Toward a bioarchaeology of urbanization: Demography, health, and behavior in cities in the past

Abstract

Urbanization is one of the most important settlement shifts in human history and has been the focus of research within bioarchaeology for decades. However, there have been limited attempts to synthesize the results of these studies in order to gain a broader perspective on whether or how urbanization affects the biology, demography, and behavior of humans, and how these potential effects are embodied in the human skeleton. This paper outlines how bioarchaeology is well-suited to examine urbanization in the past, and we provide an overview and examples of three main ways in which urbanization is studied in bioarchaeological research: comparison of (often contemporaneous) urban and rural sites, synchronic studies of the variation that exists within and between urban sites, and investigations of changes that occur within urban sites over time. Studies of urbanization, both within bioarchaeology and in other fields of study, face a number of limitations, including a lack of a consensus regarding what urban and urbanization mean, the assumed dichotomous nature of urban versus rural settlements, the supposition that urbanization is universally bad for people, and the assumption (at least in practice) of homogeneity within urban and rural populations. Bioarchaeologists can address these limitations by utilizing a wide array of data and methods, and the studies described here collectively demonstrate the complex, nuanced, and highly variable effects of urbanization.

Automated Cognitive Health Assessment Using Partially Complete Time Series Sensor Data

“…This component is thus trained using a reconstruction loss that computes the element-wise difference between the original and reconstructed feature values, as shown in Eq. (12).…”

“…The tight interplay between health and behavior is well documented in the literature. 10 11 12 The maturing design of sensor platforms, pervasive computing, and machine learning techniques offer practical, though not fully realized, methods for understanding the relationship between health and behavior and automatically assessing and predicting health status. We hypothesize that a person's health can be predicted based on digital behavior markers that are collected from continuous, longitudinal wearable sensor data.…”

“…9The tight interplay between health and behavior is well documented in the literature. [10][11][12] The maturing design of sensor platforms, pervasive computing, and machine learning techniques offer practical, though not fully realized,…”

The bioarchaeology of urbanization: The biological, demographic, and social consequences of living in cities. By TracyK. Betsinger and Sharon N.Dewitte. New York, NY: Springer. 2020. 538 pp. $139.00/$179.99 (eBook/hardback) Laure Spake

“…This review is information‐dense, particularly as it concerns modern urbanization, and it would make an excellent reading for an undergraduate level course on the anthropology of health or of urbanization. For a more complete review of bioarcheological studies of urbanization, readers may also wish to consult the editors' recent Yearbook of Physical Anthropology article (Betsinger & DeWitte, 2021). This review article could also be assigned for an upper undergraduate or graduate level course, though its level of detail would be more appropriate for students who have some knowledge of bioarcheology rather than more general anthropology training.…”

Social inequalities and mortality during the 1918 influenza pandemic on the island of Newfoundland

“…Although humans are considered the primary host for M. leprae, the pathogen does have natural non-human hosts such as chimpanzees (Hockings et al, 2021), armadillos (Sharma et al, 2015;Truman, 2005), and red squirrels (Schilling et al, 2019) that have the potential for or have contributed to zoonotic spillover. Further, the rise in prevalence and transmission of M. leprae is often associated with the rise in urbanization, specifically high population densities (Betsinger & DeWitte, 2021;Pinhasi et al, 2006), but this relationship is complex. Urban environments do not necessarily always have higher leprosy or TB rates; Kelmelis et al…”