“Breaks new ground regarding how to think about colonial encounters in innovative ways that pay attention to a wide range of issues from health and demography to identity formations and adaptation.”—Debra L. Martin, coeditor of The Bioarchaeology of Violence
“Amply demonstrates the breadth and variability of the impact of colonialism.”—Ken Nystrom, State University of New York at New Paltz
Colonized Bodies, Worlds Transformed represents a new generation of contact and colonialism studies, expanding upon a traditional focus on the health of conquered peoples towards how extraordinary biological and political transformations are incorporated into the human body, reflecting behavior, identity, and adaptation. These globally diverse case studies demonstrate that the effects of conquest reach farther than was ever thought before—to both the colonized and the colonizers.
Cultural exchange occurred between both groups, transforming social identities, foodways, and social structures at points of contact and beyond. Contributors to this volume illustrate previously unknown and variable effects of colonialism by analyzing skeletal remains and burial patterns from never-before-studied regions in the Americas to the Middle East, Africa, and Europe, resulting in the first steps of a new synthesis of historical archaeology and bioarchaeology.
