Conclusion

Abstract

Modern bioarchaeology has much to offer the world today. The studies based on human skeletal remains form a rich and detailed biocultural context for understanding vulnerability, suffering, and their long-term effects. Bioarchaeology is attentive to the details and realities of individual lived experiences but can also step back and see broad patterns across populations over time. Its superpower is that it is a science that integrates empirical data from bodies but does so within specific cultural, environmental, and historical contexts. Social theory helps to bridge the skeletal data with social processes. The case studies here offer a broad and deep approach to industrialization revealing the ways that violence is embedded in everyday life and how historical contingency can shape human experiences.