Ancient Violence Toward the Individual: Built on Bones

This is the first entry in what may become a longer-term blog (or remain forever a single-entry blog) aimed at helping me remember what I read.

I am someone who is very engaged with whatever text I'm holding. I prefer paper to e-readers--something that is supposed to help with information retention; I highlight and write in the margins of all my books--to the horror of some friends, but also an activity that should help with recall; and I read for enjoyment. Yet when asked to explain something I've read, I struggle, and when I feel urged to initiate an argument against something I know to be false, the clumsy sprint to the bookshelf and shuffling through of books to find the most appropriate highlight that will make my case most usually results in my keeping my mouth shut, or offering at most a tentative: "Hmm, I'm not sure that's the case, but maybe."

Explaining what you've read and teaching it to others is supposed to be an excellent way to retain information. I'm not sure of the source of this (another issue I regularly encounter when it comes to my claims and expectations... leading me often to wonder whether fact is fact or only maybe-fact), so this blog could potentially be my opportunity to engage with the text in yet another way, by digesting it and sharing it with you.

I will cite my source, and you should feel free to challenge me on anything I get wrong (just cite your sources, too), but hopefully we can all get something out of this together... Even if nobody reads this thing and we all/together ends up just being I alone/myself.

Today I'm struggling through Built on Bones by Brenna Hassett. I ordered this book after reading an engaging LA Times book review (my favorite section of the Times -- never get rid of it, new editors, or this millennial will be immediately unsubscribing from the hardcopy Sunday edition and switching full-time to The Guardian weekly). Despite having very limited (no) familiarity with bioarchaeology, I eagerly dove into this exploration of the history of humans and their civilizations based on evidence interpreted from their remains (i.e., bones, mostly).

At first it was fun; I laughed aloud at the silly footnotes and Hassett's chapterly take-downs of the modern Paleo diet & lifestyle. But I also had no interest in picking the book back up every time I put it down, which prolonged what I hoped would be a week-or-two read into almost six months. And even now I'm barely halfway through.

I realized the other day that the footnotes and comedic tone with which a lot of the book is written was actually distracting me and keeping me from becoming invested in the lessons, themselves. I have since stopped reading the footnotes -- which is a shame, considering some of them contain valuable nuggets -- and today I soared through two chapters with growing interest.

Today I picked up Chapter Six at the "parry fracture," which describes a kind of fracture of the forearm likely caused by trying to block an attack and is one of the most commonly cited indicators of violence in the archaeological record. Fractured forearms are not always an indicator of violence, however, as they can also be attributed to clumsiness (like falling). Fractures crowd the archaeological record, and other evidence often needs to be examined to determine whether they resulted from violence at all. For instance, in what may be a more obvious example to prove the greater point, elderly women commonly experience hip fractures, but this does not prove that there's some kind of long historical campaign of violence that has been waged against elderly women at the point of their hips. Hassett comes to parry fractures while outlining individual-on-individual violence throughout history, and the differences in violence seen culture to culture.

I read much of this chapter two or three days ago, and therefore have already forgotten most of it. I do seem to remember that the Chumash featured a lot of skull bashing, and that later the Inca, also fans of skull bashing, became very successful at drilling holes into people's skulls while they were alive as a form of medical procedure (because head injuries were so common), to the point that Inca doctors reached a point where they had a 90% survival rate, which is impressive.

In the second chapter, something that surprised me was the lack of evidence for a long history of child abuse in the bioarchaeological record. The clear instances of child abuse uncovered are few. There are multiple explanations for this -- one is that there was simply less abuse of children throughout history. In this argument, the extremely (and I mean VERY extremely) few clear cases studied in the bones of the deceased indicate that there were very few cases at all. This is a position that, though sweeping and seemingly far-fetched may, in fact, be the case, as it is argued (by Phil Walker, who is cited often) that our modern urban lifestyles, where we aren't embedded in the same kind of close-proximity extended-familial social structures as people were in the past, is an environment that allows the pathologies wherein child abuse can become more frequent to develop.

The other argument--the bone argument--is that children's bones are different than adult bones, and more capable of healing over past injures to the point that they can't even be detected by super sensitive modern equipment (see: greenstick fracture; less mineralized bones; bone plasticity that allows bones to heal themselves in ways that adult bones cannot). Evidence of child abuse can be sourced from bone bruises, which is when the "sausage-like casing" around bones shows signs of chronic mistreatment, but as these bruises can be caused by any number of injuries, it is only accepted as being clearly evident of abuse when it is accompanied by a fracture -- a combination that is rare, possibly in part (large or small) because of the plasticity of juvenile bones. In this argument, the view is that child abuse was more common than the bones seem to communicate because those same bones have cleaned up the evidence.

The history of violence against women paints an unrefutable picture of an endemic problem (One in three women will experience domestic physical or sexual violence in their lifetime, per the WHO) that spans human history. Some societies show greater signs of domestic violence against women than others, and there is suggestion that domestic violence may increase when society-wide stress increases (e.g., with environmental changes such as drought; the transition from a hunter-gatherer to more sedentary way of living; etc).