Paleoradiology Imaging Mummies and Fossils is available to be downloaded here now.
- Title: Paleoradiology Imaging Mummies and Fossils
- Author: R. K. Chhem, D. R. Brothwell
- Publisher: Springer
- Pages: 178
It is my pleasure to write the foreword to this groundbreaking text in paleoradiology. Dr. Rethy Chhem is a distinguished musculoskeletal radiologist, and he is the founder of the Paleoradiologic Research Unit at the University of Western Ontario, Canada, and the Osteoarchaeology Research Group at the National University of Singapore. His special area of paleoradiologic expertise is the Khmer civilization of Cambodia, and his contributions to radiologic and anthropologic science have built bridges between these two not always communicative disciplines.
Dr. Don Brothwell is of course well known to the paleopathology community. He is something of an anthropologic and archaeologic polymath, having made important contributions to dental anthropology, the antiquity of human diet, and veterinary paleopathology, among others. His textbook, “Digging Up Bones” (Brothwell 1982), has introduced many generations of scholars to bioarchaeology, a discipline of which he is one of the founders.
It is only fitting that this book is the work of a radiologist and an anthropologist, both of whom have experience in musculoskeletal imaging and paleopathology. For more than 100 years, diagnostic imaging has been used in the study of ancient disease. In fact, one of the first comprehensive textbooks of paleopathology, “Paleopathologic Diagnosis and Interpretation,” was written as an undergraduate thesis by a nascent radiologist, Dr. Ted Steinbock (Steinbock 1976).
The advantages of diagnostic imaging in paleopathologic research should be intuitively obvious. Osseous and soft tissue may be noninvasively and nondestructively imaged, preserving original specimens for research and display in a museum setting. Not only will the original material, often Egyptian mummies, be preserved for future generations of researchers, but public enthusiasm will be fostered by the knowledge that we can see what is really underneath all those wrappings.