Damien Huffer

There is a thriving trade, and collector community, around human remains that is facilitated by posts on new social media such as Instagram, Facebook, Etsy, and, until recently, eBay. In this article, we examine several thousand Instagram posts and perform some initial text analysis on the language and rhetoric of these posts to understand something about the function of this community, what they value and how they trade, buy, and sell, human remains. Our results indicate a well-connected network of collectors and dealers both specialist and generalist, with a surprisingly wide-reaching impact on the 'enthusiasts' who, through their rhetoric, support the activities of this collecting community, in the face of legal and ethical issues generated by its existence.

This study investigates whether or not local communities on Bahrain saw changes to social organization as they participated in two distinct long-distance trade networks. We present new isotopic and demographic data from three human skeletal assemblages, Middle Islamic Period (c. 14th-16th centuries AD) Qal’at al-Bahrain (n=245) and Early Dilmun City IIa-c Period Saar (n=14) and Hamad Town North and South (n=24)(c. 4,300-3,750 BP). We examine carbon, oxygen, and strontium isotope variability within and between the Early Dilmun assemblages to elucidate diversification of diet and childhood residence within small-scale populations centrally placed within the Dilmun polity. Diachronically, we hypothesize that increasing variation in isotope values may indicate a more heterogeneous population on Bahrain similar to elsewhere in the Islamic World. We provide a demographic reassessment of each population, assess normality, and then compare strontium and oxygen results from human enamel samples are compared to a new faunal dataset (n=6; cattle and sheep). Faunal δ18Omw  values  range from -0.8 to +8.0‰ with a mean of +3.2 ± 3.1‰, while mean strontium is 0.708343 ± 0.000087. Human strontium, oxygen and carbon values are generally narrow, but distinct outliers are seen in both assemblages. δ13Ccollagen and δ15N was also obtained for two-thirds (n=21) of the Qal’at-al Bahrain bone samples initially assessed. The collagen and carbonate data together continue to suggest that mixed C3/C4 omnivorous diets persisted in Bahrain regardless of time period or cultural context. These results suggest that, during the Middle Islamic Period diet did not substantially alter, or become sex segregated, even as local trading communities integrated into ever-larger interaction spheres and adopted foreign born individuals for at least a portion of their lives. The data overall suggests a consistent pattern of sporadic long-distance migration, with migrant numbers and origins increasing and diversifying over time.

This article describes the development, implementation, assessment, outcomes, and potential utility of a University-level, student driven educational gaming project. This project constituted a major assessment item in a course entitled Ancient Medicine, a class and project first coordinated and delivered by the authors in 2010. Discussion of various aspects of the project is explored in the context of educational gaming theory and practice. We demonstrate that educational board games not only represent an effective method for students to retain and convey information even when the games are focused on untraditional topics such as the history and archaeology of medicine. Furthermore, we argue that they can present a cheap, fun and less time/resource intensive alternative to electronic or web-based projects, while still being an attractive addition to traditional classroom teaching methods, especially within lower socio-economic status environments.