The Body as Its Own Document
A skeleton is a written record in bone. Bioarchaeology reads it—reconstructing how a person aged, ate, worked, sickened, and moved—recovering the health and demography of whole populations that left no census.
| Question | Where the answer lives | Reliability |
|---|---|---|
| Age at death | Tooth eruption/wear; bone fusion | High in young, coarse in old |
| Biological sex | Pelvis shape; skull robusticity | High for adults; poor for kids |
| Stature | Long-bone length via regression | Good |
| Disease/injury | Lesions, healed fractures, wear | Only bone-marking traces |
Age reads sharply in the young via tight schedules, but blurs in adults. Sex determination leans on the pelvis, reshaped by childbirth, and fails before puberty because those differences have not yet developed.
Chemistry: Diet and Origins
Bone chemistry preserves biography that shape cannot. Carbon isotopes distinguish diets, tracking whether staples were C3 plants like wheat or C4 plants like maize. Nitrogen isotopes rise with trophic level, revealing meat consumption and the nitrogen spike of breastfeeding.
Strontium and oxygen isotopes, locked into tooth enamel in childhood from local water and rock, reveal where a person grew up. A skeleton buried in one region with another region's isotopic signature is a migrant.
The osteological paradox: A skeleton with healed lesions belonged to someone whose body fought the illness and lived. Someone who died fast shows no lesions. A cemetery full of lesions can mean a healthier, more resilient population, not a sicker one.