Bioarchaeological Analyses and Bodies: New Ways of Knowing Anatomical and Archaeological Skeletal Collections

253 Pages·2018·5.78 MB·English

by  Pamela K. Stone (eds.)

Bioarchaeology and Social Theory
Series Editor: Debra L. Martin
Pamela K. Stone Editor
Bioarchaeological
Analyses and
Bodies
New Ways of Knowing Anatomical and
Archaeological Skeletal Collections
Bioarchaeology and Social Theory
Series editor
Debra L. Martin
Professor of Anthropology
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Las Vegas, NV, USA
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/11976
Pamela K. Stone
Editor
Bioarchaeological
Analyses and Bodies
New Ways of Knowing Anatomical
and Archaeological Skeletal Collections
Editor
Pamela K. Stone
School of Critical Social Inquiry
Hampshire College
Amherst, MA, USA
Bioarchaeology and Social Theory
ISBN 978-3-319-71113-3 ISBN 978-3-319-71114-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71114-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017962329
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This volume is dedicated to new ways of
understanding the experiences of the
individuals who have given their lives so that
we may explore the mosaic of human
difference and resiliency in the past, present,
and future.
Foreword
There is nothing bioarchaeology-as-usual with this edited volume, the 11th to come
out in the series Bioarchaeology and Social Theory. The authors were tasked with
doing some heavy self-reflection and translational work regarding the construction
of knowledge in the area of skeletal analysis not only in archaeological remains but
also from medical skeletonized remains. Authors grappled with how scientific and
medical skeletal collections were collected in the first place and how knowledge
regarding studies of those collections was circulated, utilized, and reproduced.
These chapters question the methods and underlying assumptions about how it even
came to be that early biological anthropologists, physicians, and others studied the
bones in the most decontextualized manner possible. The metaphor itself of “read-
ing” bones as “texts” that then reveal “scientific knowledge” is cross-examined. The
authors bring in social theory from the start of their projects to help guide them in
critically thinking through the assumptions and implications of research with bone
collections of all types, both here and in Europe.
In 2014, Paul Farmer characterized medical anthropology as moving ever more
toward critical approaches. In the blog, SavageMinds.Org, he wrote “That to me is
real critical anthropology: It understands political economy, it understands how
power works, it understands how embodiment happens … it understands all those
things, and is sophisticated in a way that could not have happened without many of
the tools that are unconventional in today’s anthropology.” This captures where
modern bioarchaeological scholarship is heading – toward the building of a critical
bioarchaeology. To get there, we have to have books such as this one that take the
plunge and go where bioarchaeologists have not gone before with questioning the
status quo, framing new questions, and inventing and repurposing new methods. As
well, there are many examples of utilizing sophistical social theory as part of the
process.
There are numerous themes and threads that run throughout these chapters. Each
chapter is a stand-alone study but the studies pick up and expand upon the ideas and
questions raised in all of the chapters. For example, most chapters tackled how sci-
entific information is obtained from the study of skeletal collections. To get at this,
many of the chapters go back in time to reconstruct how collections came to be and
vii
viii Foreword
which individuals were “deemed suitable” for medical or museum collections.
What many of these large skeletal collections represent are disempowered and mar-
ginalized people whose poverty and subjugation made them targets for scientific
study after their death. Each collection has a unique historical trajectory, and the
authors of these papers bring into focus those political-economic and sociocultural
factors that created what is essentially a form of structural violence. Collectors sys-
tematically targeted individuals who had no recourse either while living or after
death to provide informed consent regarding being in a study collection.
Other themes addressed in many of the chapters is the “strangeness” of using
familiar research practices on anatomical collections that are not skeletal collections
in the traditional sense of coming from cemeteries or burial excavations. Because
these collections (e.g., Cobb, Terry, Hamann Todd, Huntington) were studied largely
without any specific historical or contextual information attached to them, they
were used to produce a range of methodological standards and scientific findings.
The detachment of researchers from any knowledge about the individuals who
made up the collection permitted a form of “othering.” The chapters address the
tangled web that is the relationship between the scientist-scholars who study skel-
etal collections (whose publications and stature in the field increase) and the indi-
viduals within these collections (whose identity remains ever more invisible,
unknown, and unacknowledged).
Structural violence as a theme runs throughout most of the chapters in terms of
how it works, how racism, sexism, poverty, and other forms of subordination
become normalized through rules, laws, and codes of conduct. The chapters all
illuminate how intersectionality in a study can work, and they model how one would
go about keeping various axes of subordination (race, sex, class, economic disad-
vantage) in the analytical mix as well as exploring agency and resistance.
Debra L. Martin
Bioarchaeology and Social Theory
University of Nevada,
Las Vegas, NV, USA
Contents
1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Pamela K. Stone
Part I Anatomical (Medical) Collections
2 “Whatever Was Once Associated with him, Continues
to Bear his Stamp”: Articulating and Dissecting
George S. Huntington and His Anatomical Collection . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Aja Lans
3 Anatomical Collections as the Anthropological Other:
Some Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
Rachel Watkins
4 More Than the Sum Total of Their Parts: Restoring
Identity by Recombining a Skeletal Collection with Its Texts . . . . . . 49
Adam Netzer Zimmer
5 At the Intersections of Race, Poverty, Gender,
and Science: A Museum Mortuary for Twentieth
Century Fetuses and Infants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
Jennifer L. Muller and Margaret S. Butler
6 Recovering the Lived Body from Bodies of Evidence:
Interrogation of Diagnostic Criteria and Parameters
for Disease Ecology Reconstructed from Skeletons
Within Anatomical and Medical Anatomical Collections . . . . . . . . . . 89
Molly K. Zuckerman
ix
x Contents
Part II Archaeological Collections
7 Lives Lost: What Burial Vault Studies Reveal
About Eighteenth-Century Identities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
Douglas W. Owsley, Karin S. Bruwelheide, Kathryn G. Barca,
Susan K. Reidy, and Raquel E. Fleskes
8 ‘A Mass of Crooked Alphabets’: The Construction
and Othering of Working Class Bodies in Industrial England . . . . . . 147
Rebecca Gowland
9 From Womb to Tomb? Disrupting the Narrative
of the Reproductive Female Body . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165
Pamela K. Stone
10 Mother, Laborer, Captive, and Leader: Reassessing
the Various Roles that Females Held Among
the Ancestral Pueblo in the American Southwest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191
Ryan Harrod and Pamela K. Stone
11 A Skull’s Tale: From Middle Bronze Age Subject
to Teaching Collection “Object” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213
Madison Long and Alexis T. Boutin
12 Conclusion: Challenging the Narrative. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231
Kenneth C. Nystrom
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243