John J Crandall
John Crandall is a bioarchaeologist and anthropologist. He graduated from Syracuse University in 2010 and completed his master's degree in anthropology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in 2013. He received a “high pass” and distinction on his defense and graduated with his PhD in 2023.
His research interests include violence, paleopathology, social theory, and anthropologies of the body and resistance. He has done forensic case work and is particularly invested in using anthropology as a tool of empowerment and for creating social change.
John is part of the Chinese Railroad Workers of North America Project led by Stanford University. He is currently preparing a manuscript exploring the impacts of migrant labor exploitation and immigration law on worker health building on his dissertation work which was first to focus on Asian American communities who have generally been of little interest to bioarchaeology. The book reframes the story of Overseas Chinese in the American West centering the bodies and lives of Chinese working across the West whose bones shed light on the rise of industrial capitalism.
The project aims to consider the new burdens and challenges migrant work use and abuse brought to workers and marginalized migrants. The project aims to illuminate how these changes and the resistance of workers and conflicts between groups of workers of various nationalities and races are central in shaping the patterns of inequity and illness following the second Industrial Revolution. Without considering workers, migrants, race and exploitative capitalism it isn’t possible to fully explain how the second epidemiological transition transforms communities and is as much a shift in politics and ideology as it is a ecological arrangement. More so, the project centers Asian Americans and their life histories as captured by their remains and brings new insights to Overseas Chinese history and broader discussions around how to empower today’s workers and end the racism and xenophobia. Bioarchaeology helps trace the roots and entanglements of these social ills which emerged first alongside the Chinese whose work was central to U.S. conquest and the rise of cities and industry in and beyond the West since the mid 19th century.
Supervisors: Alyssa Crittenden, Barb Roth (Dissertation), Daniel Benyshek, William Bauer, Sue Fawn Chung, and Debra Martin (Coursework/Comprehensive Exams)
Phone: 702.354.0849
Address: 4376 Shortleaf Street,
Las Vegas, NV 89119
His research interests include violence, paleopathology, social theory, and anthropologies of the body and resistance. He has done forensic case work and is particularly invested in using anthropology as a tool of empowerment and for creating social change.
John is part of the Chinese Railroad Workers of North America Project led by Stanford University. He is currently preparing a manuscript exploring the impacts of migrant labor exploitation and immigration law on worker health building on his dissertation work which was first to focus on Asian American communities who have generally been of little interest to bioarchaeology. The book reframes the story of Overseas Chinese in the American West centering the bodies and lives of Chinese working across the West whose bones shed light on the rise of industrial capitalism.
The project aims to consider the new burdens and challenges migrant work use and abuse brought to workers and marginalized migrants. The project aims to illuminate how these changes and the resistance of workers and conflicts between groups of workers of various nationalities and races are central in shaping the patterns of inequity and illness following the second Industrial Revolution. Without considering workers, migrants, race and exploitative capitalism it isn’t possible to fully explain how the second epidemiological transition transforms communities and is as much a shift in politics and ideology as it is a ecological arrangement. More so, the project centers Asian Americans and their life histories as captured by their remains and brings new insights to Overseas Chinese history and broader discussions around how to empower today’s workers and end the racism and xenophobia. Bioarchaeology helps trace the roots and entanglements of these social ills which emerged first alongside the Chinese whose work was central to U.S. conquest and the rise of cities and industry in and beyond the West since the mid 19th century.
Supervisors: Alyssa Crittenden, Barb Roth (Dissertation), Daniel Benyshek, William Bauer, Sue Fawn Chung, and Debra Martin (Coursework/Comprehensive Exams)
Phone: 702.354.0849
Address: 4376 Shortleaf Street,
Las Vegas, NV 89119
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Edited Volumes by John J Crandall
Children’s lives differ significantly from those of adults due to disparate social identities and variable growth needs. Comparing field research from a variety of sites across Europe and the Americas, the contributors to this volume demonstrate that children not only have unique experiences but also share, cross-culturally, in daily struggles. In some of the cases presented, this is the first time that child remains have been examined in any detail, making Tracing Childhood an essential resource for scholars and researchers in this growing field.
