The Archaeology of Medicine and Healthcare - Paperback

by Naomi Sykes (Editor), Julia Shaw (Editor)

This volume highlights the importance of medical worldviews as a means of understanding healthcare and medical practice in the past. It argues for greater integration between archaeology and both the medical and environmental humanities.

Author Biography

Naomi Sykes researches and teaches on human-animal-environment interactions over the past 10,000 years and their impact on the structure, ideology and impact of societies, past and present. She integrates archaeological evidence with data from biomolecular analyses and discourse in anthropology, cultural geography, (art) history and linguistics. She is author of Beastly Questions: Animal Answers to Archaeological Issues (2014).

Julia Shaw researches and teaches on South Asian environmental and socio-religious history and diachronic interfaces between environmental archaeology, ecological public health, and global climate-change activism. Current projects include work on interactions between lowland irrigated agriculture and upland forest-based lifeways in India, and diachronic attitudes towards urban wildlife, 'pests' and pesticides in the UK. She is author of Buddhist Landscapes in Central India (Routledge, 2007) and is writing a book on religion, ecology and medico-environmental worldviews in early India. She co-leads UCL Institute of Archaeology's Heritage and Archaeology of Health and Medicine (HAHM) initiative.