The old adage ‘history is written by the victor’ is particularly true in the case of colonialism. Bioarchaeology is uniquely suited to overcome this issue by investigating the lived and embodied experiences of individuals and linking these to regional or even global processes of contact, conquest and colonialism. In the first introductory chapter of Colonized Bodies, Worlds Transformed, Murphy and Klaus provide an overview of current bioarchaeological views on the topic, emphasizing the inherent variability in the outcome of colonization resulting from an interplay of various contextual factors. They therefore advocate a multi-dimensional approach integrating various methodologies and data recovered from bioarchaeological and archaeological research, as well as historical sources as necessary if one wishes to uncover the full scope of biocultural transformations related to cultural contact.
In this volume, the editors have gathered 12 bioarchaeology case studies that demonstrate such an approach and succeed in revealing the complex and diverse nature of colonialism. These are organized into three themes: life, death and mortuary practices after contact and colonialism; frontiers, colonial entanglements and diversity; and the body and identity under colonialism. Each of these sections contains a varied selection of cases emphasizing the global nature and temporal range of the processes under investigation.
The first section, on life, death and mortuary practices after contact and colonialism, opens with a Peruvian case study by Murphy, Boza and Gaither. It crosses the historical divide to study and contrast the effects of colonization in the Inca empire and the early European conquest period. In chapter 3, Buzon and Smith continue this shift in perspective by studying the long-term effects of the New Kingdom Egyptian colonization of Nubia through an integrated bioarchaeological approach. The investigation of the effects of European conquest in two northern Peruvian communities from Eten in chapter 4 by Klaus and Alvarez-Calderón highlights the variation in local experiences within a single region. The final chapter of this section, by Winkler, Larsen, Thompson, Sciulli, Hutchinson, Thomas, Blair and Sanger, studies the entanglement between social status differences and colonization processes in Spanish Florida.
Frontiers, colonial entanglements and diversity are the theme of the second section. The dynamic dialogue and negotiation of identities by the Maya in the colonial town of Tipu is the focus of chapter 6 by Harvey, Danforth and Cohen. One of the most recent cases regarding colonialism in the current volume is presented in chapter 7 by Guichón, Casali, García Laborde, Salerno and Guichón. Their discussion of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Selk'nam from Tierra del Fuego centres on the ‘double colonialism’ undergone by these communities. Chapters 8 and 9 present another shift in perspective, with a return to Old World processes of imperialism. Perry investigates the role of the early Byzantine empire on health and life experiences in communities in the southern Levant, whereas Killgrove studies the complex heterogeneous experiences and lives of Imperial Roman citizens.
The third section contains various cases on the body and identity under colonialism, starting with chapter 10 by Tiesler and Zabala on indigenous head-shaping practices in Iberian America. Their excellent overview demonstrates how this permanent body modification embodying indigenous identities was transformed by colonial processes. In chapter 11, Danforth, Cook, Funkhouser, Hester and Guzik study skeletal material from Moran, one of the few excavated colonial French cemeteries from the New World, to shed more light on the lived experience in the French colonies. The cranio-facial variation in two African populations, from the Cape Colony and Cuba, are studied in chapter 12 by Ribot, Morris and Renschler to illuminate the variability in the global phenomenon that is the African diaspora. Chapter 13, in contrast, returns to the local scale by presenting the results of an investigation by Ortiz, Murphy, Toohey and Gaither of population composition and community identity at the settlement of Magdalena de Cao Viejo, Peru.
In the final chapter of Colonized Bodies, Worlds Transformed, Stojanowski integrates the various cases presented in the volume with wider trends in the field of bioarchaeology and contact studies, as well as engaging with postcolonial thinking. After a just reminder of the inherent potential for cruelty in colonial settings, he ends by presenting a critical, yet hopeful, view of the past, present, and future of the bioarchaeology of colonialism.
In Colonized Bodies, Worlds Transformed: Toward a Global Bioarchaeology of Contact and Colonialism, Murphy and Klaus have succeeded in collating an excellent and diverse range of studies that provide a fine representation of the current state of affairs and a solid foundation for future research. The colonized bodies at the centre of each case study in this volume provide the starting point for explorations of the lived experiences behind global processes of colonialism and provide the link between different scales of analysis. Moving beyond the classic contact of 1492 and studying different encounters demonstrates the variability inherent in colonial processes. Pushing beyond the historical divide in various chapters has reinforced the importance of changing the perspective on colonialism championed by the editors in the introduction.
The editors have made a concerted effort to including case studies from a variety of different backgrounds and time periods. The (almost) global scale of the book does, in fact, mirror the process of colonialism itself, although, understandably, not all regions of the world are represented. Perspectives from Asia and Australia, as well as pre-colonial Africa, would provide a welcome extension of the scale and scope of the work presented here.
The notion of a singular monolithic response to conquest has definitively been dismissed by the works collected in this volume in favour of the importance of scale and variability depending on a complex and dynamic interplay of different factors. The editors of Colonized Bodies, Worlds Transformed sought to ‘promote a next generation of contact and colonialism studies in bioarchaeology’ (p. 2), and their book has certainly yielded both insight and inspiration for future studies.