Articles & Chapters by John J Crandall
bioarchaeology is well positioned to contribute to understandings of the health of past peoples in their sociocultural
contexts. Recently, following a longstanding trend in archaeology, many bioarchaeologists have begun to productively engage with concepts of sex, gender, and to a lesser extent, sexuality, particularly in relation to issues of health and disease. In response, this review interrogatively and synthetically surveys recent bioarchaeological work on this nexus, querying how bioarchaeologists theorize sex and gender, how they operationalize these concepts relative to health and disease, and the relative merits of these approaches. Within this, the review focuses on studies addressing metabolic disease, trauma and violence, infectious disease, and overall health (e.g., frailty). Throughout, the review highlights how theoretically informed bioarchaeological data can be used to further elucidate the biosocial factors that shape past patterns of health. It also highlights the distinct insights generated from this scholarship, as well as the unresolved questions, methodological difficulties, and theoretical tensions facing it. The aim throughout is to give future scholars novel, social theory-informed, and operationalized theoretical frameworks and interpretive devices that can be used to answer these questions and resolve these conflicts within bioarchaeology.
Bioarchaeological evidence demonstrates that scurvy prevalence increases among subadults in association with violence and exploitation by regional political centers. Hinterland communities exhibit higher prevalence rates of scurvy than found within nearby political centers. This is consistent with hypotheses that social control involved complex inequalities in resource redistribution in the Southwest that negatively impacted the communities from which food resources were extracted. Evidence of scurvy also appears to be found most often in assemblages associated with violent conflict. Further exploration of the role structural inequalities play in shaping nutrition will enable a better understanding of how to improve health in contexts of resource instability."
Through an examination of the deaths of Nevada's first reported murder and suicide victims, Edwin and William Kiel, we illustrate how forensic and bioarchaeological approaches can be married to rule out murder-suicide as a formative process resulting in the trauma patterns we observed on the remains. Further, when contextualized and compared historically, these data enable us to formulate a possible osteological signature of ambush that may be useful in exploring ideologically- motivated violence involving firearms throughout Western history.
Reference Texts by John J Crandall
Letters to the Editor by John J Crandall
In our letter, we argue that the authors in this study make a number of conclusions which cannot be supported by the data presented. In the piece, we review what is known about porotic hyperostosis and, as paleopathologists, critique the process by which they arrive at their conclusions from a consideration of this common pathological lesion.
We use the recent find by Dominguez-Rodrigo and colleagues to discuss interpretive challenges in paleopathology and paleoanthropology, particularly in diagnosing the cause of a lesion like porotic hyperostosis which is non-specific in aetiology.
We reject the assertion that evidence of ancient anemia attests to hominin's meat-adapted physiology or the centrality of meat (hunters?) to human evolution. Instead, we urge caution in interpreting lesions without contextual information, rigorous diagnosis by exclusion and the use of biocultural modeling, as well as comparative analysis. Integrating these kinds of data as well as theory from across the social and behavioral sciences is essential in furthering judicious reconstructions of hominin evolution that find their basis in empirical data.
Newsletters & Essays by John J Crandall
Children’s lives differ significantly from those of adults due to disparate social identities and variable growth needs. Comparing field research from a variety of sites across Europe and the Americas, the contributors to this volume demonstrate that children not only have unique experiences but also share, cross-culturally, in daily struggles. In some of the cases presented, this is the first time that child remains have been examined in any detail, making Tracing Childhood an essential resource for scholars and researchers in this growing field.
bioarchaeology is well positioned to contribute to understandings of the health of past peoples in their sociocultural
contexts. Recently, following a longstanding trend in archaeology, many bioarchaeologists have begun to productively engage with concepts of sex, gender, and to a lesser extent, sexuality, particularly in relation to issues of health and disease. In response, this review interrogatively and synthetically surveys recent bioarchaeological work on this nexus, querying how bioarchaeologists theorize sex and gender, how they operationalize these concepts relative to health and disease, and the relative merits of these approaches. Within this, the review focuses on studies addressing metabolic disease, trauma and violence, infectious disease, and overall health (e.g., frailty). Throughout, the review highlights how theoretically informed bioarchaeological data can be used to further elucidate the biosocial factors that shape past patterns of health. It also highlights the distinct insights generated from this scholarship, as well as the unresolved questions, methodological difficulties, and theoretical tensions facing it. The aim throughout is to give future scholars novel, social theory-informed, and operationalized theoretical frameworks and interpretive devices that can be used to answer these questions and resolve these conflicts within bioarchaeology.
