Bioarchaeology International

Volume 6, Numbers 1–2: 1–22

DOI: 10.5744/bi.2022.6000

Building a Bioarchaeology of Pandemic, Epidemic, and Syndemic Diseases: Lessons for Understanding COVID-19

Gwen Robbins Schuga,b* and Siân E. Halcrowc

ABSTRACT   As we enter the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the scientific community has met the SARS-CoV-2 virus with efficient and effective responses in epidemiology, molecular biology, genetics, vaccine development, and new treatment options. Yet the toll of the virus on public health has been uneven globally and within nations to an extent that has led STEM professionals to inevitably conclude that a truly effective response requires insights and mobilization from across the social sciences and humanities. It is hard to express how much the pandemic has impacted almost every aspect of life in human communities and how it has laid bare longstanding social problems, like social inequalities. The pandemic has also illuminated the extent of more recent pernicious social forces, such as disaster capitalism, and provides an ominous window into how some governments and societies will meet challenges such as climate change. This introduction presents six commissioned articles that demonstrate the power of an anthropological approach to the biocultural and evolutionary aspects of pandemic and epidemic diseases in the past. In this article, we also frame a path for bioarchaeologists to contribute to incredibly important questions and debates about the global pandemic by situating the articles into holistic theoretical approaches.

Keywords: bioarchaeology; pandemics; COVID-19; SARS-CoV-2; zoonoses; social inequity

The recent outbreak of COVID-19, a disease caused by infection with a novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, began as an epidemic in Wuhan, China. COVID-19 was first recognized as a new infectious disease in December 2019 (Petersen et al. 2020; Zheng 2020), and the Chinese government rapidly moved to put Wuhan under a strict lockdown to try and confine the outbreak. Later that month, the disease was recognized in the state of Washington, in the United States, in an individual who had recently traveled to Wuhan. Cases multiplied in outbreaks around the globe through the months following and countries began instituting travel bans to try to control the spread of what was quickly becoming an epidemic disease. COVID-19 was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) on 11 March 2020, when cases of COVID-19 in China had increased 13-fold and the disease had been found in 114 countries with more than 118,000 cases, and people fighting to save lives in many hospitals. At this time, there were 9,000 cases in Iran and more than 7,700 in South Korea (WHO 2020; Chappell 2020). In the majority of European countries, hospitals were overwhelmed with cases; in Italy, more than 630 people had died of COVID-19 at that time. The country had 10,000 cases, second only to China, and the world soon watched as Italians sang to one another from their balconies while in quarantine (Rudan 2020). The recent and ongoing global pandemic shut down societies around the globe as cases multiplied exponentially, and it became clear the toll COVID-19 would have in terms of morbidity and mortality.

The COVID-19 pandemic has illuminated social forces that affect the transmissibility, susceptibility, and outcomes of infection with this virus, including syndemic effects with degenerative diseases, obesity, diabetes, hypercholesterolemia, and coinfection with other coronaviruses, influencing susceptibility and outcomes for COVID-19 patients; social determinants of health, creating deep disparities in access to vaccines as well as in the risk of serious disease; significant physical impairment for people with “long COVID”; and coevolutionary processes creating more endemic and more infective strains of the virus. The impacts of this pandemic extend far beyond the risk for infected individuals and have resulted in financial and economic repercussions rippling through global economies, widespread mental health challenges in adults accompanied by developmental and learning deficits for children, and extreme social divisions, distrust for authority, “othering,” and targeting of already vulnerable groups, even escalating to physical violence.

We have yet to fully grasp the demographic and evolutionary consequences of the pandemic, although it is becoming clear that genetic, social, and environmental factors play a role in susceptibility to severe disease (see, e.g., Anastassapoulou et al. 2020; Godri Pollitt et al. 2020; Sironi et al. 2020), and there may also be impacts on pregnant women and infants that will be felt in the coming generations (Wastnedge at al. 2021). COVID-19 has highlighted the role of caregiving in disease susceptibility (Connor et al. 2020; Gausman and Langer 2020; Wade et al. 2021) and gender inequality in this labor (Fortier 2020). The pandemic has put a spotlight on enduring racism and discrimination (Khazanchi et al. 2020), the health impacts of racism (Devakumar et al. 2020), and other forms of structural violence (Nandagiri et al. 2020; Samra et al. 2020; Singer and Rylko-Bauer 2021). It is also challenging our conception of disability (Banks et al. 2021; McKinney et al. 2020) as those known as the “long-haulers,” in particular, face substantial hurdles to their physical and cognitive ability that will necessitate new systems of care for these individuals and their families (Baig 2021; Dorfman 2021; Rubin 2020; Smith 2022). The COVID-19 pandemic has also had consequences for how we view our relationship with the so-called natural world, with debates, for example, about the importance of regulating human–animal interaction and wet markets (Aguirre et al. 2020; Fine and Love-Nichols 2021; Mizumoto et al. 2020).

There have been developments too that might be considered positive, which have resulted from the pandemic, with scientific breakthroughs in RNA research and vaccine development that will certainly bring a renaissance in the treatment of a large number of diseases and conditions (Pardi et al. 2018). The vaccine development and rollout were only made possible through the collaboration between governments and scientists across the globe, although there is more work to be done in ensuring equitable rollout among countries. As noted, COVID-19 has revealed the harsh realities of significant structural inequalities and barriers to health care, the vaccine rollout, education, housing, and food, and we see some positive reactions from some organizations and governments to addressing these structural inequalities. The unfortunate spread of disinformation on COVID-19 vaccinations has led to support on various social media platforms for science and public health informed perspectives (e.g., Twitter’s COVID-19 misleading information policy). With Zoom becoming a common venue for academic and other meetings during COVID-19 travel restrictions, longstanding concerns are finally being acknowledged about accessibility for people with young children or other care responsibilities, underlying health conditions, disabilities, or who cannot afford to travel for conferences.

The current global COVID-19 pandemic presents an opportunity for bioarchaeologists to contribute long-term perspectives toward understanding and responding to the current-day global crisis in health. Bioarchaeology is uniquely poised to give insights to each of the aforementioned aspects of research on the COVID-19 pandemic because of our focus on the history and evolution of infectious diseases in the past and our recognition of humans as biocultural organisms embedded within larger historical-environmental-social-cultural (HESC) contexts. We have at our disposal evidence from mortuary, skeletal, molecular, and isotopic sources that can provide a direct source of evidence about past epidemic diseases (DeWitte 2016). The articles in this special issue of Bioarchaeology International create sophisticated histories of epidemics, pandemics, and syndemics, which inform larger questions about human health in medical, epidemiological, evolutionary, biological, sociological, historical, policy, planning, and human security discourse. In this introduction to the special issue, we summarize some of the lessons learned from bioarchaeological research on the pandemic, epidemic, and syndemic diseases of the past and how our research informs an anthropological perspective on COVID-19.

The articles in this special issue are instructive as to how bioarchaeologists and paleopathologists approach epidemic, endemic, and pandemic diseases from a variety of social and cultural theories, and evolutionary and demographic perspectives. When an infectious disease affects a wide swath of a population, we call it an epidemic. Epidemic diseases have become an increasingly important evolutionary pressure on modern humans over the course of the Holocene as we settled in villages and developed socio-sanitation problems, began to closely associate with animals, and relied more heavily on a few staple cereal crops for our principal source of calories (Armelagos et al. 2005). A pandemic is an epidemic infectious disease that has spread across a larger region, affecting multiple countries and continents. It differs from an endemic disease in that a pandemic is an acute event, rather than a longstanding event/disease burden. For instance, malaria is widespread around regions of the world, but it is a disease that has lingered, affecting a large proportion of many human populations for an extended duration, a period of time that exists on an evolutionary timescale.

Syndemics theory focuses on synergisms within the biosocial complex that perpetuate and exacerbate negative health outcomes by promoting co-morbidity, altering disease ecology, and contravening healthy epidemiological landscapes, often across the life span and intergenerationally (Singer 1994, 2009). Stemming from her work on multigenerational impacts of substance abuse during pregnancy (Singer and Snipes 1992), anthropologist Merrill Singer developed the concept of syndemics to describe the multitude of factors driving the AIDS epidemic, focusing specifically on the co-occurrence of substance abuse and violence in communities most susceptible to HIV and AIDS (Singer 1994).

This model is widely used in global health research (Mendenhall 2017) and medical anthropology (see Singer and Erickson 2015 for a review), and the notion of syndemics powerfully encapsulates the role of vulnerability and socioeconomic inequality in shaping the disease experience for COVID-19 patients (Caul 2020; Horton 2020; Singh et al. 2020). This concept has only occasionally been invoked in paleopathology as a useful interpretive framework to explain evidence for co-morbidity, for example. The concept of syndemics has been explicitly promoted as an interpretive path to explore when we encounter evidence for disease in human skeletal remains (Crespo 2020); it has been applied to bioarchaeological research on a suite of epidemic diseases in post-Columbian North America (Jones et al. 2021) and to the connection between tuberculosis (TB) and diabetes in present-day communities in New Zealand (Littleton et al. 2014).

In a recent review article about the concept of syndemics and its use in research on the history of disease, Newfield (2021) makes an important observation that “most of the ever-growing body of historical epidemiological scholarship misses the syndemic mark in that it quarantines the history of one disease, or disease event, from all other diseases. Few historians of disease or medicine interrogate co-morbidities or multi-morbidities, or, therefore, seek to identify the factors that cause diseases to cluster in the first place.” This criticism also applies to bioarchaeology. In part, this is a weakness of skeletal data; bone can only respond to disruptions in homeostasis in a few limited ways because of the structural-functional qualities of the tissue. This makes it difficult to disentangle co-morbidities in an individual, and there are also interpretive issues due to the so-called osteological paradox—in which chronic conditions are more likely to be expressed and heterogeneous frailty biases our interpretation (DeWitte and Stojanowski 2015; Wood et al. 1992). In part, it is also a limitation of the archaeological samples, or populations, we work with, which are not representative of a living whole but of the preserved and recovered non-survivors.

While a syndemics perspective has not frequently been explicitly applied in many bioarchaeological studies, this special issue demonstrates how syndemic thinking is already at work in our understanding of epidemic and pandemic diseases of the past and their lessons for research on COVID-19. The syndemic concept or “syndemic thinking” (Newfield 2021) has been implicitly used in some bioarchaeological research to examine a wide variety of factors that have promoted or constrained the spread of disease in the past, including the influence of perception and cultural beliefs about sickness (Marstellar et al. 2011) and disability (Byrnes and Muller 2017), gender ideology (Zuckerman 2017), social determinants of health across the life course (Gowland 2015), social marginalization (Mant and Holland 2019), climate and environmental conditions (Robbins Schug 2020), and human–environmental interactions (Aufderheide et al. 2004).

It is important when considering syndemics to view disease from a holistic perspective, reconstructing life span epidemiology, focusing on the likelihood of concurrent conditions, the influence of entangled HESC forces, perceptual and semiotic aspects of health, the embodiment of mental and emotional states, and personal agency as a force for specific disease ecologies in past populations. The articles mentioned above and by those in this special issue consider a holistic perspective of disease in our understanding of epidemic and pandemic diseases of the past and their lessons for research on COVID-19, whereby endemic, epidemic, and pandemic diseases are socially and culturally contextualized, particularly using theoretical frameworks of disability studies, social determinants of health, intersectionality, critical medical anthropology, epidemiology, and evolutionary biology.

Bioarchaeology, Disability Studies, and “Long COVID”

As Byrnes and Muller (2017:1) point out in their volume devoted to a Bioarchaeology of Disability and Impairment, disability has received little attention in bioarchaeology until recently because the concept has conflicting definitions. Disability is often imagined to exist at an intersection between functional (or “biological”) impairment, the culturally influenced meaning and perception of impairment or impaired people, and social forces such as political economy, medicalization, and discrimination. However, contemporary debate in the wider field of disability studies centers on ability as a discursive field within the civil rights movement (Owens 2015). Ability is also one aspect of our intersectional identity (Crenshaw 1989, 2017); it is defined by habitus and enacted through our thoughts, perceptions, and actions (Bourdieu 1977:179). Ability can also be perceived as a form of diversity (Ginsburg and Rapp 2020), a subjective lived experience (Cascio 2015), or as “otherness” and “difference” that is a social fact with material consequences. Ability is also a category that is situated within a nexus of power relations (Kasnitz and Shuttleworth 2001; Owens 2015).

Anthropological engagement with Disability Studies is “focused on all stakeholders in local contexts and committed to an ethic of social justice” (Kasnitz and Shuttleworth 2001:27). This focus on ethics and critical medical anthropology situates the concept of disability in the wider phenomenon of medicalization, a process through which, beginning in the eighteenth century, health and disease became recognized and difference became signified and imbued with meaning (Foucault 1961, 1963). Medicalization is an idea derived from and something that cannot be distinguished from a discourse about power relations, and this too is true for the concept of disability, which invites an analysis of social structures and power relations in a variety of contexts, including medicine, law, government, and religious institutions.

Heather Battles and Rebecca Gilmour’s (2022) work informs the question of how disability intersects with infectious disease epidemics in the past. In “Beyond Mortality: Survivors of Epidemic Infections and the Bioarchaeology of Impairment and Disability,” they engage with disability theory to discuss the long-term impacts and chronic health problems associated with the poliomyelitis (polio) epidemics of the mid-twentieth century. Polio, like many infectious diseases, is only symptomatic in a small percentage of cases, and the form most recognizable in human skeletal remains, the paralytic form, only affects 2% of cases. The disease may be recognized by alterations to morphology associated with disuse—limb shortening, atypical torsion or curvature of limb bones, or bone atrophy, a set of skeletal changes that have a very broad-ranging set of conditions making differential diagnosis difficult. However, Battles and Gilmour point out the high likelihood that this disease was endemic in large urban populations of the past and how it would likely have taken on epidemic proportions each time it was introduced to a new population.

Battles and Gilmour powerfully combine three “bioarchaeologies”—the Bioarchaeology of Care (Tilley 2015), Personhood (Boutin 2016), and Disability and Impairment (Byrnes and Muller 2017)—to create what they deem the survivor-lens approach. Using the sequelae associated with polio as their example, they demonstrate a new way to conceptualize the long-term impacts of epidemic and pandemic diseases in the past. Battles and Gilmour offer a way for bioarchaeologists to engage with the long-term consequences of infectious epidemics in the past, including a consideration of how these outbreaks can shape individual embodied experiences, how they constrain or challenge barriers and abilities, and how they may open a door to sociocultural change in past societies. Using the survivor-lens approach, bioarchaeologists can go beyond the evidence of a physical difference or functional impairment, to seek evidence for distorted power relations and their embodiment in the skeleton.

