Introduction

Questions concerning the biological impacts of the economic transition from foraging to farming have formed a central focus of research in bioarchaeology since the late 1970s. Researchers examining this transition have generally compared diet, health, and workload of mobile/semimobile forager antecedents and later sedentary agriculturalists to identify differences and therefore changes associated with the adoption of an agricultural mode of subsistence. The groundbreaking volume, Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture, published in 1984, represents the first major effort to gather together such studies from a number of world regions to address questions concerning the impetus for and biological consequences of agriculture. Much of the research available at that time focused on skeletal samples from the Americas, particularly North America, and these studies still predominate in the literature. However, research efforts over the intervening years have expanded this geographic purview to include different types of agriculture and agricultural transitions in many world regions. As research accumulates, some general trends are emerging in certain aspects of health and workload, but it is also becoming apparent that the ‘transition’ and consequent health impacts were not uniform in all times and places, or even unidirectional. This growing awareness of variability in the agricultural experience has led to an increasing research emphasis on how different environmental and behavioral correlates of agriculture influence the skeletal markers used to reconstruct the different lifeways and health impacts associated with this economic transition.