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).

This volume highlights the importance of medical worldviews as a means of understanding healthcare and medical practice in the past. It argues for greater integration between archaeology and both the medical and environmental humanities.

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