We are confident that, in the coming years, Battles and Gilmour’s model will be useful for other diseases in bioarchaeology. For example, leprosy is a disease that can leave significant physical disability, leaving sufferers missing fingers and toes or lacking sensory abilities (blind, unable to smell or taste). The stigma of this disease, beyond the physical manifestations, limits the potential for many of its sufferers while simultaneously opening a path to an unprecedented degree of freedom for others (Roberts 2020a; Staples 2005). This disease was recognized and was signified as a mark of “spiritual corruption” by at least the second millennium BC (Robbins Schug 2016).

Battles and Gilmour also demonstrate how the polio epidemic offers important insights into the current pandemic. Polio, like a wide range of other past epidemics, offers a long-term perspective on public health given these sequelae and their impacts on health throughout the life span. The major focus of research on COVID-19 so far has understandably been on morbidity and mortality in the short term, but we already know that “long COVID” or “COVID long-haulers” are suffering and will continue to suffer debilitating symptoms into the future, including loss of taste and smell, neurological problems, extreme shortness of breath upon exertion, and other potential sequelae (Mendelson et al. 2021; Nikhra 2021; Sudre et al. 2021). The survivor-lens approach offers a conceptual framework for studying those potential impacts and their meaning.

Who Suffers? Social Determinants of Health, Intersectionality, and Structural Violence

The social determinants of health framework demonstrates how personal and social identity intersects with socioeconomic inequality, marginalization, and structural or institutional violence to create inequities in health outcomes and access to care. Vulnerability to epidemic and pandemic disease is strongly determined by HESC processes that increase the likelihood of exposure to pathogens, decrease access to treatment and care options, and undermine the trust necessary for successful public health interventions. In the COVID-19 pandemic, we have seen Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous people at greatest risk for morbidity and mortality, in part due to preexisting health disparities resulting from marginalization and also due to economic inequalities in who becomes an “essential worker” versus who has the luxury of staying home (Abrams and Szefler 2020; Alcendor 2020; Ataguba and Ataguba 2020; Dalsania et al. 2022; de Souza Santos et al. 2021; Debopadhaya et al. 2021; Fathi et al. 2021; Hasan Bhuiyan 2021; McNeely et al. 2020; Singu and Acharya 2020; Tai et al. 2021). People in underrepresented communities in the United States have been denied access to medical care (Egede et al. 2021), cannot always logistically or financially access necessary care (Tai et al. 2021; Vargas and Sanchez 2020), and have directly suffered from mistrust of medical and government institutions that creates attitudes and behaviors that contravene preventative measures (Kricorian and Turner 2021; Malik et al. 2020; Scharff et al. 2010). The lack of representation of Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous providers in the national health care and scientific infrastructure in the United States not only creates opportunities for discrimination (Daley et al. 2021; James 2017) but also suggests significant lost opportunities for innovative solutions to the crisis (e.g., Ramirez 2021; Sweeney 2021).

The social determinants of health framework is used to demonstrate how social, economic, and political processes give rise to stratification by income, education, occupation, gender, race, ethnicity, and other factors. These socioeconomic positions, in turn, shape specific determinants of health status where certain epidemic diseases can “feedback” to affect the functioning of those social, economic, and political institutions. COVID-19 research has been shaped by these perspectives (e.g., Abrams and Szefler 2020; Ataguba and Ataguba 2020; Bambra et al. 2020; Singu et al. 2020). This is true not only for the impact of the pandemic on people of diverse racial or ethnic identities but also based on disparities in class, gender, mental health status, ability, and rurality (e.g., McQuaid et al. 2021; Paul et al. 2021; Shakespeare et al. 2021; Sharma et al. 2020; Turner-Musa et al. 2020). One highly stigmatized and marginalized group that has received less attention in COVID-19 research today includes people who are institutionalized—in prisons, group homes, and other such settings (e.g., Hege et al. 2021; Upshaw et al. 2021). This has been previously pointed out in historical research on pandemics, such as the 1918 influenza pandemic (Mamelund and Dimka 2021). This issue is critically important as we know the largest single-site outbreaks of COVID-19 in the United States were in prison populations (https://covidprisonproject.com/), yet stigma prevents substantial research focus on these populations. The effects of institutionalization and pandemics are explored from a bioarchaeological perspective in this special issue.

Molly Zuckerman’s (2022) article, “Institutionalization within the Context of Pandemic Infectious Disease: Examining Social Vulnerability to the 1918 Influenza Pandemic amongst Individuals Institutionalized in the Mississippi State Asylum,” uses historical demography to explore disability. She demonstrates how individuals within congregate settings who have been deemed inconvenient or unfit are most vulnerable to the impacts of pandemic disease, and they are most likely to be forgotten in pandemic preparedness planning. This article combines concepts from intersectionality, structural violence, and social determinants of health frameworks to demonstrate how social forces created elevated risks for mortality from influenza for young adults, particularly Black residents, who were overrepresented in the institutional population compared with the demography of Mississippi at that time. Although higher mortality rates for Black adults were consistent with a nationwide trend, Zuckerman’s article demonstrates how Black patients were more likely to become institutionalized, and thus at greater risk for influenza in the first place, through a confluence of discriminatory, structurally violent, racist, and ableist forces in Mississippi and throughout the South of the United States.

Zuckerman presents an analysis of data from the Mississippi State Asylum, which has housed more than 30,000 residents and for whom detailed records were kept. Of these, more than 2,200 death records are available for the period circumscribed by the pandemic. This type of detailed, longitudinal data is one of the principal advantages of taking a historical bioarchaeology approach to social determinants of health in pandemic diseases. Respiratory-related deaths—tuberculosis, asthma, pneumonia, and influenza—represent a typical syndemic of health issues frequently seen today in institutionalized people worldwide (Basu et al. 2011; Gostin 2006; Licata et al. 2021; Simpson et al. 2019). Disability, poverty, racism, and insufficient care work in synergy to increase the risk of mortality. Although detailed descriptions of the life and death of Black Mississippians are unavailable in such a large number for the nonresident population, this article does explore how the greater risk of exposure in the first wave of the pandemic led to co-immunity in subsequent waves, which buffered Black communities despite malnutrition, co-morbidities, and health consequences of structural violence and racism.

Zuckerman’s approach focusing on disabilities and institutionalized populations will be valuable to epidemiological research on COVID-19 and is an important contribution for bioarchaeologists interested in syndemics, even though this concept was only implicitly used. The article demonstrates that as we assess identity and social categories of difference, it is critical that we acknowledge the multiplicity of identity that is described by the concept of intersectionality (Crenshaw 2017). Intersecting identities work together in a reciprocal fashion to form systems of oppression (Collins 2015).

“Intersectionality and the Interpretation of Past Pandemics” by Samantha Yaussy (2022) operationalizes this concept for the study of pandemics in past populations in an attempt to encourage additional research in this area within the field of bioarchaeology. She begins with a review of the development of the field of intersectionality and some of the issues with the adoption of this approach in bioarchaeology. She explains the significant number of identity categories and relationships of inequality among these social divisions, which include race, gender, class, education, relationship status, parenthood, sexuality, gender identity, Indigeneity, and disease (Springer et al. 2012; Yaussy 2022), that may exist in conflict and be differentially expressed cross-culturally and through time. Yaussy also explores how intersectionality is employed in sociology, anthropology, and public health, again using approaches that are implicitly but deeply informed by the concept of syndemics.

The incredibly valuable contribution of this article is that Yaussy developed three quantitative methodologies for bioarchaeologists to explore and understand the multiplicative effects of intersecting identities, particularly within the context of paleopathology. She describes specifically how statistical methods already widely used in the field can be adapted to elucidate the intersecting, overlapping, and accumulating impacts of identity in shaping susceptibility, risk, and impacts of pandemics in the past. Prior to this special issue, Yaussy could identify no published works in the bioarchaeological literature that explicitly combined the concept of syndemics, intersectionality, and the social determinants of health framework to explore past pandemics, although there have been allusions to such an approach, and certainly scholars have used these frameworks individually (e.g., Byrnes and Muller 2017; Geller 2017; Gowland 2017; Mant et al. 2021; Torres-Rouff and Knudson 2017; Yaussy 2019). Yaussy directs bioarchaeologists to the potential for this type of research on the Black Death and tuberculosis, in particular.

These three articles by Battles and Gilmour, Zuckerman, and Yaussy demonstrate that the root of theoretical frameworks like social determinants of health, intersectionality, disability, and syndemics is the critical medical anthropology concept of structural violence. Structural violence describes how social relations, structures, and institutions constrain human agency and work to impinge upon human potential, denying some people or groups access to basic resources and contributing to increased susceptibility to disease. Structural violence is arguably the leading cause of human suffering, morbidity, and disability today (Farmer 2004), and this social suffering is exacerbated in situations of increased social stress, including warfare, climate change, and epidemics and pandemics, including COVID-19 (Barrientos et al. 2021; Cabatbat 2021; Kabel and Phillipson 2021; Morgan and Rose 2020; Nandagiri et al. 2021; Saldino et al. 2020; Samra et al. 2020; Singer and Rylko-Bauer 2021; Singh and Singh 2020).

As we mentioned above, there is important research already being done on how structural violence and syndemics inform our understanding of COVID-19, and that work has already been synthesized in an excellent comprehensive review by Singer and Rylko-Bauer (2021). In bioarchaeology, structural violence as a framework has been explicitly employed since Carlina de la Cova articulated how gender, race, and class formed the basis for physical violence against certain bodies as opposed to others (de la Cova 2008, 2011, 2012, 2020). Since that groundbreaking work, structural violence has been applied to other documented skeletal collections derived from marginalized communities (Watkins 2012, 2018a, 2018b; Watkins and Muller 2015), often assembled despite a lack of consent (Dunnavant et al. 2021). Over the past decade, structural violence has been used as a guiding framework for bioarchaeological research in undocumented archaeological assemblages of human remains from a variety of cultural and social contexts, both historic and ancient (Ellis 2020; Filipek et al. 2021; Geber 2015; Klaus 2012; Martin and Harrod 2020; Martin et al. 2010, 2012; Nystrom 2014, 2017; Nystrom and Robbins Schug 2020; Robbins Schug 2017; Robbins Schug et al. 2012; Sheridan and Gregoricka 2020; Stone 2012; Tegtmeyer and Martin 2017; Torres Rouff 2020).

Unfortunately, social suffering is embodied most frequently by mothers and infants in the modern context and probably in the past as well (Ellis 2014; Filipek et al. 2021; Geber 2015; Halcrow and Robbins Schug in press). In bioarchaeology, skeletons of infants and children are regularly used as a proxy for social determinants of health (Halcrow and Tayles 2008; Halcrow et al. 2017; Robbins Schug 2011; Robbins Schug and Blevins 2016; Robbins Schug and Goldman 2014; Snoddy et al. 2017; for a review, see Mays et al. 2017; Halcrow and Ward 2017). The conceptualization of health and care for mothers and babies in the past draws on anthropology as a holistic field, not a set of subdisciplines, to advance a more holistic understanding of the evolutionary, social, and health significance of inequality (Halcrow et al. 2020). A model of health care for mothers and babies in the past has recently been proposed, drawing on different anthropological subdisciplines to advance a more holistic understanding of the evolutionary, social, and health significance of this practice (Halcrow 2020; Halcrow et al. 2020). This model considers a number of social facets of care and methods from a range of disciplines, including the archaeology of grief and emotion; aspects of identity, including social inequality, gender, community support and alloparenting, infant feeding, and maternal and infant health; environmental factors such as pathogen load; and life history theory.

Unequal access to health, safety, and medical care during early life also has effects across the life course and intergenerationally (Agarwal 2016; DeWitte and Yaussy 2017; Gowland and Halcrow 2020). Thus, research on social determinants of health in bioarchaeology can be informed on a conceptual level by the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) hypothesis and life history theory. The DOHaD hypothesis describes how environmentally induced physiological changes during fetal development and infancy can have long-term consequences on morbidity and mortality later in life (Cheverko 2020:66). Early life adversity is embodied in the skeleton through pathophysiological markers commonly referred to as “biocultural stress markers” (Klaus 2014). Although molecular epigenetics is not well understood to a degree we can employ these concepts in bioarchaeology, on a conceptual level, we can use skeletal populations to examine the intersection of evidence for early life stressors, disease susceptibility, and the potential for intergenerational effects on plasticity and morphology (Gowland 2015).

It is unclear to a large extent what the risks are for the maternal–fetal nexus from COVID-19. There is evidence that pregnancy influences immune response to SARS-CoV-2 infection (Ovies et al. 2021), and pregnant women also mount a robust reaction to the mRNA vaccines (Atyeo et al. 2021; Bordt et al. 2021). The possibilities for and the likelihood of vertical transmission are still unclear (Ashraf et al. 2020). Premature birth has not been decisively demonstrated as a likely outcome in cases of gestational COVID-19 (Pirjani et al. 2020; Takemoto et al. 2020), nor has increased risk for cesarean section or elevated chance of fetal mortality been conclusively linked to COVID-19 (Mullins et al. 2020); however, these results do not necessarily hold true across all cultural contexts (Vizheh et al. 2021). There is some clinical evidence for placental injury and neurological damage in children (Lin et al. 2021; Wong et al. 2021). Although pregnancy outcomes appear good in many cases, available data are primarily on pregnant women infected in their third trimester (Yang et al. 2020). Studies indicate that newborns from COVID-19–infected mothers have a significantly higher risk of morbidity and mortality, and pregnant women themselves can suffer serious and debilitating symptoms and sequelae (Villar et al. 2021). These issues have yet to be resolved as it will take time to see these effects.

There have been calls for a nuanced biosocial anthropological approach to COVID-19 with a number of recent publications focusing on the maternal–infant nexus, maternal–child health, and the potential for transgenerational effects (Leonard 2020). For example, a 2020 special volume in the American Journal of Human Biology emphasized deleterious effects on maternal stress; immune function; low birth weights; psychosocial stress; infant feeding, growth, and development; and potentially later-life health outcomes (Bogin and Varea 2020; Gildner and Thayer 2020; Palmquist et al. 2020). Anthropologists too have explored the impacts of unpredictability and insecurity on the social networks that allow humans to successfully care for our offspring (Nelson 2021). These impacts are vastly different for women and children depending on their social position. This work underscores the importance of the comparative, anthropological, and evolutionary perspectives in providing the necessary context for understanding how COVID-19 is shaping maternal–child health over the long term.

