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Built on Bones: 15,000 Years of Urban Life and Death (Bloomsbury Sigma), by Brenna Hassett
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Humans and their immediate ancestors were successful hunter-gatherers for hundreds of thousands of years, but in the last fifteen thousand years humans have gone from finding food to farming it, from seasonal camps to sprawling cities, from a few people to hordes. Drawing on her own fieldwork in the Mediterranean, Africa, Asia, and beyond, archeologist Brenna Hassett explores the long history of urbanization through revolutionary changes written into the bones of the people who lived it.
For every major new lifestyle, another way of dying appeared. From the "cradle of civilization" in the ancient Near East to the dawn of agriculture on the American plains, skeletal remains and fossil teeth show evidence of shorter lives, rotten teeth, and growth interrupted. The scarring on human skeletons reveals that getting too close to animals had some terrible consequences, but so did getting too close to too many other people.
Each chapter of Built on Bones moves forward in time, discussing in depth humanity's great urban experiment. Hassett explains the diseases, plagues, epidemics, and physical dangers we have unwittingly unleashed upon ourselves throughout the urban past--and, as the world becomes increasingly urbanized, what the future holds for us. In a time when "Paleo" lifestyles are trendy and so many of us feel the pain of the city daily grind, this book asks the critical question: Was it worth it?
- Sales Rank: #134869 in Books
- Brand: BLOOMSBURY SIGMA
- Published on: 2017-05-02
- Released on: 2017-05-02
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: .34" h x .5" w x 5.55" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 320 pages
- BLOOMSBURY SIGMA
Review
"Filled with surprising facts and insights." - Los Angeles Times
About the Author
Brenna Hassett is an archaeologist who uses clues from human skeletal remains and teeth to understand how people lived and died. She has dug at the pyramids in Egypt and many other sites. She is a founding member of the TrowelBlazers project, an advocacy effort to celebrate women's contributions to the earth sciences. This is her first book. Originally from California, Hassett completed her Ph.D. at University College, London, and continues her research at London's Natural History Museum.
@brennawalks / trowelblazers.com
Most helpful customer reviews
7 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
A droll, easily readable book about some of the most interesting science of our day. A pleasure!
By Graham H. Seibert
Most anthropologists are a little bit crazy. Sadly, the majority tend to be crazy in predictable ways, such as the pursuit of Marxist politics and marrying people from the Third World. Examples would be Robert TrIvers (OK, an evolutionary psychiatrist) and Obama's mother.
Brenna Hassett is wholly unpredictable in her craziness. She writes in a flippant, offhand way that doesn't detract whatsoever from the seriousness of her topic. She can write about the distinguished Gordon Childe being both a lifelong Marxist and an outstanding anthropologist. She doesn't get them confused. She captures the libertine atmosphere of large congregations of young anthropologists, hormones fully engaged, camped out on Neolithic sites in the middle of nowhere not too far from Cappadocia, Turkey. Or on a goat-ridden Greek island.
The chapter titles below give some idea of her capriciousness. And I'll bet this is the only book review you'll ever read in which the author's footnotes are cited. The footnotes are hilarious – I found myself clicking to go from footnotes back to text instead of the normal path of text to footnotes – in the rare instance you might be interested.
She is so off-the-wall that you don't even ask yourself if she's politically correct or not. The question is not relevant. She is simply a delight to read, and you have the feeling that she is telling you exactly what is on her mind, without a by your leave from anybody. I would bet that she gives the American Anthropological Association fits. It couldn't happen to a better bunch of folks.
It's about time I got around to telling you what the book is about. Here goes.
Bioanthropology is the science of figuring out how people lived from examining human remains. The most durable of our remains are our teeth and bones. They play the primary role in this drama. However, every now and again a little bit of our soft tissue gets left behind. It may be intentionally mummified. A corpse may be preserved in the glaciers in the Alps or the Andes, or the frozen steppes of Siberia. A corpse may fall into a peat bog, buried where the air cannot get to it in order to decay it.
As the field has evolved over the past three decades or so, bioanthropologists have gotten increasingly clever at teasing out secrets from bones. As DNA analysis has progressed on all fronts, the bio anthropologists have gotten extremely clever at digging archaic DNA out of bones going back hundreds of thousands of years. From this they have made several startling conclusions. Not only are we descended in part from the Neanderthals, which was long suspected, but also from a group named the Denisovians of which we have very little fossil record. They were a surprise.
A large part of the book deals with the two major revolutions named by the aforementioned Childe, the Neolithic Revolution that led to agriculture and the urban revolution a few millennia later that led to cities. Agriculture led to increased population densities. It had a few downsides – shorter lives, worse health, tooth decay and so on – but evolution doesn't concern itself with quality of life nearly so much as quantity. The bioanthropologists are fascinated by it all.
These scientists trace the development of our foods from the minute bits stuck in our grinding stones and embedded in the plaque on our teeth. They look at the animal bones to examine their dates and extents of domestication. They even look at the grooves we have worn in our teeth to decide what might have done that. They examine human bones to see if the flesh on them had simply decayed or had become somebody's dinner.
Hassett has several long and fascinating chapters on disease. We picked up a lot of disease from the animals we domesticated. The cities we built are wonderful breeding grounds for disease. An epidemic is rather like a nuclear bomb. It has to have a critical mass of potential victims in order to get started, but once it does – boom! She takes a detailed look at plagues, both ordinary and The Plague. The black one. She goes into typhoid and smallpox. She has a long and fascinating chapter on syphilis. I had not known it is actually four diseases. There is the notorious sexually-transmitted one, but also the relatively benign form called pinta, and the non-sexually-transmitted forms bejel and yaws. None of them sound like something you would want to sign up for.
