The dead tell no tales. Or do they? In this book, Clark Spencer Larsen shows that the dead can speak to us - about their lives, and ours - through the insights of bioarchaeology, which reconstructs the lives and lifestyles of past peoples based on the study of skeletal remains. The human skeleton is a storehouse of information. It records the circumstances of our growth and development as reflected in factors such as disease, stress, diet, nutrition, climate, activity and injury. Bioarchaeologists, by combining the methods of forensic science and archaeology, along with the resources of many other disciplines (including chemistry, geology, physics and biology), read the information stored in bones to understand what life was really like for our human ancestors. Drawing on accounts from his own experiences as a bioarchaeologist, Larsen guides us through some of the key developments in recent human evolution, including the adoption of agriculture, the arrival of Europeans in the Americas, the biological consequences of this contact and the settlement of the American West in the 18th and 19th centuries.