There are a number of ways to try to figure out how people lived hundreds or thousands of years ago; you can look at documents or environmental records, for instance.
Or you can use human remains to understand the big questions about what people were doing in the past.
That’s what the relatively young field of bioarchaeology tries to do. It’s only about 40 years old, and ASU houses a couple of journals on the subject, including a new one that debuted this summer.
To find out more, I visited Kelly Knudson’s office. She’s director of the Center for Bioarcheological Research at ASU, and I started our conversation by asking if bioarchaeology could fairly be described as a matter of trying to figure out the lives of people, as opposed to just maybe where they might have been.
