EAA Book Prize 2023 Winners

The Routledge Handbook of Archaeothanatology: Bioarchaeology of Mortuary Behaviour

Edited by Christopher Knüsel and Eline Schotsmans
Routledge
2022


Christopher Knüsel at EAA 2023 Opening Ceremony © Joe Warden photography

This comprehensive guide to Archaeothanatology or the Bioarchaeology of Mortuary Behaviour should have significant global impact on students and professionals working in and around this important interdisciplinary field.

Written by experts, the thirty-four chapters cover a wealth of themes, fascinating case studies, and innovative methodologies.

The volume, whose editors benefitted from French and European Union funding and whose contents connect francophone and anglophone approaches to the archaeology of death, is also of positive European significance.

This is underlined by the distinctive ‘Lexicon of terms used in archaeothanatology’, which will facilitate future research integration internationally.

Growing Up in the Ice Age: Fossil and archaeological evidence of the lived lives of Plio-Pleistocene children

April Nowell
Oxbow Books
2021


April Nowell at EAA 2023 Opening Ceremony © Joe Warden photography

Everyone should be able to relate to and learn from this fascinating book about Palaeolithic children and childhood.

It represents an admirable effort to combine well-defined theories and hypotheses with an inter-disciplinary array of scientific information―including a surprisingly wide range of archaeological data―to make a novel contribution to this still underexplored aspect of Palaeolithic societies.

A socially inclusive emphasis on dynamic and diverse childhoods, in which children are seen to have been active social and economic agents, is successfully combined with a wider evolutionary perspective, showing how childcare and socialisation affected the longer trajectory of the human species.