Human remains are compelling in their materiality. The tangibility and physicality of human remains first attracted me to study them, and inspired this book. Yet it is more than just the bodies themselves that I find engaging. It is the ways that bodies change over a lifetime and, in doing so, express the histories and lives of people. In other words, how the bodies of people come to be how they are, and how they are understood.

The human body is material and historical. Together, these two aspects lend it to archaeological investigation. Yet within the discipline, with regard to the study of human remains, these two aspects rarely seem to meet. Archaeological bodies are studied through two contrasting approaches that sit on different sides of a disciplinary divide. On one side lie science-based osteological approaches that focus on the skeleton as the material remains of the body. While these approaches recognise variation between individual bodies, osteological conceptualisations are necessarily fixed, universal and transhistorical in order that the body may be subject to scientific analysis and comparisons between bodies made. On the other side lie approaches to the body situated in recent developments in social theory. These increasingly view the body as a social construction that is contextually and historically produced, but hardly touch on the human remains themselves.