Abstract:This article seeks to expose the "fallacies of synchrony" that often accompany the analysis of human remains. In approaching a cemetery, for example, we all too easily think of the bodies there as a "community," even when they belong to different generations or geographic contexts. This simple point has major implications, especially for the bioarchaeology of urban landscapes. Here, chronologically disparate elements accumulate in vast mélanges, offering innumerable examples of the "non-contemporaneity of the … Show more
“…While biological anthropologists do make use of these skeletons to estimate demographics, they are typically used in the classroom to gain the basic skills of anatomical identification that, ironically, are applied to better understand the life experiences of past people excavated from more valued archeological settings. In homogenizing these bodies as simply South Asian “teaching skeletons”, we are all guilty of collapsing not just two centuries of diverse histories and biographies 30 but also willfully losing all aspects of their social identity and humanity.…”
Millions of skeletal remains from South Asia were exported in red markets (the underground economy of human tissues/organs) to educational institutions globally for over a century. It is time to recognize the personhood of the people who were systematically made into anatomical objects and acknowledge the scientific racism in creating and continuing to use them.
“…While biological anthropologists do make use of these skeletons to estimate demographics, they are typically used in the classroom to gain the basic skills of anatomical identification that, ironically, are applied to better understand the life experiences of past people excavated from more valued archeological settings. In homogenizing these bodies as simply South Asian “teaching skeletons”, we are all guilty of collapsing not just two centuries of diverse histories and biographies 30 but also willfully losing all aspects of their social identity and humanity.…”
Millions of skeletal remains from South Asia were exported in red markets (the underground economy of human tissues/organs) to educational institutions globally for over a century. It is time to recognize the personhood of the people who were systematically made into anatomical objects and acknowledge the scientific racism in creating and continuing to use them.
“…Though it has been pursued experimentally in historical research (e.g. life on a Victorian street in Oxford, Erben 1996), collective biographical approaches based on the integration of multiple strands of archaeological data to reconstruct life histories are relatively recent (Novak 2017; Robb 2019; see also Fiorato et al . 2000; Stirland 2000; Novak 2008; Geber 2015).…”
Section: Bioarchaeology and Biographical Approaches: Materials And Me...mentioning
Medieval hospitals were founded to provide charity, but poverty and infirmity were broad and socially determined categories and little is known about the residents of these institutions and the pathways that led them there. Combining skeletal, isotopic and genetic data, the authors weave a collective biography of individuals buried at the Hospital of St John the Evangelist, Cambridge. By starting with the physical remains, rather than historical expectations, they demonstrate the varied life courses of those who were ultimately buried in the hospital's cemetery, illustrating the diverse faces of medieval poverty and institutional notions of charity. The findings highlight the value of collective osteobiography when reconstructing the social landscapes of the past.
“…1820–1850). His excavated remains, along with those of at least 197 commingled others, would eventually make their way to my lab in Syracuse, New York (Novak, 2017a). Figure 1.Burial 8, (a) during excavation of Vault III, and (b) schematic of elements present (white) identified in the lab during analysis.…”
Archaeological bodies and their afflictions have multiplied in recent years, along with the specialists who study them. The result is a cascade of data, much of it difficult to reconcile. I argue that variable enactments of disease, rather than reflecting an epistemological disconnect or difference in scale, engender ontological gaps. To pursue these malleable matters, I trace the proliferation of “cancer” from the Spring Street Presbyterian Church burial vaults (1820–1850) in Manhattan. To explore the struggles involved in making many things one, I consider emergent multiplicities of this “disease” within specialists’ laboratories, archival records, and the writing process. Rather than force these different cancers to cohere, or make one “win” based on disciplinary domain (science/humanities) or hierarchy of substance (bone/paper), I rely on Stengers’s (2018) ecology of partial connects. The outcome is not a rubric of knowledge gained, but a sketchbook of lessons learned with bodies multiple along the way.
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