Evolution, Demography, Mobility, and Animal–Human Interactions in Paleoepidemiological Models

The final three articles in this special issue tackle paleoepidemiology of infectious diseases, human–pathogen co-evolutionary processes, and the role of cross-cultural differences in human–animal interactions as they shape the risk for zoonotic disease transmission. Paleoepidemiology is by definition an interdisciplinary area that examines the incidence, distribution, and spread of communicable diseases in past populations, when medical interventions were limited in effectiveness and variation in the natural history of different diseases is thus more visible (Waldron 2007). Paleoepidemiology is at the root of bioarchaeological research on infectious disease (Zuckerman and Armelagos 2014), but it is complicated by a large number of factors (e.g., population interaction, residential mobility, population density, climate change, and subsistence) that play into the population-level experience of a disease. Bioarchaeological research on this topic has the potential to inform present-day questions about biosocial and cultural factors that shape disease transmission and who is more or less at risk, particularly because of our focus on social determinants of health and structural barriers to health. Access to resources within society will shape possible responses to pandemic disease, including opportunities for migration or the ability to limit interactions with the “outside world,” which then become intrinsically interlinked with disease transmission and the risk for morbidity and mortality (Singu et al. 2020; Thakur et al. 2020; Varkey et al. 2020).

What has become clear with the current COVID-19 pandemic is that human mobility and interaction are at the core of its transmission, which is typically the case with globalization and infectious diseases (Saker et al. 2004). Migration due to climate, environmental, or social crisis creates elevated risks for communicable disease and is often responsible for altering disease ecology in ways that will enhance transmission; this is particularly true in cases of labor migration, forced displacement, and resettlement or in situations where rural people resettle in urban slums (McMichael 2015). Mobility that does not involve relocation (travel) was the principal driver of the global pandemic spread (Choi et al. 2020; Furukawa et al. 2020; Ng et al. 2020).

The link between human mobility and epidemic outbreaks is a longstanding one, which is explored in Melandri Vlok and Hallie Buckley’s (2022) article “Paleoepidemiological Considerations of Mobility and Population Interaction in the Spread of Infectious Diseases in the Prehistoric Past.” These authors provide a critical new tool for understanding the anthropological dimensions of disease transmission over the long term through a novel theoretical model that considers the interplay of climate suitability, population density, residential mobility, and human interaction levels using paleoepidemiological data from prehistoric samples from Japan, northern Viet Nam, and Mongolia (n = 343). These sites offer a range of different settlement types and mobility processes, and their analyses showed that higher levels of population interaction between sedentary populations in the past are associated with greater frequency of skeletons that demonstrate evidence of infectious disease. Highly mobile populations in the past demonstrate higher levels of pathogen diversity.

The public is now more aware of the importance of zoonotic diseases with the COVID-19 pandemic as an emerging infectious disease of probable animal origin (Haider et al. 2020; Zhang and Holmes 2020). Some estimates suggest that 75% of new or emerging infections derive from our interactions with other species of animals (Ogden et al. 2017). Although not yet conclusively demonstrated, the SARS-CoV-2 virus closely resembles a virus that infects bats (Zhang and Holmes 2020), and it has been suggested that the spillover event occurred at a wet market in Wuhan, China, in late 2019 (Henley 2020). Anthropogenic climate and environmental changes—including global warming, deforestation, habitat destruction, road-building activity, poaching, and population growth—are not only impacting biodiversity and driving the sixth mass extinction event but also altering patterns of human–animal interaction, which creates new threats for disease transmission (Henley 2020). This is such a critical juncture that it is leading to new paradigms for understanding public health, including the One Health framework, which seeks transdisciplinary collaboration to attain optimal health conditions for humans, other animals, and the environment (e.g., Bonilla-Aldana et al. 2020; Henley 2020; Schmeige et al. 2020).

Interactions between humans and other animals are not only the most likely source of coronavirus infections (Salata et al. 2019; Ye et al. 2020); other animals also play a role in viral evolution (e.g., El-Sayed et al. 2021; Lundstrom et al. 2020), the development of medical coping strategies (e.g., Christie et al. 2021; Dua et al. 2020; Luo et al. 2021), and the human coping mechanism for mental health during quarantine (e.g., Nagendrappa et al. 2020; Ng et al., 2021; Ratschen et al. 2020). Unfortunately, the threat of future zoonotic spillover is also creating challenges for animal and habitat conservation (e.g., Lu et al. 2021; MacFarlane and Rocha 2020; Zhao 2020). Many of these same issues will be identified in paleopathological research that focuses on humans and our interactions with other species in the past (e.g., Littleton et al. 2015, 2021).

The One Health framework is beginning to be more recognized as an attractive approach to bioarchaeology. The University of Edinburgh One Health Archaeology Research Group, for example, combines a wide range of disciplinary approaches to investigate human, animal, and ecosystem health through time (https://www.ed.ac.uk/history-classics-archaeology/research/research-groups/one-health-archaeology). Recently, bioarchaeologists Bendrey and Martin (2021) edited a special volume of seven articles on One Health approaches to bioarchaeology in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology. These articles cover bacterial, viral, and parasitic pathogens from global case studies spanning the Holocene and its epidemiological transitions related to farming, industrialization, and modernity. In their outline of a research agenda for a One Health framework for bioarchaeology, Bendrey and Martin (2021) call for a greater focus on wildlife and domestic animal sources of infection and human health risks in the past using zooarchaeology, ancient DNA, and paleoepidemiological approaches to paleopathology. Similarly, Agarwal (2022) has discussed an anthropological-adapted One Health approach in an invited symposium piece for Economic Anthropology responding to the question, “How can economic anthropologists contribute to our understanding of pandemic responses and recovery?” Population increases and urbanization have led to a “livestock revolution” with intensive livestock production and the large-scale trade of live animals, and the clearance and destruction of land for agricultural crops have had devastating impacts on the environment. Through the lens of anthropogenic violence and inequality, Agarwal reviews the significant social inequality in global food production having significant health and ecological impacts on the countries and specific communities within countries that are producing for the more affluent countries and communities. At the heart of the problem of the environmental and health impacts for disadvantaged countries and populations is intensive livestock consumption. As such, Agarwal calls for an ecojustice approach to curb the consumption of meat in the Global North.

Judith Littleton and colleagues (2022) make an important contribution to the consideration of zoonotic endemic, epidemic, and pandemic diseases in the past in this special issue with their article entitled “Human–Animal Interactions and Infectious Disease: A View for Bioarchaeology.” They argue that it is important in bioarchaeology to understand the emergence, evolution, and persistence of zoonotic diseases and to appreciate the interaction between human, animal, and environmental health, particularly drivers of resilience and buffers to exposure (Larsen 2018; Roberts 2020b). They point to the critical need for a focus on human–animal interactions in paleopathology and also to some challenges of the paleopathological study of zoonotic infections. They recognize the complex ecology of diseases at the human–animal interface, and the issues of interpreting these interactions in archeological settings are problematic. They argue that many zoonoses today are unrecognized or underdiagnosed, with sufferers often having chronic nonspecific symptoms and can also co-occur in individuals with other diseases (Maudlin et al. 2009). These zoonoses are often neglected tropical diseases that mostly affect communities that live in poverty and unfortunately disproportionately affect women, infants, and children (WHO 2010). These diseases cause devastating health, social and economic consequences to more than one billion people and a high rate of mortality, with affected people suffering in silence with little political voice (WHO 2010).

Littleton and colleagues (2022) argue for integrative and collaborative, transdisciplinary approaches offered by a One Health perspective (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2018), which acknowledges the complex interactions between social and ecological systems (Waltner-Toews 2017), and an anthropological consideration of human–animal interactions (taking into account their biocultural complexity) moving beyond purely biomedical approaches (Zinsstag 2012). As mentioned briefly above, the One Health perspective is a transdisciplinary and collaborative approach that explicitly “recognizes the connection between people, animals, plants and their shared environment” and calls on a diverse array of experts in human, animal, and environmental health to work together. Although this is not a new approach, it is increasingly becoming recognized as being important for today’s human society. Human populations are growing and expanding into new geographic areas with more people living in close contact with wild and domestic animals, providing more opportunities for diseases to pass between animals and people with major social and environmental changes experienced worldwide, including changes in climate and land use, such as deforestation and intensive farming practices, also providing new opportunities for disease transmission. Increases and changes in human mobility and the movement of animals and animal products also result in diseases that can spread quickly around the world. Similarly, these social contexts and changes can be assessed in the past.

The One Health approach acts to move theoretical considerations beyond a simplified paleoepidemiological association of infectious zoonotic disease with the agricultural transition and domestication of animals (Barrett et al. 1998; D’Anastasio et al. 2011; Fournié et al. 2017; Hershkovitz et al. 2008, Larsen 2018; McMichael 2004; Mitchell 2003) and contribute to the context-specific deep time histories argued to be essential to understanding disease emergence (Wallace et al. 2015). A recently published example that illustrates the importance of considering zoonoses in the specific social and ecological system, moving beyond this simplified paleoepidemiological transition (agricultural) model, is the research by Vlok et al. (2022) of hydatid disease (Echinococcus granulosus) in individuals from the pre-agricultural site of Con Co Nga in northern Viet Nam dated to 7,000 years B.P. The authors suggest that the presence of wild canids and the management of wild buffalo and deer increased the risk of disease transmission to humans and revealed subsistence complexity among hunter-gatherers living millennia prior to the adoption of farming in Southeast Asia (Vlok et al. 2022). Similarly, Littleton and colleagues acknowledge that TB and brucellosis have been identified through paleopathological and molecular analyses of hunter-gatherers in the Americas (Bos et al. 2014; Jones 2019), in pre-Neolithic settlements in Syria (Baker et al. 2015), and even in a late Pliocene specimen of Australopithecus africanus (D’Anastasio et al. 2009).

Littleton and colleagues review modeling of outbreaks and advocate for studies that incorporate zooarchaeological, geospatial, climate, ethnographic, and historical data alongside traditional paleoepidemiological analyses of mortality and morbidity to provide a fuller picture of the circumstances leading to epidemics and pandemics (e.g., Fournié et al. 2017; Gowland and Western 2012; Marciniak et al. 2018; Smith-Guzmán et al. 2016). The authors eloquently describe three examples of animal–human–disease interactions: pigs in Papua New Guinea, TB and possums–bovine–humans in New Zealand, and the Balinese people and long-tailed macaques (Macaca fascicularis). These examples demonstrate the complex sociocultural, political, economic, and ecological relationships that can exist between humans and animals.

Littleton et al. (2022) acknowledge that the One Health perspective fits well with other approaches used in bioarchaeology and paleopathology (e.g., biocultural perspectives including socioeconomic relationships and human agency approaches). This perspective could, therefore, be incorporated with syndemics and social determinants of health frameworks. The burden of zoonotic diseases is higher for populations living in poverty (Molyneux 2011). In addition, poorer populations are also marginalized within health systems, and often the impact of endemic animal diseases is mainly felt at the farm level, in terms of disease but also economic impact (Seimenis 2012). Indigenous populations are also disproportionately affected by diseases associated with the environment and animals (Riley et al. 2021). There has been a recent call for the incorporation of Indigenous values and leadership into One Health research for more effective results (Riley et al. 2021).

Conclusion

As we have all come to understand very well, a pandemic is a disease outbreak leading to a sudden and extreme increase in the number of cases that spreads across a large region, including multiple countries, and rapidly affects a large proportion of the population. A crisis of this magnitude can lead to a variety of different responses in human populations, depending upon their HESC circumstances. It is social scientists, and anthropologists in particular, who can offer perspectives that have increasingly been recognized as extremely critical, especially given the chaotic, inefficient, and unhelpful social responses to COVID-19, particularly in the United States and, to a lesser extent, in the United Kingdom and Europe. As remarked by Francis Collins, the outgoing director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in a recent interview, the politicization of science in the United States has recently grown:

… much worse. And it’s a reflection of the fact that polarization is much worse—and tribalism is much worse. We’re in a really bad place. If science happens to produce a result that a political perspective doesn’t like, then science has to be attacked. That’s exactly what we see now happening, to the detriment of getting the facts out there. This has turned out to be a much more severe situation than I would have imagined a year ago. I wish we had more insights from behavioural social science research into how this has come to pass, and why it could have gotten so completely widespread. I want to call this out as one of my most major concerns as I stepped down from the NIH, of looking at the situation in our nation. Somewhere along the way, our political hyperpolarization began having a lot of really dangerous consequences, where in many instances we seem to have lost a sense of how to tell the difference between a fact and an opinion—or some Facebook post that’s, frankly, a lie. That’s truly dangerous. That’s another epidemic that is not going to go away even if we triumph over COVID-19. We need to figure out what happened here, and how to bring ourselves back to a place where our nation has a more stable future. (Subbaraman 2021:373)

The articles in this special issue present novel, sophisticated, and holistic approaches to the study of epidemics and pandemics in the past, which demonstrate the powerful ways in which bioarchaeology is positioned to address current-day issues, including disparities in infection rates and health outcomes of COVID-19. These authors demonstrate how knowledge of the past provides opportunities for developing a more nuanced and rich understanding of modern epidemiological factors. These articles demonstrate that research on the biology and epidemiology of human diseases requires a biocultural perspective. Medical solutions, such as vaccines, will never be enough to end a global pandemic. We must attend to the HESC context, which deeply shapes the complex manner in which individuals, groups, and populations experience the impacts of and respond to infectious diseases.

Pandemics are crises that lay plain the contours of social inequality and have an especially acute power to create profound suffering for already marginalized groups and, over time, to shape the course of our evolution. However, these conditions create social suffering and shape our evolution even in the absence of pandemics, just more quietly. Social inequality is the variable of interest (Graeber and Wengrow 2021). In a capitalist society, it is not surprising that infectious diseases will be allowed to kill “essential workers” to save the economy (Harvey 2020); this is a normal state of affairs, prior to the pandemic (e.g., Whyte 2020), and it has been for thousands of years (Graeber 2012). It is hardly news that people with disabilities are treated as expendable (e.g., through widespread beliefs that the Omicron variant of COVID-19 is “mild” unless you have preexisting conditions); this ideology has a long history (Mant and Holland 2019). The preexisting conditions that make some of us more vulnerable to COVID-19 are also exacerbated and made more common by capitalism itself (Braveman and Gottlieb 2014; WHO 2013; Wilkinson and Marmot 2008).

