilience, with bioarchaeological data providing evidence of dietary and health changes reflecting the various degrees different communities responded and adjusted to colonialism. Colonized Bodies, Worlds Transformed‘ssecond accomplishment is to define bioarchaeology of colonialism that is not focused on diet, disease, and demography. Colonized Bodies, Worlds Transformed successfully justifies the value of diverse approaches that use body modification (Tiesler and Zabala), human skeletal morphology (Buzon and Smith, Danforth et al.,Ortiz et al., Ribot et al.), and ancient DNA (Danforth et al.) to explore what a bioarchaeology of colonialism can offer—the study of identity, hybridity, and ethnogenesis.