Conclusion

Spanning thousands of years and human cultures from disparate corners of the globe, the case studies in this volume show the tremendous applicability of the poetics model within bioarchaeology. When viewed as a part of the tool kit within biocultural bioarchaeology, poetics emerges as a flexible model that can respond to different research questions (individual versus population-level approaches), different types of assemblages (mass graves or individual burials, as well as antemortem, perimortem, and postmortem manipulation), and different degrees of additional evidence that can be employed (e.g., textual references for historic periods). Poetics theory has previously been applied to the study of violence in bioarchaeology as well as to mortuary processes in general, but these studies have primarily focused on cultures of the Americas. Taken as a whole, the case studies presented in this volume broadly demonstrate the usefulness of applying theoretical models to new situations. Overall, this volume highlights how different cultural groups throughout time have used violence as a form of social communication with vocabularies and grammars that reflect evolving social conditions and are deeply embedded in social and cultural ideologies.