embodiment (Other Keyword)
1-19 (19 Records)
Dress matters. More than purely functional, the color, fabric, and fit of clothing, along with adornments, posture, and manners, convey information on status, gender, bodily health, religious beliefs, and even sexual preferences. Colonial peoples created a language of appearance to express their bodies and identities through unique combinations of locally-made and imported clothing and adornment. In this paper, I discuss the active manipulations and combinations of clothing and adornment in...
Clandestine, Ephemeral, Anonymous? Myths and Actualities of the Intimate Economy of a 19th-Century Boston Brothel (2017)
Although prostitution was illegal in 19th-century Boston, it was not carried out in secret, nor did it produce so ephemeral a trace as to render it invisible in the historical and archaeological record. Study of material remains from the 27/29 Endicott Street brothel demonstrates the multi-layered realities of brothel life as the residents of the brothel developed strategies for coping with being purchased for ostensibly intimate acts that were in fact commercial transactions. These strategies...
"Cures after Doctors Fail": A Four-Field Approach to Medicated Pain Relief in Early 20th Century America (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Constructing Bodies and Persons: Health and Medicine in Historic Social Context" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In this paper, I take a four field approach to medicated pain relief in early 20th century America, analyzing the way personal narratives of health and illness were created and experienced through pain relief testimonials and marketing techniques. Medical and biological anthropologists have studied the...
Defining and divining the healthy body: materialities of body and wellness in the 18th century Spanish New World (2015)
This paper explores the intersections of health, religion, race, and dress; how theories of disease and illness in the eighteenth century intersected with Spanish imperial understandings regarding race and dress of colonizer and colonized and culturally-distinct medicinal practices for treating physical and spiritual sicknesses. Colonial empires reshaped and redefined colonial bodies: physical and spiritual care, social and sexual interactions, and dress and language were just a few of the...
Dissection as Social Process: Anatomical Products in the Nineteenth-century United States (2016)
In the nineteenth-century United States, the number of medical schools increased significantly, which in turn spurred efforts to ensure a steady supply of bodies for gross anatomy courses. Supply was largely derived from marginalized groups such as African Americans and almshouse inmates. Based on available archaeological and skeletal evidence this paper approaches dissection as a multivalent process that transformed participants in radically different ways. For the medical student, the process...
Embodied rock art motifs in far west Texas and northern South Africa (2017)
In this paper, I consider embodied rock art motifs in two rock art regions: far west Texas and northern South Africa. By employing the tools of embodiment theory, certain motifs in both regions can usefully be seen as expressions of how indigenous ontologies were perceived, how things were, and how identities were tied to physical beings and manifestations of physical beings. As with research on ritualistic ontologies and the process of making rock art, embodiment theory can help us overcome the...
The Embodiment of Identity: an Archaeological Perspective on Race and Self-Representation in18th -century Virginia (2017)
Institutionalized slavery helped to create the concept of race in the American mind and forced people into new social categories based on superficial bodily characteristics. These new social categories resulted in the formation of identities that were continuously negotiated, reinforced or challenged through daily bodily practices of self-presentation that included ways of dress, adornment and physical action. Because slavery was defined on the body, an embodiment approach to plantation...
Fire and smoke in Postclassic Petén: human remains, deity effigies, and codices (2015)
Fire and smoke were fundamental ritual forces in Mesoamerican religious worldview. Found in varied contexts (funerary processing, animation ceremonies, and desecratory rituals), fire and smoke were applied to multiple media (human bodies, architecture, and ceramics). In the Postclassic (AD 950–1524) Maya lowlands, burning both processed honored ancestors’ remains and violated enemies’ remains. Ceramic incense burners with deity effigies were used to burn resins to communicate with supernaturals....
A Hands-on Past: 3D Replication as a Form of Archaeological Engagement (2018)
Let’s face it: 3D printing is cool. It is also, thanks to a push from many different sectors, much more affordable, flexible, and accessible through college campuses and even city libraries. This presentation will focus on a recent project at the University of Denver where anthropologists teamed with the engineering and computer science school to take advantage of our different suites of knowledge. Together we crafted curriculum for students from many different academic backgrounds to employ...
