Recent bioarchaeological research has produced multiple theoretically oriented publications, tackling ideas such as identity, community, care, and in this edited volume, contact and colonialism. Colonized Bodies, Worlds Transformed covers both the New and Old Worlds in 14 chapters, 12 of which are case studies, moving beyond staid ideas of New World and European contact. While the volume skews toward the New World, the editors make an effort to include many global and temporal perspectives on colonization. As noted in the first chapter, Murphy and Klaus stress viewing long-term biological and cultural implications when groups of varying backgrounds interact, no matter where in the world, eschewing simplistic interpretations and “virgin soil” ideas about contact.
From this approach, the book is split into three sections, with the first focusing on the effects of colonialism on mortuary practice, skeletal stress, and disease. Chapter 2 (Murphy et al.) addresses typical and atypical burial patterns in pre- and postcontact Peru. While the authors find stress varied, the significant evidence of perimortem violence suggests lifeway disruptions that took place under both Inca and Spanish rule. In Chapter 3, focused on Egypt, Buzon and Smith emphasize that not all colonial encounters are with far-reaching groups or over short time spans. Instead, Nubian-Egyptian interactions resulted in local incorporations of Egyptian culture that developed new biocultural identities over centuries. In Chapter 4, Klaus and Alvarez-Calderón discuss two communities in the Lambayeque Valley, Peru. Their research shows that during postcontact times, a higher economic standing with fewer demands from the Spanish on time and labor, plus a strong and versatile subsistence economy that more readily accepted Catholic practices as noted by burial custom, made one community more successful and less likely to suffer the typical stress issues of colonialism. Chapter 5 (Winkler et al.) also addresses issues of missionization in contact-era Spanish Florida. By evaluating burial location, grave goods, and proximity to the church altar, higher status differences and ability to survive episodic stress are shown to correlate to burials near the altar.
Chapters in the second section of the volume focus on the theme of frontiers and borders of colonial entanglements and the variability and diversity of how people lived and died. Chapter 6 (Harvey et al.) addresses Maya/Spanish hybrid identity in Belize as a borderland/third space during colonial times, mitigating issues of skeletal stress. Chapter 7 (Guichón et al.) uses different scales of analysis to describe how distinct social identities of indigenous Tierra del Fuego residents navigated the colonial experience. How the Byzantine Empire influenced lives is the subject of Chapter 8, in which Perry considers diet and health and finds diverse responses in these skeletal indicators that had little to do with imperial involvement in the Near East. Also set in the Old World, Chapter 9 (Killgrove) discusses imperial Rome during the first to third centuries and finds that class factored more into Roman paleopathology and stress than location.
The final section of this edited volume covers body and identity under colonialism. Chapter 10 (Tiesler and Zabala) considers head shaping before, during, and after colonization of the New World. While the Spanish tried to exterminate this permanent identity marker, Tiesler and Zabala find that the practice persisted in more remote areas of the Andes and Mesoamerica or that alternative means, such as visible changes to headwear, were used to denote identity. Danforth and colleagues (Chapter 11) consider the case of New Biloxi, Louisiana, under French colonial rule. Their research shows low levels of skeletal stress among the primarily European male population, and they find that the cemetery itself may be indicative of rigid social norms, with segregation at that time in the Louisiana colony. The increase in gene flow due to the diasporic slave trade is the subject of Chapter 12 using two case studies, and Ribot and colleagues show that enslaved people from South Africa were less diverse than those from Cuba, suggesting intense hybridization of Africans who arrived in Cuba. In Chapter 13, Ortiz and colleagues find that through studies of biodistance and individual identity, including some with cranial modification, burials grouped more toward a Spanish and mixed Spanish/Andean ancestry at the Magdalena de Cao Viejo cemetery site in Peru, noting the dual direction of colonialism in this region.
The summary by Stojanowski in Chapter 14 discusses the advances that collaborative bioarchaeology has undertaken, including better integration of data and social theory, praising this volume as a move toward extensive framework construction to advance studies of colonialism. He also encourages historical anthropologists to engage more with bioarchaeological literature that gives a voice to skeletons, suggesting future relationships that would benefit all studying colonial encounters.