Capitalism and related phenomena of imperialism, colonialism, slavery, and social inequality have been causing social suffering for centuries, and bioarchaeology demonstrates this history (e.g., Barrett and Blakey 2011; Blakey 1998, 2001, 2020; de La Cova 2008, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2014, 2019, 2021; Dent 2017; Geber 2015; Geller 2015, 2021; Geller and Stojanowski 2017; Godde et al. 2020; Gowland et al. 2018; Hutchinson 2016; Hutchinson and Mitchem 2001; Larsen and Milner 1994; Larsen et al. 2001; Mant et al. 2021; Miller et al. 2020; Murphy and Klaus 2017; Newman and Gowland 2017; Nystrom 2017; Tremblay and Reedy 2020; Watkins 2012, 2018a, 2018b; Wesp 2020). Values of individualism and social isolation in some societies have deeply limited the range of possible coping mechanisms (Nelson 2020; van Bavel et al. 2020), which bioarchaeology too would predict (e.g., Schrenk and Tremblay 2022; Tilley 2015; Tilley and Schrenk 2017). Social scientists are not surprised when—in societies founded upon inequality, capitalism, genocide, and slavery—science and medicine will only receive respect and trust when they serve the interests of capital. That has been true in regard to the climate crisis for decades. The question is not when or how this inequality emerged but rather why we feel stuck in our current socioeconomic and political configurations (Graeber and Wengrow 2021).

We end this introduction with a call for bioarchaeologists and paleopathologists to consider the importance of their work to modern-day, pressing human health issues and disparities in health outcomes by making explicit links from their work to public health concerns and to social science discourses more broadly (e.g., Bendrey and Martin 2021; Buikstra 2018). Our past and present are thoroughly intertwined, and the lessons from the past are particularly relevant to creating solutions rooted in social justice today (Buikstra 2018), in what is arguably the worst health crisis of the twenty-first century, in terms of the immediate mortality rate, morbidity, ongoing health and socioeconomic effects, and for exacerbating inequalities within and among populations (The Lancet 2020). Although we can never incorporate every theoretical model into our work in paleopathology, this set of articles offers a comprehensive set of approaches to choose from and potentially refine to meet the goals of research in specific contexts. It is this type of research on past epidemics and pandemics that will make a real contribution to understanding and perhaps controlling present-day emerging diseases, such as COVID-19, which will become more common in the context of global warming and climate change. An understanding of epidemiology and anthropological contextualization of epidemic and pandemic disease through the exploration of the origins, evolution, the relationships of disease with social factors, and effects of interventions during past outbreaks can be used in a predictive manner to investigate the factors promoting emerging diseases (Bendry and Martin 2021; DeWitte and Wissler 2022).

Abrams, Elissa M., and Stanley J. Szefler. 2020. COVID-19 and the impact of social determinants of health. The Lancet Respiratory Medicine 8(7):659–661. DOI: 10.1016/S2213-2600(20)30234-4.

Agarwal, Sabrina C. 2016. Bone morphologies and histories: Life course approaches in bioarchaeology. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 159(S61):130–149. DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.22905.

Agarwal, Sabrina C. 2022. What does pandemic response and recovery look like through the lens of anthropogenic violence and inequality? Economic Anthropology 9:158–162. DOI: 10.1002/sea2.12238.

Aguirre, A. Alonso, Richard Catherina, Hailey Frye, and Louise Shelley. 2020. Illicit wildlife trade, wet markets, and COVID-19: Preventing future pandemics. World Medical & Health Policy 12(3):256–265. DOI: 10.1002/wmh3.348.

Alcendor, Donald J. 2020. Racial disparities-associated COVID-19 mortality among minority populations in the US. Journal of Clinical Medicine 9(8):2442. DOI: 10.3390/jcm9082442.

Alemi, Qais, Carl Stempel, Hafifa Siddiq, and Eunice Kim. 2020. Refugees and COVID-19: Achieving a comprehensive public health response. Bulletin of the World Health Organization 98(8):510–510A. DOI: 10.2471/BLT.20.271080.

Anastassopoulou, Cleo, Zoi Gkizarioti, George P. Patrinos, and Athanasios Tsakris. 2020. Human genetic factors associated with susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 disease severity. Human Genomics 14(1):1–8. DOI: 10.1186/s40246-020-00290-4.

Anurudran, Ashri, Leah Yared, Cameron Comrie, Katherine Harrison, and Thomas Burke. 2020. Domestic violence amid COVID-19. International Journal of Gynecology & Obstetrics 150(2):255–256. DOI: 10.1002/ijgo.13247.

Armelagos, George J., Peter J. Brown, and Bethany Turner. 2005. Evolutionary, historical and political economic perspectives on health and disease. Social Science & Medicine 61(4):755–765. DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2004.08.066.

Ashraf, Mohammad Ali, Pedram Keshavarz, Parisa Hosseinpour, Amirhossein Erfani, Amirhossein Roshanshad, Alieh Pourdast, et al. 2020. Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19): A systematic review of pregnancy and the possibility of vertical transmission. Journal of Reproduction & Infertility 21(3):157–168.

Ataguba, Ochega A., and John E. Ataguba. 2020. Social determinants of health: The role of effective communication in the COVID-19 pandemic in developing countries. Global Health Action 13(1):1788263. DOI: 10.1080/16549716.2020.1788263.

Atyeo, Caroline, Elizabeth A. DeRiso, Christine Davis, Evan A. Bordt, Rose M. DeGuzman, Lydia L. Shook, et al. 2021. COVID-19 mRNA vaccines drive differential antibody Fc-functional profiles in pregnant, lactating, and nonpregnant women. Science Translational Medicine 13(617):eabi8631. DOI: 10.1101/2021.04.04.438404.

Aufderheide, Arthur C., Wilmar Salo, Michael Madden, John Streitz, Jane Buikstra, Felipe Guhl, et al. 2004. A 9,000-year record of Chagas’ disease. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 101(7):2034–2039. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0307312101.

Baig, Abdul Mannan. 2022. Counting the neurological cost of COVID-19. Nature Reviews Neurology 18(1):5–6. DOI: 10.1038/s41582-021-00593-7.

Baker, Oussama, Oona Y.-C. Lee, Houdini H. T. Wu, Gurdyal S. Besra, David E. Minnikin, Gareth Llewellyn, et al. 2015. Human tuberculosis predates domestication in ancient Syria. Tuberculosis 95:S4–S12.

Bambra, Clare, Ryan Riordan, John Ford, and Fiona Matthews. 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic and health inequalities. Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health 74(11):964–968. DOI: 10.1136/jech-2020-214401.

Banks, Lena Morgon, Calum Davey, Tom Shakespeare, and Hannah Kuper. 2021. Disability-inclusive responses to COVID-19: Lessons learnt from research on social protection in low- and middle-income countries. World Development 137:105178. DOI: 10.1016%2Fj.worlddev.2020.105178.

Barrett, Autumn R., and Michael L. Blakey. 2011. Life histories of enslaved Africans in colonial New York: A bioarchaeological study of the New York African Burial Ground. In Social Bioarchaeology, edited by Sabrina C. Agarwal and Bonnie A. Glencross. Blackwell Publishing, Hoboken, NJ, pp. 212–251.

Barrett, Ronald, Christopher W. Kuzawa, Thomas McDade, and George J. Armelagos. 1998. Emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases: The third epidemiologic transition. Annual Review of Anthropology 27(1):247–271.

Barrientos, J., M. Guzmán-González, A. Urzúa, and F. Ulloa. 2021. Psychosocial impact of COVID-19 pandemic on LGBT people in Chile. Sexologies 30(1):e35–e41. DOI: 10.1016/j.sexol.2020.12.006.

Basu, Sanjay, David Stuckler, and Martin McKee. 2011. Addressing institutional amplifiers in the dynamics and control of tuberculosis epidemics. The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene 84(1):30–37. DOI: 10.4269/ajtmh.2011.10-0472.

Battles, Heather T., and Rebecca J. Gilmour. 2022. Beyond mortality: Survivors of epidemic infections and the bioarchaeology of impairment and disability. Bioarchaeology International 6(1–2):Early View. DOI: 10.5744/bi.2021.0003.

Bendrey, Robin, and Debra Martin. 2021. Zoonotic diseases: New directions in human-animal pathology. International Journal of Osteoarchaeology. Early View. DOI: 10.1002/oa.2975.

Blakey, Michael L. 1998. The New York African Burial Ground Project: An examination of enslaved lives, a construction of ancestral ties. Transforming Anthropology 7(1):53–58. DOI: 10.1525/tran.1998.7.1.53

Blakey, Michael L. 2001. Bioarchaeology of the African diaspora in the Americas: Its origins and scope. Annual Review of Anthropology 30(1):387–422.

Blakey, Michael L. 2020. Archaeology under the blinding light of race. Current Anthropology 61(S22):S183–S197. DOI: 10.1086/710357.

Blue, Sara A., Jennifer A. Devine, Matthew P. Ruiz, Kathryn McDaniel, Alisa R. Hartsell, Christopher J. Pierce, et al. 2021. Im/mobility at the US–Mexico border during the COVID-19 pandemic. Social Sciences 10(2):47. DOI: 10.3390/socsci10020047.

Bogin, Barry, and Carlos Varea. 2020. COVID-19, crisis, and emotional stress: A biocultural perspective of their impact on growth and development for the next generation. American Journal of Human Biology 32(5):e23474. DOI: 10.1002/ajhb.23474.

Bonilla-Aldana, D. K., K. Dhama, and A. J. Rodriguez-Morales. 2020. Revisiting the One Health approach in the context of COVID-19: A look into the ecology of this emerging disease. Advances in Animal and Veterinary Sciences 8(3):234–237.

Bordt, Evan A., Lydia L. Shook, Caroline Atyeo, Krista M. Pullen, Rose M. DeGuzman, Marie-Charlotte Meinsohn, et al. 2021. Maternal SARS-CoV-2 infection elicits sexually dimorphic placental immune responses. Science Translational Medicine 13(617):eabi7428. DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.abi7428.

Bos, Kirsten I., Kelly M. Harkins, Alexander Herbig, Mireia Coscolla, Nico Weber, Iñaki Comas, et al. 2014. Pre-Columbian mycobacterial genomes reveal seals as a source of New World human tuberculosis. Nature 514(7523):494–497.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Structures and the habitus. In Outline of a Theory of Practice, edited by Pierre Bourdieu. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 72–95.

Boutin, Alexis T. 2016. Exploring the social construction of disability: An application of the bioarchaeology of personhood model to a pathological skeleton from ancient Bahrain. International Journal of Paleopathology 12:17–28. DOI: 10.1016/j.ijpp.2015.10.005.

Braveman, Paula, and Laura Gottlieb. 2014. The social determinants of health: It’s time to consider the causes of the causes. Public Health Reports 129(S2):19–31. DOI: 10.1177/00333549141291S206.

Buikstra, Jane E., ed. 2018. Bioarchaeologists Speak Out: Deep Time Perspectives on Contemporary Issues. Bioarchaeology and Social Theory Series. Springer, Cham, Switzerland.

Busch-Hallen, Jenny, Dylan Walters, Sarah Rowe, Archana Chowdhury, and Mandana Arabi. 2020. Impact of COVID-19 on maternal and child health. The Lancet Global Health 8(10):e1257. DOI: 10.1016/S2214-109X(20)30327-2.

Byrnes, Jennifer F., and Jennifer Lynn Muller, eds. 2017. Bioarchaeology of Impairment and Disability: Theoretical, Ethnohistorical, and Methodological Perspectives. Bioarchaeology and Social Theory Series. Springer, Cham, Switzerland.

Cabatbat, Katherine Pia M. 2021. Covid-19 and the social suffering attached to it. Journal of Public Health. Early View. DOI: 10.1093/pubmed/fdab274.

Cascio, M. Ariel. 2015. Cross-cultural autism studies, neurodiversity, and conceptualizations of autism. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 39(2):207–212. DOI: 10.1007/s11013-015-9450-y.

Caul, Sarah. 2020. Deaths involving COVID-19 by local area and socioeconomic deprivation: Deaths occurring between 1 March and 31 July 2020. UK Office for National Statistics. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/deathsinvolvingcovid19bylocalareasanddeprivation/deathsoccurringbetween1marchand31july2020. Accessed December 30, 2021.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 2018. One Health basics. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases (NCEZID). https://www.cdc.gov/onehealth/basics/index.html. Accessed December 24, 2021.

Chandrasekaran, Sruthi, Nadia Diamond-Smith, Karthik Srinivasan, and Suchitra Dalvie. 2020. Preparing for an increased need for abortion access in India during and after COVID-19: Challenges and strategies. Studies in Family Planning 51(4):377–383. DOI: 10.1111/sifp.12139.

Chappell, Bill. 2020. Coronavirus: COVID-19 is now officially a pandemic, WHO says. NPR. https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/03/11/814474930/coronavirus-covid-19-is-now-officially-a-pandemic-who-says. Accessed December 30, 2021.

Cheverko, Colleen M. 2020. Life course approaches and life history theory. In Theoretical Approaches in Bioarchaeology, edited by Colleen M. Cheverko, Julia R. Prince-Buitenhuys, and Mark Hubbe. Routledge, New York, pp. 59–74.

Choi, Edward M., Daniel K. W. Chu, Peter K. C. Cheng, Dominic N. C. Tsang, Malik Peiris, Daniel G. Bausch, et al. 2020. In-flight transmission of SARS-CoV-2. Emerging Infectious Diseases 26(11):2713–2716. DOI: 10.3201/eid2611.203254.

Christie, Michael J., Aaron T. Irving, Samuel C. Forster, Benjamin J. Marsland, Philip M. Hansbro, Paul J. Hertzog, et al. 2021. Of bats and men: Immunomodulatory treatment options for COVID-19 guided by the immunopathology of SARS-CoV-2 infection. Science Immunology 6(63):eabd0205. DOI: 10.1126/sciimmunol.abd0205.

Collins, Patricia Hill. 2015. Intersectionality’s definitional dilemmas. Annual Review of Sociology 41:1–20. DOI: 10.1146/annurev-soc-073014-112142.

Connor, Jade, Sarina Madhavan, Mugdha Mokashi, Hanna Amanuel, Natasha R. Johnson, Lydia E. Pace, et al. 2020. Health risks and outcomes that disproportionately affect women during the Covid-19 pandemic: A review. Social Science & Medicine 266:113364. DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2020.113364.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé W. 1989. Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989(1):139–167.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé W. 2017. On Intersectionality: Essential Writings. The New Press, New York.

Crespo, Fabian. 2020. Reconstructing immune competence in skeletal samples: A theoretical and methodological approach. In Theoretical Approaches in Bioarchaeology, edited by Colleen M. Cheverko, Julia R. Prince-Buitenhuys, and Mark Hubbe. Routledge, London, pp. 76–92.

