El enfoque paleoepidemiológico en la antropología física

Abstract

Within the field of paleopathology, recent years have witnessed an increasing appreciation of the paleoepidemiological approach, that studies the prevalence, distribution and determinants of diseases in a biocultural context. Following the early leads of Hooton and Angel, during the sixties emerged this new perspective, whose emphasis is less on finding the exact aetiology or cause of a disease, that would be a clinical approach, and focuses in the use of multiple indicators of health and nutrition (that can be observed in bones and teeth), that reflect the conditions at death, as well as during the life of the individuals that make up the skeletal series under study. I present in this work a revision of the main literature that better explains the sequence of the development of the paleoepidemiological discipline in foreign countries, and it’s influence in Mexican paleopathological studies trough time.