Osteobiographies: Local Biologies, Embedded Bodies, and Relational Persons

Abstract

Osteobiography is an increasingly popular approach, but one that can have the effect of producing unproblematised, individualised approaches to the life course with little theoretical underpinning. In this contribution, I explore what osteobiographies represent. Rather than seeing them as the result of processes and events that happen to skeletons, osteobiographies are produced through the continuing interaction of genes, environment, culture and society over time. These four factors combine to produce osteobiographies that are individualised 'local biologies' (Lock 1993) and which are dynamic across the life course. Drawing on this interaction of the biological and the social, I argue that bone itself emerges out of social action as well as biological processes, and after death acts as a fossilisation of a personhood that is dynamic during life. This concept is drawn out through detailed analysis of the skeleton of King Richard III of England. Isotopic analysis of Richard's skeleton illustrates how his negotiation of his personhood as king caused changes in his lifestyle that altered his bone chemistry. Whilst evidence for increased consumption of high-status food and drink could be interpreted as resulting from increased access to these resources, in fact such consumption was a critical part of his approach to building and maintaining alliances. In this case, the skeleton provides a physiological record of political action.

Weathered remains: Bioarchaeology, identity, and the landscape

“…It is not just past cultures we are “seeing” when we look at skeletal remains. This is because, beyond recognizing the combination of social and biological factors that become “fossilization[s] of personhood” in skeletons (Appleby, 2019, 32), bodies are also postmortem entities whose identities are mediated by the postmortem world in which they exist. Verdery (1999, 28) perhaps put it best when she wrote, “in short, the significance of corpses has less to do with their concreteness than with how people think about them.” The identities we bring to bodies are both generated by the bodies themselves but also by us, the observers, and our preconceptions about who these individuals would have been.…”