Abstract
Disarticulated assemblages often are seen as the end result of some kind of violent episode involving executions and/or massacres. Given the slippery nature of defining violence in cross-cultural perspectives, a poetics approach to violence in the archaeological record provides a way to focus on how extreme violence may reflect cosmology and ideology and how it is a cultural system in its own right. To the trained eye focused on linking skeletal remains to broader social constructs, arrangements of bones, and marks on bones are intentional products of human agency. Interpretations of the meaning of extreme violence can only be revealed by utilizing theoretical frameworks that link direct violence and its underlying connections with other aspects of human behavior and social organization. Examples of this approach as applied to three massacre sites in the American Southwest provide insight into thinking about the underlying reasons for the presence of infants, children, and women in these kinds of contexts.
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Osterholtz, A.J., Martin, D.L. (2017). The Poetics of Annihilation: On the Presence of Women and Children at Massacre Sites in the Ancient Southwest. In: Martin, D., Tegtmeyer, C. (eds) Bioarchaeology of Women and Children in Times of War. Bioarchaeology and Social Theory. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48396-2_7
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