D’Anastasio, Ruggero, T. Staniscia, M. L. Milia, Lamberto Manzoli, and Lorenzo Capasso. 2011. Origin, evolution and paleoepidemiology of brucellosis. Epidemiology & Infection 139(1):149–156.

D’Anastasio, Ruggero, Bernhard Zipfel, Jacopo Moggi-Cecchi, Roscoe Stanyon, and Luigi Capasso. 2009. Possible brucellosis in an early hominin skeleton from Sterkfontein, South Africa. PLoS ONE 4(7):e6439.

Daley, George Q., Gilda A. Barabino, Olujimi A. Ajijola, Cedric M. Bright, Valerie Montgomery Rice, and Cata T. Laurencin. 2021. COVID highlights another crisis: Lack of Black physicians and scientists. Med 2(1):2–3. DOI: 10.1016/j.medj.2020.06.006.

Dalsania, Ankur K., Matthew J. Fastiggi, Aaron Kahlam, Rajvi Shah, Krishan Patel, Stephanie Shiau, et al. 2022. The relationship between social determinants of health and racial disparities in COVID-19 mortality. Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities 9(1):288–295. DOI: 10.1007/s40615-020-00952-y.

de la Cova, Carlina. 2008. Silent Voices of the Destitute: An Analysis of African American and Euro-American Health during the Nineteenth Century. Ph.D. thesis, Indiana University, Bloomington.

de la Cova, Carlina. 2011. Race, health, and disease in 19th-century-born males. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 144(4):526–537. DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.21434.

de la Cova, Carlina. 2012. Patterns of trauma and violence in 19th-century-born African American and Euro-American females. International Journal of Paleopathology 2(2–3):61–68. DOI: 10.1016/j.ijpp.2012.09.009.

de la Cova, Carlina. 2014. The biological effects of urbanization and in‐migration on 19th-century-born African Americans and Euro-Americans of low socioeconomic status: An anthropological and historical approach. In Modern Environments and Human Health: Revisiting the Second Epidemiologic Transition, edited by Molly K. Zuckerman. Wiley-Blackwell, Hoboken, NJ, pp. 243–264.

de la Cova, Carlina. 2019. Marginalized bodies and the construction of the Robert J. Terry anatomical skeletal collection: A promised land lost. In Bioarchaeology of Marginalized People, edited by Madeleine L. Mant and Alyson Jaagumägi Holland. Academic Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 133–155.

de la Cova, Carlina. 2020. Making silenced voices speak: Restoring neglected and ignored identities in anatomical collections. In Theoretical Approaches in Bioarchaeology, edited by Colleen M. Cheverko, Julia R. Prince-Buitenhuys, and Mark Hubbe. Routledge, New York, pp. 150–169.

de Souza Santos, Debora, Mariane de Oliveira Menezes, Carla Betina Andreucci, Marcos Nakamura-Pereira, Roxana Knobel, Leila Katz, et al. 2021. Disproportionate impact of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) among pregnant and postpartum Black women in Brazil through structural racism lens. Clinical Infectious Diseases 72(11):2068–2069. DOI: 10.1093/cid/ciaa1066.

Debopadhaya, Shayom, John S. Erickson, and Kristin P. Bennett. 2021. Temporal analysis of social determinants associated with COVID-19 mortality. In Proceedings of the 12th ACM Conference on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, and Health Informatics. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, pp. 1–10.

Dent, Sophia C. 2017. Interindividual differences in embodied marginalization: Osteological and stable isotope analyses of antebellum enslaved individuals. American Journal of Human Biology 29(4):e23021. DOI: 10.1002/ajhb.23021.

Devakumar, Delan, Geordan Shannon, Sunil S. Bhopal, and Ibrahim Abubakar. 2020. Racism and discrimination in COVID-19 responses. The Lancet 395(10231):1194. DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(20)30792-3.

DeWitte, Sharon N. 2016. Archaeological evidence of epidemics can inform future epidemics. Annual Review of Anthropology 45:63–77. DOI: 10.1146/annurev-anthro-102215-095929.

DeWitte, Sharon N., and Christopher M. Stojanowski 2015. The osteological paradox 20 years later: Past perspectives, future directions. Journal of Archaeological Research 23(4):397–450.

DeWitte, Sharon N., and Amanda Wissler. 2022. Demographic and evolutionary consequences of pandemic diseases. Bioarchaeology International 6(1–2):Early View. DOI: 10.5744/bi.2020.0024.

DeWitte, Sharon N., and James W. Wood. 2008. Selectivity of Black Death mortality with respect to preexisting health. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105(5):1436–1441. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0705460105.

DeWitte, Sharon N., and Samantha L. Yaussy. 2017. Femur length and famine mortality in medieval London. Bioarchaeology International 1(3–4):171–182. DOI: 10.5744/bi.2017.1009.

Dongarwar, Deepa, Veronica B. Ajewole, Emmanuella Oduguwa, Ahone Ngujede, Kiydra Harris, Theresa U. Ofili, et al. 2020. Role of social determinants of health in widening maternal and child health disparities in the era of COVID-19 pandemic. International Journal of Maternal and Child Health and AIDS 9(3):316–319. DOI: 10.21106/ijma.398.

Dorfman, Doron. 2021. Pandemic “disability cons.” Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics 49(3):401–409. DOI: 10.1017/jme.2021.60.

Dua, Devika, Madhur Yadav, Pranav Jetley, and Radhika Dua. 2020. Covid-19: Immunological lessons from bats, pangolins and old coronaviruses; and how we can apply them in a timely way for a better outcome. Preprints 2020, 20200400701. DOI: 10.20944/preprints202004.0071.v1.

Dunnavant, Justin, Delande Justinvil, and Chip Colwell. 2021. Craft an African American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Nature 593:337–340. DOI: 10.1038/d41586-021-01320-4.

Egede, Leonard E., Rebekah J. Walker, and Joni S. Williams. 2021. Intersection of structural racism, social determinants of health, and implicit bias with emergency physician admission tendencies. Journal of the American Medical Association Network Open 4(9):e2126375. DOI: 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.26375.

Ellis, M. 2020. Still life: A bioarchaeological portrait of perinatal remains buried at the Spring Street Presbyterian Church. Historical Archaeology 54(1):184–201. DOI: 10.1007/s41636-019-00216-5.

El-Sayed, Amr, Mohamed Abdel-Daim, and Mohamed Kamel. 2021. Zoonotic and anthropozoonotic potential of COVID-19 and its implications for public health. Environmental Science and Pollution Research 28(38):52599–52609. DOI: 10.1007/s11356-021-16415-8.

Farmer, Paul. 2004. An anthropology of structural violence. Current Anthropology 45(3):305–325. DOI: 10.1086/382250.

Fathi, Mobina, Kimia Vakili, Fatemeh Sayehmiri, Ashraf Mohamadkhani, Mohammadreza Hajiesmaeili, Mostafa Rezaei-Tavirani, et al. 2021. The prognostic value of comorbidity for the severity of COVID-19: A systematic review and meta-analysis study. PLoS ONE 16(2):e0246190. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0246190.

Filipek, Kori L., Charlotte Roberts, Rebecca L. Gowland, and Katie Tucker. 2021. Alloparenting adolescents: Evaluating the social and biological impacts of leprosy on young people in Saxo-Norman England (9th to 12th centuries AD) through cross-disciplinary models of care. In The Family in Past Perspective: An Interdisciplinary Exploration of Familial Relationships through Time, edited by Ellen J. Kendall and Ross Kendall. Routledge, London, pp. 30–57.

Fine, Julia C., and Jessica Love-Nichols. 2021. We are (not) the virus: Competing online discourses of human-environment interaction in the era of COVID-19. Environmental Communication. Early View. DOI: 10.1080/17524032.2021.1982744.

Fortier, Nikki. 2020. COVID-19, gender inequality, and the responsibility of the state. International Journal of Wellbeing 10(3):77–93. DOI: 10.5502/ijw.v10i3.1305.

Foucault, Michel. 1961. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique). Translated by Richard Howard and Jean Khalfa. Librairie Plon, Paris.

Foucault, Michel. 1963. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (Naissance de la clinique: une archéologie du regard médical). Translated by Alan Sheridan. Presses Universitaires de France, Paris.

Fournié, Guillaume, Dirk U. Pfeiffer, and Robin Bendrey. 2017. Early animal farming and zoonotic disease dynamics: Modelling brucellosis transmission in Neolithic goat populations. Royal Society Open Science 4 (2):160943.

Furukawa, Nathan W., John T. Brooks, and Jeremy Sobel. 2020. Evidence supporting transmission of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 while presymptomatic or asymptomatic. Emerging Infectious Diseases 26(7):e201595. DOI: 10.3201/eid2607.201595.

Gausman, Jewel, and Ana Langer. 2020. Sex and gender disparities in the COVID-19 pandemic. Journal of Women’s Health 29(4):465–466. DOI: 10.1089/jwh.2020.8472.

Geber, Jonny. 2015. Victims of Ireland’s Great Famine: The Bioarchaeology of Mass Burials at Kilkenny Union Workhouse. Bioarchaeological Interpretations of the Human Past: Local Regional and Global Perspectives series. University Press of Florida, Gainesville.

Geller, Pamela L. 2015. Hybrid lives, violent deaths: Seminole Indians and the Samuel G. Morton collection. In Disturbing Bodies: Perspectives on Forensic Anthropology, edited by Zoe Crossland. SAR Press, Santa Fe, NM, pp. 137–156.

Geller, Pamela L. 2017. The Bioarchaeology of Socio-Sexual Lives. Bioarchaeology and Social Theory series. Springer, Cham, Switzerland.

Geller, Pamela L. 2021. What is necropolitics? In Theorizing Bioarchaeology, edited by Pamela L. Gellar. Bioarchaeology and Social Theory series. Springer, Cham, Switzerland, pp. 87–116. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-70704-0_5.

Geller, Pamela L., and Christopher M. Stojanowksi. 2017. The vanishing Black Indian: Revisiting craniometry and historic collections. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 162(2):267–284. DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.23115.

Gildner, Theresa E., and Zaneta M. Thayer. 2020. Maternal and child health during the COVID-19 pandemic: Contributions in the field of human biology. American Journal of Human Biology 32(5):1–6. DOI: 10.1002/ajhb.23494.

Ginsburg, Faye, and Rayna Rapp. 2020. Disability/anthropology: Rethinking the parameters of the human: An introduction to supplement 21. Current Anthropology 61(S21):S4–S15.

Godde, Kanya, Valerie Pasillas, and America Sanchez. 2020. Survival analysis of the Black Death: Social inequality of women and the perils of life and death in Medieval London. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 173(1):168–178. DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.24081.

Godri Pollitt, Krystal J., Jordan Peccia, Albert I. Ko, Naftali Kaminski, Charles S. Dela Cruz, Daniel W. Nebert, et al. 2020. COVID-19 vulnerability: The potential impact of genetic susceptibility and airborne transmission. Human Genomics 14(1):1–7. DOI: 10.1186/s40246-020-00267-3.

Gostin, Lawrence. 2006. Public health strategies for pandemic influenza: Ethics and the law. Journal of the American Medical Association 295(14):1700–1704. DOI: 10.1001/jama.295.14.1700.

Gowland, Rebecca L. 2015. Entangled lives: Implications of the developmental origins of health and disease hypothesis for bioarchaeology and the life course. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 158(4):530–540. DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.22820.

Gowland, Rebecca L. 2017. Embodied identities in Roman Britain: A bioarchaeological approach. Britannia 48:175–194. DOI: 10.1017/S0068113X17000125.

Gowland, Rebecca L., Anwen Caffell, Sophie Newman, Alysa Levene, and Malin Holst. 2018. Broken childhoods: Rural and urban non-adult health during the Industrial Revolution in Northern England (eighteenth–nineteenth centuries). Bioarchaeology International 2(1):44–62. DOI: 10.5744/bi.2018.1015.

Gowland, Rebecca L., and Siân E. Halcrow, eds. 2020. The Mother-Infant Nexus in Anthropology: Small Beginnings, Significant Outcomes. Springer International Publishing, Cham, Switzerland. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-27393-4.

Gowland, Rebecca L., and A. Gaynor Western. 2012. Morbidity in the marshes: Using spatial epidemiology to investigate skeletal evidence for malaria in Anglo-Saxon England (AD 410–1050). American Journal of Physical Anthropology 147(2):301–311.

Graeber, David. 2012. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House, Brooklyn, NY.

Graeber, David, and David Wengrow. 2021. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. Penguin Random House UK, Dublin.

Halcrow, Siân E. 2020. Infants in the bioarchaeological past: Who cares? In The Mother-Infant Nexus in Anthropology: Small Beginnings, Significant Outcomes, edited by Rebecca Gowland and Siân E. Halcrow. Bioarchaeology and Social Theory series. Springer International Publishing, Cham, Switzerland, pp. 19–38. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-27393-4_2.

Halcrow, Siân E., and Gwen Robbins Schug. In press. Theoretical approaches to the bioarchaeology of infants, children, and adolescents: Structural violence as a holistic interpretive tool in paleopathology. In Routledge Handbook of Paleopathology, edited by Anne Grauer. Routledge, Abingdon, UK.

Halcrow, Siân E., and Nancy Tayles. 2008. The bioarchaeological investigation of childhood and social age: Problems and prospects. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 15(2):190–215. DOI: 10.1007/s10816-008-9052-x.

Halcrow, Siân E., Nancy Tayles, and Gail E. Elliott. 2017. The bioarchaeology of fetuses. In The Anthropology of the Fetus: Biology, Culture, and Society, edited by S. Han, T. K. Betsinger, and A. B. Scott. Berghahn Books, New York, pp. 83–111.

Halcrow, Siân E., and Stacey Maree Ward. 2017. Bioarchaeology of childhood. In Oxford Bibliographies in Childhood Studies, edited by Heather Montgomery. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK.

Halcrow, Siân E., Ruth Warren, Geoff Kushnick, and April Nowell. 2020. Care of infants in the past: Bridging evolutionary anthropological and bioarchaeological approaches. Evolutionary Human Sciences 2:e47. DOI: 10.1017/ehs.2020.46.

Hasan Bhuiyan, Mohammad Tawhidul, Irtesam Mahmud Khan, Sheikh Saifur Rahman Jony, Renee Robinson, Uyen-Sa D. T. Nguyen, et al. 2021. The disproportionate impact of COVID-19 among undocumented immigrants and racial minorities in the US. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 18(23):12708. DOI: 10.3390/ijerph182312708.

