Introduction

The maintenance of human health and the mechanisms by which this is achieved – through medicine, medical intervention and care-giving – are fundamentals of human societies. However, within archaeological discourse, investigations of medicine and care have tended to examine the obvious and explicit manifestations of medical treatment as discrete practices that take place within specific settings, rather than as broader indicators of medical worldviews and health beliefs. In order to achieve a viable new subfield, there is a need for archaeologists to forge better links between the biomedical sciences and medical humanities. The latter, in particular, would help archaeology to move beyond a presentist and Eurocentric understanding of ‘medicine’ as a set of discrete drug-based ‘treatments’ in the modern clinical sense. A scholarly understanding of pre-modern medical worldviews needs to be situated within an overview of the history of European medicine.