“What if violence is considered ennobling, redeeming, and necessary to the continuance of life itself?” (Neil Whitehead, “Violence and the Cultural Order,” Daedalus 136(1):40–50, 2007). It is fitting to begin this book review with a quote from Neil Whitehead, whose work on the poetics of violence informs each chapter in this edited volume by bioarchaeologist Anna Osterholtz. For anyone who studies violence, this volume brings forward the “what if” posed by Whitehead and offers research that applies his poetics model in the analysis of the postmortem treatment of the dead across the globe and through time. What we learn is that the poetics lens complicates our understanding of violence and reveals deeper meanings to the role of processed human remains in their reflection of social expression and collective beliefs, social stratification, and power dynamics in the past.

Osterholtz, whose own work in bioarchaeology has offered important insights into the poetics of violence from multiple sites, here brings together articles from a symposium at the 2016 annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Each chapter explores how the processing of human remains, viewed through the poetics lens, underscores the symbolism in how “the physical body (and its manipulation) is used as a social tool” (p. 3). Contributing authors engage a poetics framework to rethink past and current research, revealing new and nuanced models and entry points in the interpretations of disarticulated and commingled remains from archaeological and anatomical samples.

Each chapter considers how manipulation of the physical body in death illuminates the ways that social memory, rituals and beliefs, and behaviors become intertwined in determining who processes the bodies of the deceased after death, and how and which bodies are processed. Part I focuses on the Americas, from rituals associated with warfare—such as trophy head taking in Andean and Uraca cultures (Chapter 2)—to the complexity of the rituals and behaviors that resulted in the commingled burials found at Paquimé, in Mexico (Chapter 3). In the American Southwest, the burials of Ancestral Puebloan peoples (Chapter 4) and others (Chapter 5) are considered for clues about ritual and beliefs in the treatment of the dead and disarticulation of some skeletal elements. These chapters demonstrate how (re)analyses of skeletal assemblages through a poetics lens offers new ways of understanding how processing serves the living as an ennobling and redeeming activity and in the maintenance of social order.

Part II shifts to the Old World and sites in Ethiopia (Chapter 6) and Egypt (Chapter 7), the Neolithic in Anatolia (Chapter 8), and Petra in Jordan (Chapter 9). Reassessments of skeletal and mummified remains offer insight into how processing of the dead can be read as redeeming and necessary to the continuance of life itself, and how the roles of perpetrator, victim, or bystander are deeply nuanced. Roselyn A. Campbell (Chapter 7) reexamines the mummified remains of King Ramses III. Legal records reveal that he was assassinated, but until this work, his remains did not. In this case, new methods (computed tomography and radiography) affirm that the king's throat was “cut, violently and deeply” (p. 128). This finding exposes how processing the king's body after death was done to hide this violence and to ensure his transition to the afterlife, upholding Egyptian belief systems.

Part III focuses on historic American anatomical collections and how the anatomization (i.e., historic dissection and disarticulation of individuals in the name of medicine) illuminates much about the culture, power, and privilege of biomedicine. Christina J. Hodge and Kenneth C. Nystrom (Chapter 10) and Carlina de le Cova (Chapter 11) offer insight into the ways in which anatomical collections (some still in use) should be reconsidered and examined through the poetics lens—an important and timely shift in focus from the distant past to the recent past and present. Here, we are confronted with how anatomical and skeletal knowledge has been produced, with critical considerations of violence perpetrated by professionals (doctors and physical anthropologists) in their quest to study the human body. This work reminds anyone who works with human skeletal remains that our own production of knowledge is infused with violence, power, and privilege. The lens of poetics demands that we be self-reflective in the ways in which contemporary research relies on the disarticulated and commingled remains of people who did not consent to having their skeletal remains curated or used as study specimens.

Overall, the bioarchaeological scholarship in this volume provides models for how poetics can inform the ways in which we study disarticulated and commingled humans. This book is the first of its kind to bring together scholars in bioarchaeology, who offer, through the lens of poetics, ways to begin to make sense of the experiences of the living—the actors and observers—in the deposition of their dead. They also allow us a moment to ask “what if” the manipulation of the skeletal body is more about group identity and power, as well as domination over life and death, and the formation—or confirmation—of the social identities of individuals and communities. This serves to remind us that control over the bodies of the dead does not end in the performance of the living who process and bury their dead, but it continues as we exhume, study, interpret, and curate these individuals. We are left with the need to confront our own implicit biases, to consider our own roles in the ways in which we create and critique narratives about people in the past, and to think about how we are also perpetrators and bystanders, engaging in our own poetics as we handle the dead and tell their tales.