Hege, Adam, Sandi Lane, Trent Spaulding, Margaret Sugg, and Lakshmi Iyer. 2021. County-level social determinants of health and COVID-19 in nursing homes, United States, June 1, 2020–January 31, 2021. Public Health Reports 137(1):137–148. DOI: 10.1177/00333549211053666.

Henley, Phaedra. 2020. COVID-19 and One Health: Shifting the paradigm in how we think about health. JBI Evidence Synthesis 18(6):1154–1155. DOI: 10.11124/JBIES-20-00161.

Hernández, Leandra Hinojosa, and Sarah De Los Santos Upton. 2020. Transgender migrant rights, reproductive justice, and the Mexico–US border in the time of COVID-19. QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 7(3):142–150. DOI: 10.14321/qed.7.3.0142.

Hershkovitz, Israel, Helen D. Donoghue, David E. Minnikin, Gurdyal S. Besra, Oona Y. C. Lee, Angela M. Gernaey, et al. 2008. Detection and molecular characterization of 9000-year-old Mycobacterium tuberculosis from a Neolithic settlement in the Eastern Mediterranean. PLoS ONE 3(10):e3426.

Hessami, Kamran, Nahid Homayoon, Atefe Hashemi, Homeira Vafaei, Maryam Kasraeian, and Nasrin Asadi. 2020. COVID-19 and maternal, fetal and neonatal mortality: A systematic review. The Journal of Maternal-Fetal & Neonatal Medicine. Early View. DOI: 10.1080/14767058.2020.1806817.

Horton, Richard. 2020. Offline: COVID-19 is not a pandemic. The Lancet 396(10255):874. DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(20)32000-6.

Hutchinson, Dale L. 2016. Disease and Discrimination: Poverty and Pestilence in Colonial Atlantic America. University Press of Florida, Gainesville.

Hutchinson, Dale L., and Jeffrey M. Mitchem. 2001. Correlates of contact: Epidemic disease in archaeological context. Historical Archaeology 35(2):58–72. DOI: 10.1007/BF03374384.

James, Sherman A. 2017. The strangest of all encounters: Racial and ethnic discrimination in US health care. Cadernos de Saude Publica 33(S1):e000104416. DOI: 10.1590/0102-311X00104416.

Jones, Christine. 2019. Brucellosis in an adult female from Fate Bell Rock Shelter, Lower Pecos, Texas (4000–1300 BP). International Journal of Paleopathology 24:252–264.

Jones, Terry L., Al W. Schwitalla, Marin A. Pilloud, John R. Johnson, Richard R. Paine, and Brian F. Codding. 2021. Historic and bioarchaeological evidence supports late onset of post-Columbian epidemics in Native California. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118(28):e2024802118. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2024802118.

Kabel, Ahmed, and Robert Phillipson. 2021. Structural violence and hope in catastrophic times: From Camus’ The Plague to Covid-19. Race & Class 62(4):3–18. DOI: 10.1177/0306396820974180.

Kasnitz, Devva, and Russel P. Shuttleworth. 2001. Anthropology and disability studies. Semiotics and dis/ability: Interrogating categories of difference. In Semiotics and Dis/ability: Interrogating Categories of Difference, edited by Linda J. Rodgers and Beth Blue Swadener. State University of New York Press, Albany, pp. 19–41.

Khazanchi, Rohan, Charlesnika T. Evans, and Jasmine R. Marcelin. 2020. Racism, not race, drives inequity across the COVID-19 continuum. Journal of the American Medical Association Network Open 3(9):e2019933. DOI: 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2020.19933.

Klaus, Haagen D. 2012. The bioarchaeology of structural violence: A theoretical model and a case study. In The Bioarchaeology of Violence, edited by Debra L. Martin, Ryan P. Harrod, and Ventura R. Pérez. University Press of Florida, Gainesville, pp. 29–62.

Klaus, Haagen D. 2014. Frontiers in the bioarchaeology of stress and disease: Cross-disciplinary perspectives from pathophysiology, human biology, and epidemiology. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 155(2):294–308. DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.22574.

Kricorian, Katherine, and Karin Turner. 2021. COVID-19 vaccine acceptance and beliefs among Black and Hispanic Americans. PLoS ONE 16(8):e0256122. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0256122.

Larsen, Clark Spencer. 2018. The bioarchaeology of health crisis: Infectious disease in the past. Annual Review of Anthropology 47:295–313. DOI: 10.1146/annurev-anthro-102116-041441.

Larsen, Clark Spencer, Mark C. Griffin, Dale L. Hutchinson, Vivian E. Noble, Lynette Norr, Robert F. Pastor, et al. 2001. Frontiers of contact: Bioarchaeology of Spanish Florida. Journal of World Prehistory 15(1):69–123.

Larsen, Clark Spencer, and George R. Milner, eds. 1994. In the Wake of Contact: Biological Responses to Conquest. Wiley-Liss, New York.

Leonard, William R. 2020. Human biologists confront the COVID-19 pandemic. American Journal of Human Biology 32(5):e23511. DOI: 10.1002/ajhb.23511.

Licata, Marta, Omar Larentis, Chiara Tesi, and Rosagemma Ciliberti. 2021. Infectious disease in asylums: A fact-finding investigation to prevent tuberculosis contagion in the early twentieth century in Italy. Neurological Sciences 42(3):1185–1188. DOI: 10.1007/s10072-020-04744-4.

Lin, Jieru E., Arsenoi Asfour, Taylor B. Sewell, Benjamin Hooe, Patrice Pryce, Chelsea Earley, et al. 2021. Neurological issues in children with COVID-19. Neuroscience Letters 743:135567. DOI: 10.1016/j.neulet.2020.135567.

Littleton, Judith, Melinda S. Allen, and Gina McFarlane. 2015. Multi-species perspectives on anthropogenic environments: Dental pathology patterns, Marquesas Islands (Polynesia). The Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology 10(2):277–301. DOI: 10.1080/15564894.2014.980471.

Littleton, Judith, Sarah Karstens, Mark Busse, and Nicholas Malone. 2022. Human-animal interactions and infectious disease. Bioarchaeology International 6(1–2):Early View. DOI: 10.5744/bi.2021.0002.

Littleton, Judith, Gina McFarlane, and Melinda S. Allen. 2021. Human-animal entanglements and environmental change: Multi-species approaches in Remote Oceania. In The Routledge Handbook of the Bioarchaeology of Climate and Environmental Change, edited by Gwen Robbins Schug. Routledge, London, pp. 493–510.

Littleton, Judith, Julie Park, Evelyn Marsters, and T. Panapa. 2014. Using a syndemic perspective to understand tuberculosis and diabetes among Pacific peoples. American Journal of Human Biology 26(2):271.

Lu, Manman, Xindong Wang, Huan Ye, Huimin Wang, Shan Qiu, Hongmao Zhang, et al. 2021. Does public fear that bats spread COVID-19 jeopardize bat conservation? Biological Conservation 254:108952. DOI: 10.1016/j.biocon.2021.108952.

Lundstrom, Kenneth, Murat Seyran, Damiano Pizzol, Parise Adadi, Tarek Mohamed Abd El-Aziz, Sk. Sarif Hassan, et al. 2020. The importance of research on the origin of SARS-CoV-2. Viruses 12(11):1203. DOI: 10.3390/v12111203.

Luo, Jia, Shan Liang, and Feng Jin. 2021. Gut microbiota in antiviral strategy from bats to humans: A missing link in COVID-19. Science China Life Sciences 64(6):942–956. DOI: 10.1007/s11427-020-1847-7.

MacFarlane, Douglas, and Richardo Rocha. 2020. Guidelines for communicating about bats to prevent persecution in the time of COVID-19. Biological Conservation 248:108650. DOI: 10.1016/j.biocon.2020.108650.

Malik, Amyn A., SarahAnn McFadden, Jad Elharake, and Saad B. Omer. 2020. Determinants of COVID-19 vaccine acceptance in the US. EClinicalMedicine Sep(26):100495. DOI: 10.1016/j.eclinm.2020.100495.

Mamelund, Svenn-Erik, and Jessica Dimka, J. (2021). Not the great equalizers: Covid-19, 1918–20 influenza, and the need for a paradigm shift in pandemic preparedness. Population Studies 75(S1):179–199. DOI: 10.1080/00324728.2021.1959630.

Mant, Madeleine L., Carlina de la Cova, and Megan B. Brickley. 2021. Intersectionality and trauma analysis in bioarchaeology. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 174(4):583–594. DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.24226.

Mant, Madeleine L., and Alyson J. Holland, eds. 2019. Bioarchaeology of Marginalized People. Academic Press, London.

Marciniak, Stephanie, D. Ann Herring, Alessandra Sperduti, Hendrik N. Poinar, and Tracy L. Prowse. 2018. A multi-faceted anthropological and genomic approach to framing Plasmodium falciparum malaria in imperial period central-southern Italy (1st–4th c. CE). Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 49:210–224.

Marsteller, Sara J., Christina Torres-Rouff, and Kelly J. Knudson. 2011. Pre-Columbian Andean sickness ideology and the social experience of leishmaniasis: A contextualized analysis of bioarchaeological and paleopathological data from San Pedro de Atacama, Chile. International Journal of Paleopathology 1(1):24–34. DOI: 10.1016/j.ijpp.2011.02.001.

Martin, Debra L., and Ryan P. Harrod. 2020. The climate change-witch execution connection: Living with environmental uncertainties on the Colorado Plateau (AD 800–1350). In The Routledge Handbook of the Bioarchaeology of Climate and Environmental Change, edited by Gwen Robbins Schug. Routledge, New York, pp. 301–315.

Maudlin, Ian, Mark Charles Eisler, and Susan Christina Welburn. 2009. Neglected and endemic zoonoses. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 364(1530):2777–2787. DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2009.0067.

Mays, Simon, Rebecca Gowland, Siân E. Halcrow, and Eileen Murphy. 2017. Child bioarchaeology: Perspectives on the past 10 years. Childhood in the Past 10(1):38–56. DOI: 10.1080/17585716.2017.1301066.

McKinney, Emma L., Victor McKinney, and Leslie Swartz. 2020. COVID-19, disability and the context of healthcare triage in South Africa: Notes in a time of pandemic. African Journal of Disability 9(1):1–9. DOI: 10.4102%2Fajod.v9i0.766.

McMichael, Anthony J. 2004. Environmental and social influences on emerging infectious diseases: Past, present and future. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences 359(1447):1049–1058.

McMichael, Celia. 2015. Climate change-related migration and infectious disease. Virulence 6(6):548–553. DOI: 10.1080/21505594.2015.1021539.

McNeely, Connie L., Laurie A. Schintler, and Bonnie Stabile. 2020. Social determinants and COVID-19 disparities: Differential pandemic effects and dynamics. World Medical & Health Policy 12(3):206–217. DOI: 10.1002/wmh3.370.

McQuaid, Robyn J., Sylvia M. L. Cox, Ayotola Ogunlana, and Natalia Jaworska. 2021. The burden of loneliness: Implications of the social determinants of health during COVID-19. Psychiatry Research 296:113648. DOI: 10.1016/j.psychres.2020.113648.

Mendelson, M., J. Nel, L. Blumberg, S. A. Madhi, M. Dryden, W. Stevens, and F. W. D. Venter. 2021. Long-COVID: An evolving problem with an extensive impact. SAMJ: South African Medical Journal 111(1):10–12. DOI: 10.7196/samj.2021.v111i1.15433.

Mendenhall, Emily. 2017. Syndemics: A new path for global health research. The Lancet 389(10072):889–891. DOI: 10.1016/s0140-6736(17)30602-5.

Miller, Megan, Gwen Robbins Schug, Luca Pagani, and Nicola Carrara. 2020. A bioarchaeology of madness: Modernity, pellagra, and the rise of the manicomio system in the Veneto Region of Italy. In The Routledge Handbook of the Bioarchaeology of Climate and Environmental Change, edited by Gwen Robbins Schug. Routledge, London, pp. 255–276.

Mitchell, Peter. 2003. The archaeological study of epidemic and infectious disease. World Archaeology 35(2):171–179.

Mizumoto, Kenji, Katsushi Kagaya, and Gerardo Chowell. 2020. Effect of a wet market on coronavirus disease (COVID-19) transmission dynamics in China, 2019–2020. International Journal of Infectious Diseases 97:96–101. DOI: 10.1016%2Fj.ijid.2020.05.091.

Molyneux, David Zuhair Hallaj, Gerald T. Keusch, Donald P. McManus, Helena Ngowi, Sarah Cleaveland, Pilar Ramos-Jimenez, et al. 2011. Zoonoses and marginalised infectious diseases of poverty: Where do we stand? Parasites and Vectors 4:106. DOI: 10.1186/1756-3305-4-106.

Moreau, Caroline, Mridula Shankar, Anna Glasier, Sharon Cameron, and Kristina Gemzell-Danielsson. 2021. Abortion regulation in Europe in the era of COVID-19: A spectrum of policy responses. BMJ Sexual & Reproductive Health 47(4):e14.

Morgan, Craig, and Nikolas Rose. 2020. Multidisciplinary research priorities for the COVID-19 pandemic. The Lancet Psychiatry 7(7):e33. DOI: 10.1016/S2215-0366(20)30230-3.

Mullins, Edward, D. Evans, R. M. Viner, P. O’Brien, and E. Morris. 2020. Coronavirus in pregnancy and delivery: Rapid review. Ultrasound in Obstetrics & Gynecology 55(5):586–592.

Murphy, Melissa S., and Haagen D. Klaus. 2017. Colonized Bodies, Worlds Transformed: Toward a Global Bioarchaeology of Contact and Colonialism. Bioarchaeological Interpretations of the Past: Local, Regional, and Global Perspectives series. University Press of Florida, Gainesville.

Nagendrappa, Sachin, Sheikh Shoib, Sajjadur Rehman, Omityah Grigo, and Ramdas Ransing. 2020. Recognizing the role of animal-assisted therapies in addressing mental health needs during the COVID-19 pandemic. Asian Journal of Psychiatry 53:102390. DOI: 10.1016/j.ajp.2020.102390.

Nandagiri, Rishita. 2021. Gender, health, and development in the context of pandemic: Reflecting on the International Day of Action for Women’s Health. World Medical & Health Policy 2021:1–3. DOI: 10.1002/wmh3.462.

Nandagiri, Rishita, Ernestina Coast, and Joe Strong. 2020. COVID-19 and abortion: Making structural violence visible. International Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health 46(S1):83–89. DOI: 10.1363/46e1320.

