The Labor of Building a Community: Exploring the Divergent Trajectories of Complex Sites in Copper Age Iberia (original) (raw)

A growing body of literature in public health and epidemiology is focused on the concept of "embodiment": "how we literally incorporate biologically-from conception to death-our social experience and express this embodiment in population patterns of health, disease, and well-being" (Krieger 1999, 296). Today, the majority of embodied inequalities are linked to living in a globalized economy deeply rooted in colonial and imperial histories. Because of the effects of economic and political changes on contemporary bodies, we often anticipate that past social transformations entailed similar somatic costs and that increasing social complexity goes hand in hand with biocultural trade-offs.