The memory of bones: Science at the service of history

Esta obra está bajo una Licencia Creative Commons Atribución-NoComercial-SinDerivar 4.0 Internacional.

Science, especially social science and forensics, plays an essential role in our interpretation of the past, from the most ancient to the most recent. Human bones are not only the essential trace of who our ancestors once were, but also a memory repository that cannot and must not be forgotten.

The well-known phrase «those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it» is essentially the cornerstone of this monograph, which offers a multidisciplinary overview of a diverse historical memory, analysed from different but complementary scientific perspectives, where history, archaeology, physical anthropology, forensic medicine, criminalistics, and genetics, among other sciences, intertwine to shed light and evidential value on heterogeneous facts based on the biological vestiges of the past.

In the following pages, we propose a diachronic journey from ancient times to the present. The different authors approach history from twenty-first century lines of research, and bioanthropological and genetic heritage is the subject of the different studies, as well as the vehicle for understanding the memory of past societies.