Nelson, Anitra. 2020. COVID-19: Capitalist and postcapitalist perspectives. Human Geography 13(3):305–309. DOI: 10.1177/1942778620937122.

Nelson, Robin. 2021. Prioritize care for a more resilient future. Nature Human Behaviour 5(3):295–295. DOI: 10.1038/s41562-020-01037-w.

Newfield, Timothy P. 2021. Syndemics and the history of disease: Towards a new engagement. Social Science & Medicine. Early View. DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.114454.

Newman, Sophie L., and Rebecca L. Gowland. 2017. Dedicated followers of fashion? Bioarchaeological perspectives on socio‐economic status, inequality, and health in urban children from the industrial revolution (18th–19th C), England. International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 27(2):217–229. DOI: 10.1002/oa.2531.

Ng, Oon-Tek, Kalisvar Marimuthu, Po-Ying Chia, Vanessa Koh, Calvin J. Chiew, Liang De Wang, et al. 2020. SARS-CoV-2 infection among travelers returning from Wuhan, China. New England Journal of Medicine 382(15):1476–1478. DOI: 10.1056/NEJMc2003100.

Ng, Zenithson, Taylor Chastain Griffin, and Lindsey Braun. 2021. The new status quo: Enhancing access to human-animal interactions to alleviate social isolation & loneliness in the time of COVID-19. Animals 11(10):2769. DOI: 10.3390/ani11102769.

Nikhra, Vinod. 2021. Living with ‘long COVID-19’: The long-term complications and sequelae. International Journal of Clinical Virology 5:11–21. DOI: 10.29328/journal.ijcv.1001030.

Nystrom, Kenneth C. 2014. The bioarchaeology of structural violence and dissection in the 19th-century United States. American Anthropologist 116(4):765–779. DOI: 10.1111/aman.12151.

Nystrom, Kenneth C., ed. 2017. The Bioarchaeology of Dissection and Autopsy in the United States. Bioarchaeology and Social Theory series. Springer International Publishing, Cham, Switzerland.

Nystrom, Kenneth C., and Gwen Robbins Schug. 2020. A bioarchaeology of social inequality and environmental change. In The Routledge Handbook of the Bioarchaeology of Climate and Environmental Change, edited by Gwen Robbins Schug. Routledge, New York, pp. 159–188.

Ogden, N. H., P. AbdelMalik, and J. R. C. Pulliam. 2017. Emerging infections: Emerging infectious diseases: Prediction and detection. Canada Communicable Disease Report 43(10):206–211. DOI: 10.14745/ccdr.v43i10a03.

One Health Archaeology Research Group. 2020. One Health Archaeology Research Group. The University of Edinburgh, School of History, Classics & Archaeology. https://www.ed.ac.uk/history-classics-archaeology/research/research-groups/one-health-archaeology

Ovies, Cristian, Eleanor C. Semmes, and Carolyn B. Coyne. 2021. Pregnancy influences immune responses to SARS-CoV-2. Science Translational Medicine 13(617):eabm2070. DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.abm2070.

Owens, Janine. 2015. Exploring the critiques of the social model of disability: The transformative possibility of Arendt’s notion of power. Sociology of Health & Illness 37(3):385–403. DOI: 10.1111/1467-9566.12199.

Palmquist, Aunchalee E. L., Ifeyinwa V. Asiodu, and Elizabeth A. Quinn. 2020. The COVID-19 liquid gold rush: Critical perspectives of human milk and SARS-CoV-2 infection. American Journal of Human Biology 32(5):e23481. DOI: 10.1002/ajhb.23481.

Pandya, Apurvakumar, and Alex Redcay. 2021. Impact of COVID-19 on transgender women and Hijra: Insights from Gujarat, India. Journal of Human Rights and Social Work. Early View. 10.1007/s41134-021-00184-y.

Pardi, Norbert, Michael J. Hogan, Frederick W. Porter, and Drew Weissman. 2018. mRNA vaccines—a new era in vaccinology. Nature Reviews Drug Discovery 17(4):261–279. DOI: 10.1038/nrd.2017.243.

Paul, Ayan, Philipp Englert, and Melinda Varga. 2021. Socio-economic disparities and COVID-19 in the USA. Journal of Physics: Complexity 2(3):035017.

Petersen, Eskild, David Hui, Davidson H. Hamer, Lucille Blumberg, Lawrence C. Madoff, Marjorie Pollack, et al. 2020. Li Wenliang, a face to the frontline healthcare worker. The first doctor to notify the emergence of the SARS-CoV-2,(COVID-19), outbreak. International Journal of Infectious Diseases 93:205–207. DOI: 10.1016/j.ijid.2020.02.052.

Piquero, Alex R., Wesley G. Jennings, Erin Jemison, Catherine Kaukinen, and Felicia Marie Knaul. 2021. Evidence from a systematic review and meta-analysis: Domestic violence during the COVID-19 pandemic. Journal of Criminal Justice 74:101806. DOI: 10.1016/j.jcrimjus.2021.101806.

Pirjani, Reihaneh, Reihaneh Hosseini, Tahereh Soori, Maryam Rabiei, Ladan Hosseini, Ameneh Abiri, et al. 2020. Maternal and neonatal outcomes in COVID-19 infected pregnancies: A prospective cohort study. Journal of Travel Medicine 27(7):taaa158. DOI: 10.1093/jtm/taaa158.

Ramirez, Ainissa. 2021. Hidden Black scientists proved the polio vaccine worked. Public health. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hidden-black-scientists-proved-the-polio-vaccine-worked/. Accessed December 30, 2021.

Ratschen, Elena, Emily Shoesmith, Lion Shahab, Karine Silva, Dimitra Kale, Paul Toner, et al. 2020. Human-animal relationships and interactions during the Covid-19 lockdown phase in the UK: Investigating links with mental health and loneliness. PLoS ONE 15(9):e0239397. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0239397.

Riley, Tamara, Neil E. Anderson, Raymond Lovett, Anna Meredith, Bonny Cumming, and Joanne Thandrayen. 2021. One Health in Indigenous communities: A critical review of the evidence. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 8(21):11303. DOI: 10.3390/ijerph182111303.

Robbins Schug, Gwen. 2011. Bioarchaeology and Climate Change: A View from South Asian Prehistory. Bioarchaeological Interpretations of the Human Past: Local Regional and Global Perspectives series. University Press of Florida, Gainesville.

Robbins Schug, Gwen. 2016. Begotten of corruption? Bioarchaeology and “othering” of leprosy in South Asia. International Journal of Paleopathology 15:1–9. DOI: 10.1016/j.ijpp.2016.09.002.

Robbins Schug, Gwen. 2017. A hierarchy of values: The bioarchaeology of complexity, order, health, and hierarchy at Harappa. In Bones of Complexity: Bioarchaeological Case Studies of Social Organization and Skeletal Biology, edited by Haagen D. Klaus, Amanda R. Harvey, and Mark N. Cohen. Bioarchaeological Interpretations of the Human Past: Local Regional and Global Perspectives series. University Press of Florida, Gainesville, pp. 263–298.

Robbins Schug, Gwen, ed. 2020. The Routledge Handbook of the Bioarchaeology of Climate and Environmental Change. Routledge, London.

Robbins Schug, Gwen, and Kelly Elaine Blevins. 2016. The center cannot hold: A bioarchaeological perspective on environmental crisis in the second millennium BCE, South Asia. In A Companion to South Asia in the Past, edited by Gwen Robbins Schug and Subhash R. Walimbe. John Wiley and Sons, Hoboken, NJ, pp. 255–273.

Robbins Schug, Gwen, and Haviva M. Goldman. 2014. Birth is but our death begun: A bioarchaeological assessment of skeletal emaciation in immature human skeletons in the context of environmental, social, and subsistence transition. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 155(2):243–259. DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.22536.

Robbins Schug, Gwen, Kelsey Gray, V. Mushrif-Tripathy, and A. R. Sankhyan. 2012. A peaceful realm? Trauma and social differentiation at Harappa. International Journal of Paleopathology 2(2–3):136–147. DOI: 10.1016/j.ijpp.2012.09.012.

Roberts, Charlotte A. 2020a. Leprosy: Past and Present. University of Florida Press, Gainesville.

Roberts, Charlotte A. 2020b. Palaeopathology: The study of ancient disease in archaeological human and nonhuman remains. In Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology, edited by Claire Smith. Springer, Cham, Switzerland, pp. 8279–8285. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-30018-0.

Rubin, Rita. 2020. As their numbers grow, COVID-19 “long haulers” stump experts. Journal of the American Medical Association 324(14):1381–1383. DOI: 10.1001/jama.2020.17709.

Rudan, Igor. 2020. A cascade of causes that led to the COVID-19 tragedy in Italy and in other European Union countries. Journal of Global Health 10(1):010335. DOI: 10.7189/jogh-10-010335.

Saker, Lance, Kelley Lee, Barbara Cannito, Anna Gilmore, and Diarmid H. Campbell-Lendrum. 2004. Globalization and infectious disease: A review of the linkages. World Health Organization. https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/68726. Accessed December 28, 2021.

Saladino, Valeria, Davide Algeri, and Vincenzo Auriemma. 2020. The psychological and social impact of Covid-19: New perspectives of well-being. Frontiers in Psychology 11:2550. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.577684.

Salata, Cristiano, Arianna Calistri, Cristina Parolin, and Giorgio Palù. 2019. Coronaviruses: A paradigm of new emerging zoonotic diseases. Pathogens and Disease 77(9):ftaa006. DOI: 10.1093/femspd/ftaa006.

Samra, Shamsher, Todd Schneberk, Dennis Hsieh, and Philippe Bourgois. 2020. Interpersonal and structural violence in the wake of COVID-19. American Journal of Public Health 110(11):1659–1661. DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.2020.305930.

Scharff D. P., K. J. Mathews, P. Jackson, J. Hoffsuemmer, E. Martin, and D. Edwards. 2010. More than Tuskegee: Understanding mistrust about research participation. Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved 21(3):879–897.

Schmiege, Dennis, Ana Maria Perez Arredondo, Joshua Ntajal, Juliana Minetto Gellert Paris, Merveille Koissi Savi, Krupali Patel, et al. 2020. One Health in the context of coronavirus outbreaks: A systematic literature review. One Health 10:100170. DOI: 10.1016/j.onehlt.2020.100170.

Schrenk, Alicia, and Lori A. Tremblay, eds. 2022. Bioarchaeology of Care through Population-Level Analyses. Bioarchaeological Interpretations of the Human Past: Local Regional and Global Perspectives series. University of Florida Press, Gainesville.

Sharma, Shreela V., Ru-Jye Chuang, Melinda Rushing, Brittni Naylor, Nalini Ranjit, Mike Pomeroy, et al. 2020. Peer-reviewed: Social determinants of health-related needs during COVID-19 among low-income households with children. Preventing Chronic Disease 17:200322. DOI: 10.5888/pcd17.200322.

Sheridan, Susan Guise, and Lesley A. Gregoricka. 2020. A bioarchaeology of purposeful pain. In Purposeful Pain: The Bioarchaeology of Intentional Suffering, edited by Susan Guise Sheridan and Lesley A. Gregoricka. Bioarchaeology and Social Theory series. Springer International Publishing, Cham, Switzerland, pp. 1–17.

Simpson, Paul L., Melanie Simpson, Armita Adily, Luke Grant, and Tony Butler. 2019. Prison cell spatial density and infectious and communicable diseases: A systematic review. BMJ Open 9(7):e026806. DOI: 10.1136/bmjopen-2018-026806.

Singer, Merrill. 1994. AIDS and the health crisis of the US urban poor; the perspective of critical medical anthropology. Social Science & Medicine 39(7):931–948.

Singer, Merrill. 2009. Introduction to Syndemics: A Critical Systems Approach to Public and Community Health. John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken, NJ.

Singer, Merrill, and Pamela I. Erickson, eds. 2015. A Companion to Medical Anthropology. 2nd ed. Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester, UK.

Singer, Merrill, and Barbara Rylko-Bauer. 2021. The syndemics and structural violence of the COVID pandemic: Anthropological insights on a crisis. Open Anthropological Research 1(1):7–32. DOI: 10.1515/opan-2020-0100.

Singer, Merrill, and Charlene Snipes. 1992. Generations of suffering: Experiences of a treatment program for substance abuse during pregnancy. Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved 3(1):222–234. DOI: 10.1353/hpu.2010.0180.

Singh, Awadhesh K., Clare L. Gillies, Ritu Singh, Akriti Singh, Yogini Chudasama, Briana Coles, et al. 2020. Prevalence of co-morbidities and their association with mortality in patients with COVID-19: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism 22(10):1915–1924. DOI: 10.1111/dom.14124.

Singh, Jaspreet, and Jagandeep Singh. 2020. COVID-19 and its impact on society. Electronic Research Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities 2(1):168–172.

Singu, Sravani, Arpan Acharya, Kishore Challagundla, and Siddappa N. Byrareddy. 2020. Impact of social determinants of health on the emerging COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Frontiers in Public Health 8(406):1–10. DOI: 10.3389/fpubh.2020.00406.

Siqueira, Thayane Santos, José Rodrigo Santos Silva, Mariana do Rosário Souza, Débora Cristina Fontes Leite, Thomas Edwards, Paulo Ricardo Martins-Filho, et al. 2021. Spatial clusters, social determinants of health and risk of maternal mortality by COVID-19 in Brazil: A national population-based ecological study. The Lancet Regional Health–Americas 3:100076. DOI: 10.1016/j.lana.2021.100076.

Sironi, Manuela, Seyed E. Hasnain, Benjamin Rosenthal, Tung Phan, Fabio Luciani, Marie-Anne Shaw, et al. 2020. SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19: A genetic, epidemiological, and evolutionary perspective. Infection, Genetics and Evolution 84:104384. DOI: 10.1016/j.meegid.2020.104384.

Smith, Maia P. 2022. Estimating total morbidity burden of COVID-19: Relative importance of death and disability. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology 142:54–59. DOI: 10.1016/j.jclinepi.2021.10.018.

Smith-Guzmán, Nicole, Rose, Jerome, and K. Kucken. 2016. Beyond the differential diagnosis: New approaches to the bioarchaeology of the Hittite plague. In New Directions in Biocultural Anthropology, edited by Molly K. Zuckerman and Debra L. Martin. Wiley, New York, pp. 295–316.

