New directions in the archaeology of medicine: deep-time approaches to human-animal-environmental care

Abstract

The maintenance of human health and the mechanisms by which this is achievedthrough medicine, medical intervention and care-givingare fundamentals of human societies. However, within archaeological discourse, investigations of medicine and care have tended to examine the obvious and explicit manifestations of medical treatment as discrete practices that take place within specific settings, rather than as broader indicators of medical worldviews and health beliefs. In terms of human remains analysis, discussions have generally focused on the identification and diagnosis of palaeopathologies (e.g. Roberts and Manchester [2007]; Grauer [2012]) or unusual examples of surgical intervention (Mogle and Zias 1995;Bernardini et al. 2012;Becker 2014). Material studies have centred on medical implements (Baker 2004; Jackson 1997) with less attention given to investigating the less tangible pharmacopoeia.Matczakm and Chudziak (2018, this volume) provide an excellent summary of the key developments, approaches and sources concerning 'medical archaeology'. As is made clear, the research area is advancing fast, with a large number of high-quality publications being produced in recent years, including the British Archaeological Reports (BAR) Studies in Early Medicine Series that followed from a number of workshops and conferences from the late 1990s. In 2013 Baker published her important Archaeology of Medicine in the Greco-Roman World, and 2017 saw the publication of ground-breaking volumes on archaeological approaches to care (Powell, Southwell-Wright, and Gowland 2017;Tilley and Schrenk 2017). Nevertheless, the research area is still nascent, especially when compared with the intersecting discourse brought together within the Medical Humanities, including the History of Medicine and Medical Anthropology. Both of these fields are large, well-defined and well-funded, with their own research degrees and academic journals (notably Journal of Medical Humanities, Medical History, Medical Anthropology, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences). This volume sets out to make the case that there is potential for archaeology to develop its own subfield along similar lines, as our discipline has the ability to improve diachronic understanding of medicine and healthcare and to contribute to a range of emergent fields such as community and public health (Deprez and Thomas 2016), environmental and planetary health (

Environmentalism as Religio-Medical ‘Worldview': New Synergies Between the Palaeoenvironmental Humanities, Ecological Public Health, and Climate-Change Activism

“…As discussed later, a similar recognition is at the heart of emerging ecological public health and 'exposome' discourse (Miller & Jones 2014), aimed at highlighting the porosity between humans and their environment. Further, the question of how traditional definitions of sacred/pure v. polluted spaces, objects or foodstuffs correspond with modern medical and toxicological notions of cleanliness and 'hygiene' v. pollution deserves further archaeological investigation (Shaw 2016a;Shaw & Sykes 2019). This is especially important in the light of Riede's (this volume: 18) comments about the potential dangers of fixing the onset of the Anthropocene exclusively in the nuclear age, with the result being that the 'pre-1950s past [is relegated] to some politically largely irrelevant "pre-Anthropocene"'.…”

“…Hence the revisionist picture of Hinduism as a distinctly anti-environmentalist tradition, which, through a belief in the Ganges' inherent purifying qualities, is able to transcend (and ignore) the 'reality' of a worsening environmental crisis. And yet there are important convergences between traditional and modern constructs of landscape and human wellbeing that offer useful scope for future environmental remediation and for mediating between the realms of superstition to those that foster constructive dialogue between traditional and modern religio-medical worldviews (Shaw 2016a;Yeh 2016;Yeh & Coggins 2014;Shaw & Sykes 2019).…”

“…Such attitudes reflect a dislocation from scholarship on religion-asworldview that underscores major dietary trends and attitudes towards the body, and overlaps closely with medical and environmental worldviews (Shaw & Sykes 2019). Other more nuanced accounts (Morrison 2016) refer to the 'ritual' status of rice while at the same time overlooking the highly divergent attitudes, both within and between religious communities and castes, towards different grains and their physical and 'energetic' impact on the body, with precise classifications and taxonomies that regulate the production and consumption of different foodstuffs varying according to different religious contexts (e.g.…”

“…The growing interest in 'environment and wellbeing' offers particular scope here for bridging some of the aforementioned methodological and theoretical divisions between the bio-and environmental sciences, and their humanities-orientated counterparts (MacBride-Stewart et al 2019;Shaw & Sykes 2019) including various initiatives in the realm of 'ecological public health' (Morris & Saunders 2017). A key aim of the latter is to understand and address the relationship between environment and human health and wellbeing 'on vastly extended temporal and spatial scales' (Morris & Saunders 2017), with this diachronic emphasis offering obvious scope for archaeological input.…”

“…Others (Baker 2018) have examined Roman concepts of health in relation to air quality, albeit framed predominantly from the perspective of well being rather than toxicology and environmental health (Shaw & Sykes 2019). Such discussions can be situated usefully within historical scholarship on gardens and 'pleasure groves' in antiquity as places of healing (Ali 2003) as well as modern public health discourse on ecotherapy, and 'nature' and wellbeing (Burls 2007), with the primary emphasis being on the psychological, sensory and experiential benefits of nature immersion, especially in childhood.…”