Bioarchaeological Analyses and Bodies
Description
This volume features bioarchaeological research that interrogates the human skeleton in concert with material culture, ethnographic data and archival research. This approach provides examples of how these intersections of inquiry can be used to consider the larger social and political contexts in which people lived and the manner in which they died.
Bioarchaeologists are in a unique position to develop rich interpretations of the lived experiences of skeletonized individuals. Using their skills in multiple contexts, bioarchaeologists are also situated to consider the ethical nature and inherent humanity of the research collections that have been used because they represent deceased for whom there are records identifying them.
These collections have been the basis for generating basic information regarding the human skeletal transcript. Ironically though, these collections themselves have not been studied with the same degree of understanding and interpretation thatis applied to archaeological collections.
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Pamela K. Stone is the Director of the Foundation for Psychocultural Research-Hampshire College, Culture, Brain, and Development Program, and a senior faculty associate in the School of Critical Social Inquiry at Hampshire College, in Amherst, MA. She received her B.A. from Hampshire College (1990), and her M.A. (1995) and Ph.D. (2000) from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She would characterize herself as a broadly trained biocultural-bioarchaeologist. She began her anthropological career exploring evolutionary anthropology, and participating in research at Koobi Fora, Kenya. She then shifted to examining the ethics of skeletal analysis in the wake of the Native American Graves Repatriation and Protection legislation. She has worked at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History in the department of anthropology, and at the American Museum on Natural History. Her graduate research has included work on mortuary sites on the ArabianPeninsula, focusing on arid lands, paleopathology, and world-systems analysis. Her PhD on paleoobstetrics explored questions of interpretations and cultural bias in reading females in the past. Within this focus she examined skeletal remains from the American Southwest to consider the complex roles that women played in the past, beyond reproduction. She now focuses her work on understanding how biology is negotiated by culture at birth, and how life histories are explored through biology in death, offering ways to consider how culture narrates these stories. This type of research has shaped much of her work as she aims to illuminate patterns of morbidity and mortality for people on the margins through biological, cultural, and ethnographic information. She has applied her skeletal analysis skills to help in forensic investigations, and is a qualified expert witness. Her current work grapples with the ethical questions in the biological sciences and anthropological inquiry, with a particular focus on how inequality impacts women, children, and indigenous communities.
Content
Chapter 1: Introduction.- Part I - Anatomical (Medical) Collections.- Chapter 2: "Whatever was once associated with him, continues to bear his stamp": Articulating and Dissecting George S. Huntington and His Anatomical Collection.- Chapter 3: Anatomical collections as the Anthropological Other: Some Considerations.- Chapter 4: More Than the Sum Total of Their Parts: Restoring Identity by Recombining a Skeletal Collection with its Texts.- Chapter 5: At the Intersections of Race, Poverty, Gender, and Science: A Museum Mortuary for 20th century Fetuses and Infants.- Chapter 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.- Part II - Archaeological Collections.- Chapter 7: Lives Lost: What Burial Vault Studies Reveal about Eighteenth-Century Identities.- Chapter 8: 'A Mass of Crooked Alphabets': The Construction and Othering of Working Class Bodies in Industrial England.- Chapter 9: From Womb to Tomb? Disrupting the Narrative of the Reproductive Female Body.- Chapter 10: Mother, Laborer, Captive, and Leader: Reassessing the Various Roles that Females Held Among the Ancestral Pueblo in the American Southwest.- Chapter 11: A Skull's Tale: From Middle Bronze Age Subject to Teaching Collection "Object".- Conclusion: Challenging the narrative.