ABSTRACT
Chapters 8–10 deal with palaeopathology, the study of disease and injury in past populations. Chapter 8 concentrates on bone diseases. I discuss how we go about the tricky task of diagnosing disease in ancient bones and how we quantify its frequency in a skeletal population. Study of bone disease helps us to understand the history of particular diseases, but most work nowadays concentrates on using quantitative studies of disease frequencies to address questions of broad archaeological or historical relevance. We do this by relating disease frequencies to cultural or environmental factors, the so-called biocultural approach.
