Skeletons in Our Closet: Revealing Our Past through Bioarchaeology [Paperback]

Clark Spencer Larsen (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0691092842 | ISBN-13: 978-0691092843 | Publication Date: February 11, 2002

The dead tell no tales. Or do they? In this fascinating book, Clark Spencer Larsen shows that the dead can speak to us--about their lives, and ours--through the remarkable insights of bioarchaeology, which reconstructs the lives and lifestyles of past peoples based on the study of skeletal remains. The human skeleton is an amazing storehouse of information. It records the circumstances of our growth and development as reflected in factors such as disease, stress, diet, nutrition, climate, activity, and injury. Bioarchaeologists, by combining the methods of forensic science and archaeology, along with the resources of many other disciplines (including chemistry, geology, physics, and biology), "read" the information stored in bones to understand what life was really like for our human ancestors. They are unearthing some surprises.

For instance, the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture approximately 10,000 years ago has commonly been seen as a major advancement in the course of human evolution. However, as Larsen provocatively shows, this change may not have been so positive. Compared to their hunter-gatherer ancestors, many early farmers suffered more disease, had to work harder, and endured a poorer quality of life due to poorer diets and more marginal living conditions. Moreover, the past 10,000 years have seen dramatic changes in the human physiognomy as a result of alterations in our diet and lifestyle. Some modern health problems, including obesity and chronic disease, may also have their roots in these earlier changes.

Drawing on vivid accounts from his own experiences as a bioarchaeologist, Larsen guides us through some of the key developments in recent human evolution, including the adoption of agriculture, the arrival of Europeans in the Americas and the biological consequences of this contact, and the settlement of the American West in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Written in a lively and engaging manner, this book is for anyone interested in what the dead have to tell us about the living.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Some tales can only be told by the dead. Bioarchaeologist Clark Spencer Larsen, while very much alive, has spent thousands of hours communing with the bones of our ancestors; though somewhat inarticulate, they reveal vast unguessed knowledge of our past. Skeletons in Our Closet, his report from the field, gives the reader a backstage pass to American natural history museums, showing what the displays can only hint at: concrete details of the lifestyles of pioneers and pre-contact Americans etched indelibly into their remains. Larsen pulls no technical punches in his writing, though he is careful to define his terms clearly as he proceeds. Obviously enthusiastic about his work, he infuses the reader with interest without evangelizing.

What has he found? Some of his results are merely interesting, such as eating and working habits ground into dental remains. Others are more controversial. Larsen finds evidence that not all hunter-gatherer cultures had an easier time of it than their agricultural successors, as popular anthropological opinion holds. While he can't speak for all of the dead, those pre-agricultural people he's studied seemed to suffer more greatly from disease, malnutrition, and injury than did their descendents. Meticulously detailed, Skeletons in Our Closet is essential for any reader interested in America's unwritten history. --Rob Lightner --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

By closely examining human biological remains, mostly bones, bioarcheologists explore "the lives and lifestyles of human beings in the past." Larsen (Bioarchaeology), professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina, here argues convincingly that a person's "skeleton is sensitive to the environment, from well before birth through the years of infancy, childhood, and adulthood." In great detail, he demonstrates how a competent expert may read an enormous amount from the subtle patterns present on bones. Bone density and shape provide clues to work habits; lesions to rates of infection; dental cavities and the ratio of isotopes of carbon in bones to dietary preferences; patterns of osteoarthritis to repetitive daily activities. Larsen summarizes his own research findings and, by dealing with North American populations spanning thousands of years, demonstrates how robust his methodology is. Whether he is dealing with the remains of the first humans on the continent undergoing the transition from foraging to farming, indigenous populations first encountering Europeans, those Europeans themselves or settlers in Maryland and Illinois in the 1600s and 1800s, respectively, Larsen draws notable conclusions. Counter to traditional dogma, he claims, for example, that the transition to farming is usually associated with a decrease in standard of living and that the dramatic collapse in indigenous populations upon contact with Europeans was due to a constellation of factors rather than to the introduction of novel diseases such as smallpox. Although Larsen's text can be repetitive, there is much in it to provoke debate. (June)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Princeton University Press (February 11, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0691092842
• ISBN-13: 978-0691092843
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,267,089 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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This review is from: Skeletons in Our Closet: Revealing Our Past through Bioarchaeology (Paperback)

