Every year, there are over 1.6 million violent deaths worldwide, making violence one of the leading public health issues of our time. And with the 20th century just behind us, it's hard to forget that 191 million people lost their lives directly or indirectly through conflict. This collection of engaging case studies on violence and violent deaths reveals how violence is reconstructed from skeletal and contextual information. By sharing the complex methodologies for gleaning scientific data from human remains and the context they are found in, and complementary perspectives for examining violence from both past and contemporary societies, bioarchaeology and forensic anthropology prove to be fundamentally inseparable. This book provides a model for training forensic anthropologists and bioarchaeologists, not just in the fundamentals of excavation and skeletal analysis, but in all subfields of anthropology, to broaden their theoretical and practical approach to dealing with everyday violence.

Debra L. Martin is Lincy Professor of Anthropology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. For the last 30 years, her research interests have focused on the analysis of ancient human remains in order to better understand the origin and evolution of violence and disease in culturally diverse human groups. Her primary research interests currently include bridging social theory with bioarchaeological data, the impact of raiding, warfare and captivity on morbidity and mortality, and the ways that social control creates marginalized individuals. Her popular course 'The Anthropology of Violence' is offered every year at the University of Nevada. Cheryl P. Anderson is a PhD student at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her primary research interests include the evolution of organized violence, the use of violence as a means of communication, and the impacts of social inequality on human health. Recently, she has investigated violence in a late precolonial skeletal collection from Northern Mexico. Additionally, she has been involved in projects analyzing human skeletal remains from a historic period family cemetery from Southern Nevada, a Bronze Age population from the United Arab Emirates and a Middle Bronze Age village in Anatolia.