The Bioarchaeology of Structural Violence: A Theoretical Framework for Industrial Era Inequality is one of 20 titles in Springer's popular “Bioarchaeology and Social Theory” series, joining another four titles published in 2020. The volume builds on a poster session presented at the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists (now the American Association of Biological Anthropologists, or AABA) in Austin, Texas, in 2018. Following several previous individual publications examining evidence of structural violence in Western Europe and North America in the Industrial era, this volume includes 10 case studies that apply this framework to bioarchaeological research. Bringing together this collection of varied approaches and applications, the potentialities of the holistic practice of bioarchaeology to elucidate structural violence are demonstrated and discussed.

Chapters in Part I address the structural violence of gender inequality. All bioarchaeologists should pay close attention to the chapter by Aja M. Lans, which presents not only a nuanced discussion of research within the Smithsonian Institution's Huntington Collection but also a timely critique of the ways in which structural violence toward the dead is embedded in the present practice of bioarchaeology. Pamela K. Stone's excellent discussion of medical oppression and the whiteness of science is paired with an undercited discussion of tight-laced corseting in Victorian England. Sarah Mathena-Allen and Molly K. Zuckerman's study of rural versus urban working-class women in the United Kingdom (1666–1857) highlights the accumulation of chronic stress spurred by industrialization, although the authors acknowledge that the analysis suffers from a deficiency of contextualizing archival research and trouble in defining populations. This is a challenge also shared by Sarah Reedy, whose chapter addresses frailty and resource access among European Industrial-era children despite small, unevenly distributed sample sizes and reliance on only one marker of biological stress (stature).

Chapters in Part II focus on the structural violence of social and economic inequalities. Jennifer L. Muller, Jennifer F. Byrnes, and David A. Ingleman combine Michel Foucault's concept of heterotopia with the framework of structural violence to convincingly demonstrate the cyclical violence of Industrial-era social policy in Buffalo, New York, and its regulation of those individuals considered “deviant” or “in crisis.” The structural violence of anatomical practice is well contextualized by Gwyn Madden and Rose Drew, who describe how the marginalized poor of Industrial Norway were subject to detrimental social policies that endangered their health, seized their bodies, and erased their graves. In their respective chapters, Anna Paraskevi Alioto and Sara A. McGuire examine physical stresses experienced by individuals in Industrial Cleveland, Ohio, and in England, although both have difficulty demonstrating a clear connection between the investigated biomarkers (entheses and osteoarthritis for Alioto; stature and age at death for McGuire) and systemic biological stress resulting from unequal hierarchical social relationships. Gina Agostini's investigation of the Portuguese working class under the dictatorial Estado Novo (1933–1974) raises the question of whether the regulation of a political economy during times of authoritarianism and war that adversely affects the health of the nonelite can be considered structural violence. Finally, Christine L. Halling and Ryan M. Seidemann's engaging analysis of the historical and archaeological contexts of antebellum New Orleans, Louisiana, demonstrates that the city's legal structures harbored an inherent structural violence that adversely affected marginal groups from French colonization through the nineteenth century.

A goal of this much-needed volume is to demonstrate the efficacy of structural violence as a theoretical framework for bioarchaeological research. Although the success of this goal across the 10 case studies is variable, the strongest chapters support their research with multiple lines of evidence grounded in a robust engagement with social theory. The case studies featured in this volume highlight the importance and necessity of extensive contextualization when analyzing bioarchaeological data. Situating the subjects of bioarchaeological research in their historical and archaeological contexts is crucial to portraying agentful individuals within their contingent, lived experience, instead of presenting them as passive victims of violent social structures. Individual chapters could be successfully incorporated into reading lists for scholarly research and seminars for advanced students, although the numerous grammatical and copyediting mistakes are distracting. The book devotes ample space to structural violence related to gender and socioeconomic class. Future studies that incorporate additional research on the intersections of structural violence and aspects of identity—such as race, age, disability, ethnicity, gender presentation, and others—would be welcome disrupters of the “archival silences” (p. 48) highlighted by Lans.