Christopher Knüsel is Associate Professor in Bioarchaeology in the Department of Archaeology, University of Exeter. Works include Blood Red Roses: The Archaeology of a Mass Grave from Towton, A.D 1461 (co-ed., 2000, 2007); Social Archaeology of Funerary Remains (co-ed., 2006), Velim: Violence and Death in Bronze Age Bohemia (2007), co-authored with Anthony Harding, Radka Šumberová, and Alan Outram. He is currently working on Funerary Archaeology: A Bioarchaeological Synthesis and serves as Co-Head of the Human Remains Team at Neolithic Çatalhöyük (Turkey). Martin J. Smith is Senior Lecturer in Forensic and Biological Anthropology in the School of Applied Sciences, Bournemouth University. He recently published the first book to deal specifically with human remains from Neolithic Britain: People of the Long Barrows: Life, Death and Burial in the Earlier Neolithic, co-authored with Megan Brickley (2009), he has also authored a range of papers dealing with aspects of burial practice, post mortem damage to the skeleton and the recognition of violent injuries to human bone.
This timely book presents detailed studies of human conflict from all round the world in many different periods from prehistory to the modern era. It is a showcase for the value of scientific analysis of human remains in revealing human brutality across time and culture. It will be required reading for archaeologists, historians, biological anthropologists and others interested in the study of violence in the past. A delightfully grisly read! - Mike Parker Pearson, University College London, UK. ...notable contributors move beyond description and draw insightful inferences about violence and its links to gender, social status, and citizenship. Summing Up: Recommended. -P. L. Geller, University of Miami, USA, in CHOICE