Owing to their unique state of preservation, mummies provide us with significant historical and scientific knowledge of humankind’s past. This handbook, written by prominent international experts in mummy studies, offers readers a comprehensive guide to new understandings of the field’s most recent trends and developments. It provides invaluable information on the health states and pathologies of historic populations and civilizations, as well as their socio-cultural and religious characteristics. Addressing the developments in mummy studies that have taken place over the past two decades – which have been neglected for as long a time – the authors excavate the ground-breaking research that has transformed scientific and cultural knowledge of our ancient predecessors. The handbook investigates the many new biotechnological tools that are routinely applied in mummy studies, ranging from morphological inspection and endoscopy to minimally invasive radiological techniques that are used to assess states of preservation. It also looks at the paleoparasitological and pathological approaches that have been employed to reconstruct the lifestyles and pathologic conditions of ancient populations, and considers the techniques that have been applied to enhance biomedical knowledge, such as craniofacial reconstruction, chemical analysis, stable isotope analysis and ancient DNA analysis. This interdisciplinary handbook will appeal to academics in historical, anthropological, archaeological and biological sciences, and will serve as an indispensable companion to researchers and students interested in worldwide mummy studies.

Dominant historical narratives among cultures with long and enduring colonial experiences often ignore Indigenous histories. This erasure is a response to the colonial experiences. With diverse cultures like those in the Philippines, dominant groups may become assimilationists themselves. Collaborative archaeology is an important tool in correcting the historical record. In the northern Philippines, archaeological investigations in Ifugao have established more recent origins of the Cordillera Rice Terraces, which were once understood to be at least two thousand years old. This new research not only sheds light on this UNESCO World Heritage site but also illuminates how collaboration with Indigenous communities is critical to understanding their history and heritage. Indigenous Archaeology in the Philippines highlights how collaborative archaeology and knowledge co-production among the Ifugao, an Indigenous group in the Philippines, contested (and continue to contest) enduring colonial tropes. Stephen B. Acabado and Marlon M. Martin explain how the Ifugao made decisions that benefited them, including formulating strategies by which they took part in the colonial enterprise, exploiting the colonial economic opportunities to strengthen their sociopolitical organization, and co-opting the new economic system. The archaeological record shows that the Ifugao successfully resisted the Spanish conquest and later accommodated American empire building. This book illustrates how descendant communities can take control of their history and heritage through active collaboration with archaeologists. Drawing on the Philippine Cordilleran experiences, the authors demonstrate how changing historical narratives help empower peoples who are traditionally ignored in national histories.

The Ibaloi village of Kabayan Poblacion combines a subsistence agricultural economy with a market economy that has grown up as a result of subsequent waves of colonization. The Spanish arrived in the sixteenth century, following the trail of gold and slave-bearing Chinese trade junks, and were followed in 1898 by the Americans. The Ibaloi, who were gold miners and traders, cattle barons and vegetable producers, have since then come to be known as an Hispanicized uplands people, acculturated to Western ways and struggling to come to grips with new economic realities. This book examines the Ibaloi property system and demonstrates that the changes which have taken place since the Spanish arrival were complex and had numerous directions and relationships, many of them steered by the nature of Ibaloi society itself, others by the Spanish, and still others by the resources of Benguet Province. What began as a study of the Ibaloi property system rapidly became an exercise in understanding developments over time in social stratification, ritual and law. Wiber’s research has led her to challenge the dependency theory of legal pluralism, whereby peripheral zones are forced into economic dependency by having to exist within two legal structures, their own and another imposed by a central power zone, in favour of the social science view of legal pluralism. Thus all heterogeneous societies experience legal pluralism, but in different and individual ways, as people have a tendency to manipulate the law to their own advantage. She also takes issue with the narrowness of current anthropological terms relating to property systems and whether they are applicable to non-Western societies and argues for a reorientation of anthropology to end the tendency to generate simplistic models of property, kinship and law.