General introduction

One of the few tenets of palaeopathological and palaeoepidemiological study is that there is an intimate relationship between the lifestyle of humans and the frequency and types of disease from which they suffer. That relationship has been demonstrated repeatedly in numerous studies of ancient and more recent skeletal populations from many parts of the world. They have shown, for example, that there is an increase in the frequency of certain types of stress and infectious disease with socio-economic, cultural and demographic change. This association has provided archaeologists with an important interpretive tool for unravelling the time at which socio-economic as well as demographic changes in ancient populations took place. Moreover, palaeopathology has helped to identify when some hunter-gatherer groups began to lead a more sedentary existence, that transitional stage before taking up farming and developing permanent towns and villages. This has been a particularly difficult stage of cultural development to detect in the archaeology using more traditional methods of investigation. Of equal importance is the fact that this same research has enabled us to study the temporal and spatial origin of disease. In turn we have gained a better understanding of the ecology of certain pathogens and the environmental changes which affect them. In this way palaeopathology and palaeoepidemiology have contributed enormously to our understanding of present-day disease.