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Introduction: It is often said that the best way to know a country is through its people, and the same may hold true of the past. This chapter draws out aspects of the lifeways, identity and agency of the small, North Vietnamese, Neolithic community of Man Bac by examining the experience of one individual in some detail. To do this, it positions inferences from a single set of human remainsalbeit a very special set of remainsagainst the backdrop of broader archaeological discoveries. Indeed, our aim is to use this case study as a mechanism for situating the osteobiographical analysis of one individual within site-specific, population-level analyses, and to investigate how one can use such combined data sets to shed new light on the human condition at this one site at a particular point in time. Man Bac Burial 9 (M9) was a young man who lived to around 25 years of age, but for approximately the last 10 years of his existence suffered a quadriplegia which rendered him completely immobile from the waist down, and left him with, at best, only limited upper body mobility. This extreme level of disability required dedicated, skilled and resource-intensive care to enable his survival from early adolescence through to adulthood. Unpacking what was likely involved in the provision of this supportfrom the decision to care for M9 in the first place, through the elements of the care provided, to the direct and indirect demands of the caregiving process itselfallows new insights into certain of the cultural, social and economic practices that existed within a subsistence society dating back almost 4000 years. These insights serve to confirm, expandand sometimes modify or challengeconclusions reached through more traditional archaeological analyses and, in the course of doing this, provide a more rounded and distinctively <i>human</i> picture of life and times in early Man Bac. The case of M9 has already been well documented. In 2009, Oxenham et al. described his remains and provided a differential diagnosis of the signs of pathology evidenced in almost every skeletal element recovered. At this time, the authors briefly noted that the obvious severity of disease impact would have necessitated community support. In 2011, Tilley and Oxenham addressed the question of M9s need for and receipt of care directly, using a bioarchaeology of care approach (Tilley 2012, 2015) in assessing the likely range and extent of clinical and functional impacts of M9s condition, and identifying the basic components of the health-related care required for him to survive in the face of these. This second paper (Tilley and Oxenham 2011) also discussed some implication of this caregiving for understanding socioeconomic practice and social relationships in Man Bac. The current chapter builds on these latter observations. The first section introduces M9, recapitulating earlier work and focusing on the physical evidence of M9s remains and the inferences drawn from this. The following section summarises the archaeological and osteological evidence to present a synopsis of what is known, and what is surmised, about M9s contemporary environment. The final section attempts to illustrate how the understanding of M9s needs and his experience of care that has been derived from bioarchaeology of care analysis may be used, in conjunction with more conventionally derived archaeological and bioarchaeological data from the Man Bac site and its cemetery population. To address questions ranging from the mundane to the metaphysical. Because the bioarchaeology of care provides the conceptual and methodological framework for the proposals contained in this chapter, a brief outline of what this consists of is necessary. The bioarchaeology of care is a contextualized, case study-based approach for identifying, inferring and interpreting the experience of disability and the receipt of health-related care within their corresponding lifeways setting. The applied methodology comprises four sequential stages of analysis, each building on the last: (i) description and diagnosis
(ii) establishing disability impact and determining the case for care
(iii) deriving a model of care
and (iv) interpreting the broader implications of the care given (Tilley 2012, 2015). The Index of Care (www.indexofcare.org), a freely available online instrument developed as a non-prescriptive guide to bioarchaeology of care analysis (Tilley and Cameron 2014), was used in preparing this chapter.
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