Bioarchaeological evidence demonstrates that scurvy prevalence increases among subadults in association with violence and exploitation by regional political centers. Hinterland communities exhibit higher prevalence rates of scurvy than found within nearby political centers. This is consistent with hypotheses that social control involved complex inequalities in resource redistribution in the Southwest that negatively impacted the communities from which food resources were extracted. Evidence of scurvy also appears to be found most often in assemblages associated with violent conflict. Further exploration of the role structural inequalities play in shaping nutrition will enable a better understanding of how to improve health in contexts of resource instability."
Through an examination of the deaths of Nevada's first reported murder and suicide victims, Edwin and William Kiel, we illustrate how forensic and bioarchaeological approaches can be married to rule out murder-suicide as a formative process resulting in the trauma patterns we observed on the remains. Further, when contextualized and compared historically, these data enable us to formulate a possible osteological signature of ambush that may be useful in exploring ideologically- motivated violence involving firearms throughout Western history.
In our letter, we argue that the authors in this study make a number of conclusions which cannot be supported by the data presented. In the piece, we review what is known about porotic hyperostosis and, as paleopathologists, critique the process by which they arrive at their conclusions from a consideration of this common pathological lesion.
We use the recent find by Dominguez-Rodrigo and colleagues to discuss interpretive challenges in paleopathology and paleoanthropology, particularly in diagnosing the cause of a lesion like porotic hyperostosis which is non-specific in aetiology.
We reject the assertion that evidence of ancient anemia attests to hominin's meat-adapted physiology or the centrality of meat (hunters?) to human evolution. Instead, we urge caution in interpreting lesions without contextual information, rigorous diagnosis by exclusion and the use of biocultural modeling, as well as comparative analysis. Integrating these kinds of data as well as theory from across the social and behavioral sciences is essential in furthering judicious reconstructions of hominin evolution that find their basis in empirical data.
Mortuary treatment and paleopathology data are used to test the recent argument, based on archaeological evidence, that the ill and young (<1 year of age) were viewed as liminal persons across ancient Mesoamerica. Our results appear to support this hypothesis. For example, data from Postclassic/historic Maya and Loma San Gabriel Tepehuan, sites demonstrate high rates of scurvy (58% and 42% respectively) and other bony indicators of ill-health such as periosteal reactions and endocranial lesions, in infants buried in special contexts. Supporting data from other sites in this region will also be discussed. This research highlights the social consequences disease had for particular age groups (such as infants) and provides a more nuanced perspective of the social roles the ill played in prehistory."
Data are reported for the mummified and/or skeletonized remains of 11 infants from Zape, Mexico. Given the unique context of these interments (burial complete with shrouds, pillows, grave goods and clay architecture), it is likely that these infants were buried in a ritual manner and therefore the sample of infants may not reflect typical patterns of infant health. Although the sample size is small, 5 (45%) of the infants show lesions suggestive of scurvy. The patterning of periosteal lesions is described in detail, with an emphasis on examples from two of the infants who exhibit widespread lesions, both consistent with severe manifestations of the condition. Comparisons to clinical data demonstrate that lesions present on the mandibles, crania, scapulae and pelvic bones of these two individuals are consistent with micro-hemorrhaging near muscle attachment sites (e.g. Larralde et al. 2007). Overall, these data support an emerging interpretation of lesion patterns indicative of infantile scurvy and suggest that disease severity may in fact be reflected in lesion distribution and intensity.
Taphonomic indicators of the mortuary context revealed evidence of burning and intentional sequenced internment suggestive of ritualized burial treatment. Results from the analysis of coprolites and quids found in the cave (Reinhard, et al. 1988) provide additional information on diet and health. Vegetative data noting the presence of botanicals used for drug production at the site ( Foster 1984), suggests that an unusual occurrence such as ritual sacrifice likely precipitated the deaths of up to 17 infants and children as well as two adult females. Large quantities of corn and beans may have been part of a ritual offering.