¹The dictionary definition is the “use of a range of biological techniques on archaeological material in order to learn more about past populations” (MedicineNet.com).

²In 1973, Vilhelm Møller-Christensen (1973, 1978) adamantly took ownership of the term osteoarchaeology, which he linked to an excavation method he had been developing since 1935. Complaining of the manner in which archaeologists excavated cemetery sites, Møller-Christensen (1973:412) emphasized that during osteoarchaeological excavations, “the main idea … is to treat any part of a tiny and fragile bone just as carefully as the archaeologists treat jewels, gold and pearls …” He (Møller-Christensen, 1973:413) went on to declare that the “osteo-archaeologic examination of a burial place is therefore something quite different from the taking-up of skeletons by archaeologists.”

³BABAO’s stated objective “is to promote the study of human bioarchaeology and for the purpose of understanding the human condition from the past to the present” (BABAO Web site).

⁴Compare, for example, the nonhuman biological usage for the Bioarchéologie at the University of Geneva (Chevalier, 1997, ILLAPA Web site) and Bioarcheologia at San Vincenzo al Volturno (San Vincenzo al Volturno, 2001, Bioarcheologia Web page) with the bioarqueología taught at the Autonomous University of the Yucatán (UADY) (www.uady.mx/sitios/antropol/arqueologia/index.html).

⁵In the United States, animal bones are typically studied by archaeozoologists or zooarchaeologists, archaeologists with special training in identification and analysis of animal bone. Biological anthropologists specialize in the study of human bone. Occasionally, “bioarchaeology” is glossed with the United Kingdom definition, e.g., University of Texas at El Paso’s Laboratory for Environmental Biology (UTEP Laboratory for Environmental Biology Bioarchaeological References Web page).

⁶Certainly, important influences from the United Kingdom and elsewhere have affected the course of American studies of archaeologically derived human remains, e.g., Brothwell’s handbook (1963c) and broadly based scholarship. British archaeologists, however, actively imported American “bioarchaeology,” beginning in the late 1970s, e.g., Chapman et al. (1981).