Next time your bones creak, count your lucky stars. Your ancestors whoever they were, had it worse.
And people like Clark Larsen, an anthropologist at the University of North Carolina, now have techniques that can measure almost exactly how much worse.
Most of Larsen's work recounted in "Skeletons in Our Closet" was done in the Great Basin (Nevada, Utah and vicinity), where the living was never easy.
By measuring the rotundity of long bones, a bioarchaeologist can determine how much walking a person did, and the hunters and gathers in Nevada 10,000 years ago did some hard travelin'.
This is not surprising. But other essays can reveal less obvious information.
One of the most powerful tools is called stable isotope analysis. If we know what sorts of foods were available where the owner of a bone lived, Larsen can tell, broadly, what kinds he ate.
This is because different kinds of plants use carbon differently. Because they do, the relative presence of heavier or lighter forms of carbon (or other elements) can reveal whether, for example, a person ate a diet of mainly corn.
One surprising finding, made from digs in the eastern part of North America, is that corn did not become important in the diet there until relatively late.
When it did, according to Larsen, the people's health declined.
"The shift from foraging to farming occasioned a reduction in nutrition" in most places, according to Larsen and all other students of early human nutrition known to me.
I believe they are wrong. Hunter-gatherers usually ate a more varied diet than farmers did, and in many ways this variety produced a better balance in nutrition.
Signs of anemia (which show up in porous skulls) are more common among farmers.
The conclusion that farmers were more poorly fed does not follow, however.
Throughout history, and in poorer places today, the chief deficiency in human diet has not been protein or vitamins or mineral but calories. Lack of calories kept hunter-gatherer populations small. Larsen's own work demonstrates the lack of calories, even if he misses the significance.
The flood of calories provided by agriculture allowed many more people to survive. The worse fed of these farmers had more kinds of nutritional deficiencies than hunters did, but they were alive.
In the hunting environment, these people would never have been born at all. So the proper comparison between ill-fed farmers is not with well-fed hunters but with unfed hunters.
This comparison cannot be made through bioarchaeology.
Much of the rest of "Skeletons" is more persuasive. Larsen debunks the notion that the natives of the New World were disease-free before the coming of the Europeans.
"To be sure," he writes, "some of the dreadful Old World diseases (e.g., smallpox, measles and malaria) were absent from the Americas prior to European contact. However, the presence of both nonspecific and specific infections, iron deficiency anemia and other evidence of morbidity throughout the Americas provides substantial evidence contradicting the perception that native peoples were disease-free prior to European contact."
Elsewhere, he proves that just about everybody anyplace got arthritis early. Physical activity was so strenuous that bones and gristle wore out.
Though Larsen has not done bioarchaeology in Polynesia and has nothing to say about the Hawaii version of the "no disease" myth, he does explode one other myth that is held universally here: that the Native Hawaiians lacked a natural immunity to disease that Europeans had.
"I think this consensus is wrong," Larsen writes, referring to the North American version of the same myth, "however, in that it is unlikely that the native populations lacked some inherent genetic resistance in comparison with Europeans. Rather, Europeans had the advantage of having had previous experience with pathogens that caused such diseases as smallpox and measles, resulting in acquired immunities for them."
Some advantage. Measles killed about the same proportion of people in England in the 18th century as it did in Hawaii.
The apparent discrepancy in death rates, argued vehemently by academics like David Stannard of the University of Hawaii and accepted unquestioningly in even the least pretentious guidebooks, never existed.