Tales form the dead: what bones tell us about our past, and why we should know -- The lives and lifestyles of ancient hunter-gatherers: "poor, nasty, brutish and short" in the American Great Basin? -- Skeletons from Stillwater: good times and bad times -- From foraging to farming: a regional perspective -- Going global: bioarchaeology of the foraging-to-farming transition -- Europeans arrive: circumstances and settings for native population collapse in the Americas -- Bioarchaeology of population decline and extinction in Spanish Florida -- Sot-Weed to Sangamo: life and death in frontier North America -- On to Sangamo Country: colonizing the Midwest -- Life's transitions: the bioarchaeological past.