Bioarchaeology in the ancient Near East: Challenges and future directions for the southern Levant

The synthesis of biological anthropology, archaeology, and social theory provides a bioarchaeological model to reconstruct nuanced aspects of demography, diet, disease, death, daily activities, and biodistance, even in the absence of discrete burials. Numerous skeletal assemblages in the southern Levant are composed of mixed and fragmented bones resulting from generational use of cemeteries, mass burial, and additional communal burial practices. Others become commingled due to taphonomic processes such as flooding, geological events, or human mediated mechanisms like looting, improper excavation, and poor curation. Such collections require one to ask broader questions of human adaptability, exercise a holistic approach, use broad demographic categories, and remain cognizant of the limitations posed by fragmentation. Expanded research questions and ethical considerations, the use of centralized databases and understudied collections, as well as the application of social media, citizen science, and crowd sourcing provide new tools for bioarchaeological analyses of the many commingled ancient Near Eastern collections in the southern Levant.