Snoddy, Anne Marie E., Siân E. Halcrow, Hallie R. Buckley, Vivien G. Standen, and Bernado T. Arriaza. 2017. Scurvy at the agricultural transition in the Atacama desert (ca 3600–3200 BP): Nutritional stress at the maternal-foetal interface? International Journal of Paleopathology 18:108–120. DOI: 10.1016/j.ijpp.2017.05.011.

Springer, Kristen W., Olena Hankivsky, and Lisa M. Bates. 2012. Gender and health: Relational, intersectional, and biosocial approaches. Social Science & Medicine 74(11):1661–1666. DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2012.03.001.

Staples, J. 2005. Leprosy in South India: The paradox of disablement as enablement. Review of Disability Studies: An International Journal 1(4):13–28.

Stone, Pamela K. 2012. Binding women: Ethnology, skeletal deformations, and violence against women. International Journal of Paleopathology 2(2–3):53–60. DOI: 10.1016/j.ijpp.2012.09.008.

Subbaraman, Nidhi. 2021. Science misinformation alarms Francis Collins as he leaves top NIH job. Nature. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03611-2. Accessed December 31, 2021.

Sudre, Carole H., Benjamin Murray, Thomas Varsavsky, Mark S. Graham, Rose S. Penfold, Ruth C. Bowyer, et al. 2021. Attributes and predictors of long COVID. Nature Medicine 27(4):626–631. DOI: 10.1038/s41591-021-01292-y.

Sweeney, Chris. 2021. Kizzmekia Corbett is just getting started. Harvard Public Health. https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/magazine/magazine_article/kizzmekia-corbett-is-just-getting-started/. Accessed December 30, 2021.

Tai, Don Bambina Geno, Aditya Shah, Chyke A. Doubeni, Irene G. Sia, and Mark L. Wieland. 2021. The disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on racial and ethnic minorities in the United States. Clinical Infectious Diseases 72(4):703–706. DOI: 10.1093/cid/ciaa815.

Takemoto, Maira L. S., Mariane O. Menezes, Carla B. Andreucci, Roxana Knobel, Liduína A. R. Sousa, Leila Katz, et al. 2020. Maternal mortality and COVID-19. The Journal of Maternal-Fetal & Neonatal Medicine. Early View. DOI: 10.1080/14767058.2020.1786056.

Tegtmeyer, Caryn E., and Debra L. Martin. 2017. The bioarchaeology of women, children, and other vulnerable groups in times of war. In Bioarchaeology of Women and Children in Times of War: Case Studies from the Americas, edited by Debra L. Martin and Caryn Tegtmeyer. Bioarchaeology and Social Theory series. Springer International Publishing, Cham, Switzerland, pp. 1–14.

Thakur, Neeta, Stephanie Lovinsky-Desir, Christian Bime, Juan P. Wisnivesky, and Juan C. Celedón. 2020. The structural and social determinants of the racial/ethnic disparities in the US COVID-19 pandemic. What’s our role? American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine 202(7):943–949. DOI: 10.1164/rccm.202005-1523PP.

The Lancet. 2020. Humanitarian crises in a global pandemic. The Lancet 396(10249):447. DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(20)31749-9.

Tilley, Lorna. 2015. Theory and Practice in the Bioarchaeology of Care. Bioarchaeology and Social Theory series. Springer, Cham, Switzerland.

Tilley, Lorna, and Alecia A. Schrenk, eds. 2017. New Developments in the Bioarchaeology of Care. Bioarchaeology and Social Theory series, Springer, Cham, Switzerland.

Todd-Gher, Jamie, and Payal K. Shah. 2020. Abortion in the context of COVID-19: A human rights imperative. Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters 28(1):1758394. DOI: 10.1080/26410397.2020.1758394.

Torres-Rouff, Christina. 2020. Binding, wrapping, constricting, and constraining the head: A consideration of cranial vault modification and the pain of infants. In Purposeful Pain: The Bioarchaeology of Intentional Suffering, edited by Susan Guise Sheridan and Lesley A. Gregoricka. Bioarchaeology and Social Theory series. Springer International Publishing, Cham, Switzerland, pp. 233–252.

Torres-Rouff, Christina, and Kelly J. Knudson. 2017. Integrating identities: An innovative bioarchaeological and biogeochemical approach to analyzing the multiplicity of identities in the mortuary record. Current Anthropology 58(3):381–409. DOI: 10.1086/692026.

Tremblay, Lori A., and Sarah Reedy, eds. The Bioarchaeology of Structural Violence: A Theoretical Framework for Industrial Era Inequality. Bioarchaeology and Social Theory series. Springer, Cham, Switzerland.

Turner-Musa, Jocelyn, Oluwatoyin Ajayi, and Layschel Kemp. 2020. Examining social determinants of health, stigma, and COVID-19 disparities. Healthcare 8(2):168. DOI: 10.3390/healthcare8020168.

Upshaw, Tara L., Chloe Brown, Robert Smith, Melissa Perri, Carolyn Ziegler, and Andrew D. Pinto. 2021. Social determinants of COVID-19 incidence and outcomes: A rapid review. PLoS ONE 16(3):e0248336. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0248336.

van Bavel, Jay J., Katherine Baicker, Paulo S. Boggio, Valerio Capraro, Aleksandra Cichocka, Mina Cikara, et al. 2020. Using social and behavioural science to support COVID-19 pandemic response. Nature Human Behaviour 4:460–471. DOI: 10.1038/s41562-020-0884-z.

Vargas, Edward, and Gabriel R. Sanchez. 2020. COVID-19 is having a devastating impact on the economic well-being of Latino families. Journal of Economics, Race, Policy 3:262–269. DOI: 10.1007/s41996-020-00071-0.

Varkey, Rittu S., Justin Joy, Gargee Sarmah, and Prasant K. Panda. 2020. Socioeconomic determinants of COVID-19 in Asian countries: An empirical analysis. Journal of Public Affairs 21(4):e2532. DOI: 10.1002/pa.2532.

Villar, José, Shabina Ariff, Robert B. Gunier, Ramachandran Thiruvengadam, Stephen Rauch, Alexey Kholin, et al. 2021. Maternal and neonatal morbidity and mortality among pregnant women with and without COVID-19 infection: The INTERCOVID Multinational Cohort Study. JAMA Pediatrics 175(8):817–826. DOI: 10.1001/jamapediatrics.2021.1050.

Vizheh, Maryam, Maryam Allahdadian, Salut Muhidin, Mahboubeh Valiani, Khadijeh Bagheri, Forogh Borandegi, et al. 2021. Impact of COVID-19 infection on neonatal birth outcomes. Journal of Tropical Pediatrics 67(5):1–8. DOI: 10.1093/tropej/fmab094.

Vlok, Melandri, and Hallie Buckley. 2022. Paleoepidemiological considerations of mobility and population interaction in the spread of infectious diseases in the prehistoric past. Bioarchaeology International 6(1–2):Early View. DOI: 10.5744/bi.2020.0026.

Vlok, Melandri, Hallie R. Buckley, Kate Domett, Anna Willis, Monica Tromp, Hiep H. Trinh, et al. 2022. Hydatid disease (Echinococcosis granulosis) diagnosis from skeletal osteolytic lesions in an early seventh-millennium BP forager community from preagricultural northern Vietnam. American Journal of Biological Anthropology 177(1):100–115. DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.24435.

Wade, Mark, Heather Prime, Dylan Johnson, Shealyn S. May, Jennifer M. Jenkins, and Dillon T. Browne. 2021. The disparate impact of COVID-19 on the mental health of female and male caregivers. Social Science & Medicine 275:113801. DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.113801.

Waldron, Tony. 2007. Palaeoepidemiology: The Measure of Disease in the Human Past. Routledge, London.

Wallace, Robert G., Luke Bergmann, Richard Kock, Marius Gilbert, Lenny Hogerwerf, Rodrick Wallace, and Mollie Holmberg. 2015. The dawn of Structural One Health: A new science tracking disease emergence along circuits of capital. Social Science & Medicine 129:68–77.

Waltner-Toews, David. 2017. Zoonoses, One Health and complexity: Wicked problems and constructive conflict. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 372(1725):20160171. DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2016.0171.

Wang, Yuanyuan, Lian Chen, Tianchen Wu, Huifeng Shi, Qin Li, Hai Jiang, et al. 2020. Impact of Covid-19 in pregnancy on mother’s psychological status and infant’s neurobehavioral development: A longitudinal cohort study in China. BMC Medicine 18(1):1–10. DOI: 10.1186/s12916-020-01825-1.

Wastnedge, Elizabeth A. N., Rebecca M. Reynolds, Sara R. Van Boeckel, Sarah J. Stock, Fiona C. Denison, Jacqueline A. Maybin, et al. 2021. Pregnancy and COVID-19. Physiological Reviews 101(1):303–318. DOI: 10.1152/physrev.00024.2020.

Watkins, Rachel J. 2012. Variation in health and socioeconomic status within the W. Montague Cobb skeletal collection: Degenerative joint disease, trauma and cause of death. International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 22(1):22–44. DOI: 10.1002/oa.1178.

Watkins, Rachel J. 2018a. Anatomical collections as the anthropological other: Some considerations. In Bioarchaeological Analyses and Bodies: New Ways of Knowing Anatomical and Archaeological Skeletal Collections, edited by Pamela K. Stone. Bioarchaeology and Social Theory series. Springer International Publishing, Cham, Switzerland, pp. 27–47.

Watkins, Rachel J. 2018b. The fate of anatomical collections in the US: Bioanthropological investigations of structural violence. In Identified Skeletal Collections: The Testing Ground of Anthropology? edited by Charlotte Yvette Henderson and Francisca Alves Cardoso. Archaeopress, Oxford, UK, pp. 169–185.

Watkins, Rachel J., and Jennifer Muller. 2015. Repositioning the Cobb human archive: The merger of a skeletal collection and its texts. American Journal of Human Biology 27(1):41–50. DOI: 10.1002/ajhb.22650.

Wesp, Julie K. 2020. Working in the city: An historical bioarchaeology of activity in urban New Spain. Historical Archaeology 54(1):92–109.

Whyte, D. 2020. Ecocide: Kill The Corporation before It Kills Us. Manchester University Press, Manchester, UK.

Wilkinson, Richard, and Michael Marmot, eds. 2008. Social Determinants of Health: The Solid Facts. 2nd ed. World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland.

Wong, Yin Ping, Teck Yee Khong, and Geok Chin Tan. 2021. The effects of COVID-19 on placenta and pregnancy: What do we know so far? Diagnostics 11(1):94. DOI: 10.3390/diagnostics11010094.

Wood, James W., George R. Milner, Henry C. Harpending, Kenneth M. Weiss, Mark N. Cohen, Leslie E. Eisenberg, et al. 1992. The osteological paradox: Problems of inferring prehistoric health from skeletal samples [and comments and reply]. Current Anthropology 33(4):343–370.

World Health Organization (WHO). 2010. First WHO Report on Neglected Tropical Disease: Working to Overcome the Global Impact of Neglected Tropical Diseases. World Health Organization. https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/44440. Accessed January 6, 2022.

World Health Organization (WHO). 2013. The Economics of Social Determinants of Health and Health Inequalities: A Resource Book. World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland.

World Health Organization (WHO). 2020. WHO Director-General’s Opening Remarks at the Media Briefing on COVID-19. World Health Organization. https://www.who.int/director-general/speeches/detail/who-director-general-s-opening-remarks-at-the-media-briefing-on-covid-19—11-march-2020. Accessed January 31, 2022.

Yang, H., C. Wang, and L. C. Poon. Novel coronavirus infection and pregnancy. Ultrasound in Obstetrics & Gynecology 55(4):435–437. DOI: 10.1002/uog.22006.

Yaussy, Samantha. 2019. The intersections of industrialization: Variation in skeletal indicators of frailty by age, sex, and socioeconomic status in 18th- and 19th-century England. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 170:116–130. DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.23881.

Yaussy, Samantha. 2022. Intersectionality and the interpretation of past pandemics. Bioarchaeology International 6(1–2):Early View. DOI: 10.5744/bi.2020.0028.

Ye, Zi-Wei, Shuofeng Yuan, Kit-San Yuen, Sin-Yee Fung, Chi-Ping Chan, and Dong-Yan Jin. 2020. Zoonotic origins of human coronaviruses. International Journal of Biological Sciences 16(10):1686–1697. DOI: 10.7150/ijbs.45472.

Zhang, Yong-Zhen, and Edward C. Holmes. 2020. A genomic perspective on the origin and emergence of SARS-CoV-2. Cell 181(2):223–227. DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2020.03.035.

Zhao, Huabin. 2020. COVID-19 drives new threat to bats in China. Science 367(6485):1436–1436. DOI: 10.1126/science.abb3088.

Zheng, Jun. 2020. SARS-CoV-2: An emerging coronavirus that causes a global threat. International Journal of Biological Sciences 16(10):1678. DOI: 10.7150/ijbs.45053.

Zinsstag, Jakob. 2012. Convergence of EcoHealth and One Health. EcoHealth 9(4):371–373. DOI: 10.1007/s10393-013-0812-z.

Zuckerman, Molly K. 2017. Mercury in the midst of Mars and Venus: Reconstructing gender and socioeconomic status in the context of mercury treatments for acquired syphilis in 17th to 19th century England. In Exploring Sex and Gender in Bioarchaeology, edited by Sabrina C. Agarwal and Julie K. Wesp. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, pp. 223–262.

Zuckerman, Molly K. 2022. Institutionalization within the context of pandemic infectious disease: Examining social vulnerability to the 1918 influenza pandemic amongst individuals institutionalized in the Mississippi State Asylum. Bioarchaeology International 6(1–2):Early View. DOI: 10.5744/bai.2021.0006.

Zuckerman, Molly K., and George J. Armelagos. 2014. The hygiene hypothesis and the second epidemiologic transition. In Modern Environments and Human Health: Revisiting the Second Epidemiologic Transition, edited by Molly K. Zuckerman. John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken, NJ, pp. 301–320. DOI: 10.1002/9781118504338.ch16.

Zuckerman, Molly K., Kristin Nicole Harper, Ronald Barrett, and George John Armelagos. 2014. The evolution of disease: Anthropological perspectives on epidemiological transitions. Global Health Action 7(1):23303. DOI: 10.3402/gha.v7.23303.

aDepartment of Anthropology, Appalachian State University, Boone, NC, USA

bDepartment of Anthropology, University of North Carolina Greensboro, Greensboro, NC, USA

cDepartment of Anatomy, School of Biomedical Sciences, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

*Corresponding author: Gwen Robbins Schug, 320a Anne Belk Hall, Department of Anthropology, Appalachian State University, Boone, NC 28608

e-mail: Robbinsgm@gmail.com