دانلود کتاب مطالعه استخوان ها – فعالیت، زیست شناسی و فرهنگ

Reading the Bones takes on one of the most debated topics in bioarchaeology. The question addressed in this book is, do skeletal activity indicators reveal past people’s activity patterns, or do biological factors influence these markers in ways that make reconstructing activities impossible? Studies using activity indicators address fundamental questions regarding past lifestyles such as how agricultural adoption affected health, whether sex differences are more pronounced in agricultural cultures than in hunter-gatherer cultures, and whether class differences affect the activity levels of past peoples; however, activity indicators are not free of biological confounds such as hormonal effects on bone building, genetic adaptations to climate differences, and age differences in bone remodeling. Uniquely, this book reviews each of the main activity indicators from a variety of angles to attempt to understand which indicators can be used to reconstruct past lifestyles and which may be better retooled to answer other questions. Throughout my career, I have been trying to answer this question by examining the main activity indicators, including osteoarthritis, crosssectional geometries, entheseal changes, and stress fractures, and by looking for trends that transcend culture such as age and sex effects that are found throughout time and place. Considering that activity markers are perhaps the most commonly used skeletal traits analyzed in bioarchaeology and archaeology, this book provides a timely—and perhaps provocative—review of the usefulness of these traits when it comes to understanding the past.