The book is fascinating purely as research. Hassett tells you what she has found. There is no moralizing, no particular storyline. She simply has a droll way of recounting what is going on today in this field of science. I hope that she is able to inspire a new generation to follow in her footsteps. A five-star effort.
Here is one page of footnotes. Doesn't it make you curious about the text it comes from?
1 Some enterprising folk maintained two residences on site; one now-established scholar for instance kept a tent expressly for (ahem) facilitating sociability. I always preferred tents for the exact opposite reason, but the downside to having your own canvas bubble was the fact that they get to about 45 degrees by 7.00 a.m., and you might occasionally wake up to find your guy-wires crossed with a tent erected for purely (cough) social purposes.
2 To be fair to our smaller-brained ancestors, it was very cold.
3 And beyond; the first seeds in space were sent on a 1942 V-2 rocket trip, and current crops aboard the International Space Station include romaine lettuce.
4 Though not too far aside. Maybe 4° C (8° F) or a few H-bombs aside.
5 Much like my skills in analogy.
6 For instance: early, using the Bering Strait.
7 This is surprisingly true in physical anthropology. No one expects the Denisovans.
8 Thailand, Japan.
9 And cannibalism: see Chapter 8.
10 In which someone paid for him to go canoeing, kayaking, mountain biking, lumbering, boating, salmon fishing, carving, weaving and god knows what else all across the coastline of Western Canada; that’s what is known to UK archaeologists as ‘jammy’.
11 Or at least, in theory, it shouldn’t. Though anyone who’s ever been in my car off-roading to site might disagree.
12 In the immortal words of excavator Anies Hassan, broadcast over the site radio: It’s soooo hot.
13 Problem.
14 Without which I would never have been able to achieve the desired hair height for the French Revolution theme night.
15 Highlights include: nuns, vicars, gods, goddesses, the conservation team as Ninja Turtles, and a fabulous seventeenth-century full-skirted gown constructed entirely from a patio umbrella and Efes bottle caps.
16 Which did finally explain what had happened to my second-best digging shirt.
17 Traditional dancing is a much-underestimated hazard of archaeological fieldwork.
18 On Twitter, which is why the tweeting of conferences is wonderful. Thanks Jens!
19 On balance, Morris dancing probably did not feature.
20 I am still peeved about the crossed guy-wires thing. Ten years later.
And here is the table of contents. Not very telling, but very inviting.
Contents Introduction: Nothing (but Flowers)
Chapter 1: Papa Was a Rolling Stone
Chapter 2: Feed Me (Seymour)
Chapter 3: What’s New Pussycat?
Chapter 4: Revolution
Chapter 5: Power of Equality
Chapter 6: Oops Upside Your Head
Chapter 7: Under My Thumb
Chapter 8: War! What Is It Good For?
Chapter 9: Under Pressure
Chapter 10: Bring Out Your Dead
Chapter 11: Tainted Love
Chapter 12: Take This Job and Shove It
Chapter 13: Panic ...
Conclusion: Karma Police Acknowledgements: Some of My Friends Index
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Its well written and the wit keeps you solidly entertained.
By Cluckus Duckus
This is a book about how the decisions we made to live, such as domestication of animals, nutrition, violence, etc.,changed us physically and left their record in the BioArchaeological record. It’s written with the one of the best inventions of human beings came up with: sarcasm. Therefore, its awesome.
Brenna starts at the beginning and goes through just about all aspect of humans in their transitions from hunter-gatherer to sedentary civilization or urbanization. She goes into the how’s and why’s of how we changed. For example, our shrinking faces. She delves into the the effects of our diet changing from heavily masticated eating habits such as nuts and seeds to easy “noodle slurping” that changed our need for extra muscle and therefore less bone mass, hence smaller faces.
Much of this book analyzes nutrition and how it has affected us. She particularly picks apart the fad of the Paleo diet. For instance one of the main foundations of the diet is that humans started farming and then started eating cereals. The fossil record shows signs of humans eating cereals for quite sometime before any agriculture sets in. She goes into detail about the diet of early humans and how it impacted our bones.
There is sarcasm and witty jokes all throughout this book. Mind you, that does not mean she doesn’t cover everything seriously. While this book covers a large expanse of knowledge about people moving through their journey to urbanize, it places serious issues such as starvation and various forms of violence that we still deal with today, in context. It is important to understand these issues fully before making decisions that impact people’s lives. If only leaders, politicians, or other decision makers had more knowledge of Anthropology, perhaps we would have at least a few less problems in the world.
You don’t need to be a college graduate to read this book. Its well written and the wit keeps you solidly entertained.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Great science writing and humor
By Steve G
I loved this book. Brenna Hassett tells the reader about urbanization of the world using the evidence from bone remains to build the story. On its own, the story is fascinating, but when you add in her incredible sense of humor, this book is impossible to put down. It is not often that I recommend that the reader read the footnotes, but in this case it’s a must. I’m sure I annoyed my wife by reading the footnotes out loud to her. While this book is about science, it is written in plain language and no science background is necessary to enjoy the book. This is one of the best science books I’ve read recently.
Disclosure: I received a complimentary copy of this book via Netgalley for review purposes.
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