The anthropology of health in prehistoric Europe: a cultural history of variation, illness and death. (360G-Wellcome-096510_Z_11_Z)

This pilot research explores the medical anthropology of prehistoric Europe (40000 BC through the Classical era). Using a broad, systematically assembled range of published archaeological evidence (skeletal remains, art imagery and burials), it relates health to ways in which the body was defined, categorised, and acted upon culturally. For instance, it examines how death rituals responded to unusual health conditions in ways which might imply particular notions of good and bad deaths or social identities for the differently-bodied, how actual physical harm related to cultural symbolisations of violence, and how bodies were produced culturally through cosmetic, ritual or medical interventions. Large-scale patterns in health and the body, and case studies of particular interest and richness will be related to broader histories of social change; for instance, did the advent of sedentism and farming in the Neolithic or social hierarchies in the Iron Age not only change actual health but also affect how the body was conceptualised, gendered, harmed, healed and transformed at death? It will produce two key outputs: a general overview monograph exploring the prehistory of health in Europe, and a research report assessing the available data and exploring potential avenues for focused, major research projects.