The Bioarchaeology of Care: A Case Study From Neolithic Vietnam

A recent article in the International Journal of Palaeopathology, ‘Survival against the odds: modelling the social implications of care provision to seriously disabled individuals’ by Tilley & Oxenham (2011), proposed a new methodology  called the ‘bioarchaeology of care’ to investigate the nature of support required to sustain life for disabled individuals in the archaeological record.

The focus of the investigation is the individual called Man Bac burial 9 (M9), from a Neolithic cemetery site (1700-2000BC) located in Ninh Binh province of northern Vietnam, 100 km north of Hanoi. Excavations between 1999 & 2007 uncovered 95 individuals from the site occupying a mouth of an estuary of the Red River Delta... Past Horizons