The Archaeology of Medicine and Healthcare

Naomi Sykes researches and teaches on human-animal-environment interactions over the past 10,000 years and their impact on the structure, ideology and impact of societies, past and present. She integrates archaeological evidence with data from biomolecular analyses and discourse in anthropology, cultural geography, (art) history and linguistics. She is author of Beastly Questions: Animal Answers to Archaeological Issues (2014). Julia Shaw researches and teaches on South Asian environmental and socio-religious history and diachronic interfaces between environmental archaeology, ecological public health, and global climate-change activism. Current projects include work on interactions between lowland irrigated agriculture and upland forest-based lifeways in India, and diachronic attitudes towards urban wildlife, 'pests' and pesticides in the UK. She is author of Buddhist Landscapes in Central India (Routledge, 2007) and is writing a book on religion, ecology and medico-environmental worldviews in early India. She co-leads UCL Institute of Archaeology’s Heritage and Archaeology of Health and Medicine (HAHM) initiative.

Introduction – New directions in the archaeology of medicine: deep-time approaches to human-animal-environmental care 1. Calculated or caring? Neanderthal healthcare in social context 2. Identifying the connection between Roman conceptions of ‘Pure Air’ and physical and mental health in Pompeian gardens (c.150 BC–AD 79): a multi-sensory approach to ancient medicine 3. From mine to apothecary: an archaeo-biomedical approach to the study of the Greco-Roman lithotherapeutics industry 4. Medical therapeutics and the place of healing in early medieval Culmen in Poland 5. Health beliefs, healing practices and medico-ritual frameworks in the Ecuadorian Andes: the continuity of an ancient tradition 6. Medicine in colonial Moquegua, Peru: plants, wine and Belén de Locumbilla 7. Enslavement and institutionalized care: the politics of health in nineteenth-century St Croix, Danish West Indies 8. Contagious objects: artefacts of disease transmission and control at North Head Quarantine Station, Australia 9. Vision and ocular health at a World War II internment camp