Migrant Invisibility in the Industrial Built Environment (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Archaeology/Architecture", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The industrial-era migration experience has long been a focus for historical archaeologists and historians of architecture alike. But how can methods from both archaeology and architecture be used to illuminate ethnic identity when typologies fail and standard built environment patterns prove invisible? This paper presents a work-in-progress...
Miraculous Bodies: Archives of Medieval Impairment (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper Bodies: Excavating Archival Tissues and Traces", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Among the “cacophony” of medieval bodies (Walker Bynum 1995) were those affected by physical impairments. The embodied social and physical realities of those living with impairment might be glimpsed through different material traces. Hagiographies and chronicles provide textual descriptions of impaired bodies, most often in...
Significantly Differentiated Figures: understanding difference through the construction of personhood in the southern African San idiom (2017)
Within the corpus of San rock art in the South African Drakensberg mountains is a category of highly embellished, oversized anthropomorphic figures termed Significantly Differentiated Figures (SDFs). Such images have previously been interpreted as San ritual specialists' conceptualisation of themselves, in metaphor, as a result of the arrivals of African farmers and European colonists. This paper, drawing on new data gathered during surveys of the Matatiele region in the Eastern Cape, South...
Smoke and Spirit: Exploring Bodily and Sensual Concerns at Early Harvard College (2018)
Identity, a central concept in contemporary historical archaeology theory, has been enlivened by recent scholarship that is mindful of bodily experience. Some scholars emphasize embodiment, others explore further sensory dimensions of historical identities embodied in human and material interactions, including emotion, memory, sensuality, and nostalgia, to explore the sensing body in the material world through sound, smell, touch, sexuality, and emotion. The intent in focusing on sensual...
Sound, health, and spirituality in the colonial Lower Mississippi Valley (2016)
Wellness and spirituality are rooted in the body. Bodies and material culture are intertwined through practices of healing; ways to navigate bodily and spiritual health in daily life. In colonial Lower Mississippi Valley, European-introduced diseases and new forms of material culture greatly impacted Native American communities and their practices of healing. Some of these stories are familiar to us: the changes brought about by access to new materials, new tools, and new kinds of clothing. Yet,...
Using DAACS to Explore Embodied Identities: Potential Approaches (2015)
DAACS has proven to be a valuable resource for quantitative studies that explore patterns across sites associated with slavery. However, its analytical potential is not limited to purely statistical applications that utilize abundant artifact types such as ceramics, because the rigorous, highly standardized cataloging protocol used in DAACS captures minute details of artifacts. This makes it a useful resource for the qualitative study of more variable artifacts, such as objects of personal...
Visuospatial integration: perspective in cognitive archaeology (2015)
Cognitive archaeology is based on the assumption that behaviors can reveal cognitive capacities, and that archaeology can provide inferences on behaviors. Additional information comes from the fossil record (paleoneurology) and from methods in neuroscience (neuroarchaeology). Visuospatial functions can be investigated from all these perspectives. In archaeology, visuospatial capacity can be investigated in terms of space and geometry according to information on tools, tool use, and space...
Wares of Venus: The sensoriality of sex for purchase at a 19th-century Boston brothel (2018)
The archaeological examination of brothel spaces has expanded significantly in recent decades to include compelling interpretations of these sites within the framework of embodiment, sexuality, and urbanization. By incorporating the sensory experiences of the individuals living, working, and seeking entertainment in places of prostitution, archaeologists have an opportunity to examine these spaces in terms of the fantasy experiences being sold. In terms of this paper’s case study, the 27/29...
Wearing Culture: Dress and Regalia in Early Mesoamerica and Central America (2014)
Wearing Culture connects scholars of divergent geographical areas and academic fields-from archaeologists and anthropologists to art historians-to show the significance of articles of regalia and of dressing and ornamenting people and objects among the Formative period cultures of ancient Mesoamerica and Central America. Documenting the elaborate practices of costume, adornment, and body modification in Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Oaxaca, the Soconusco region of southern...
What’s in a Button?: Sartorial Artifacts, Colonial Journeys, and the Archaeological Imagination (2019)
This is an abstract from the "One of a Kind: Approaching the Singular Artifact and the Archaeological Imagination" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Archaeological objects related to clothing wield an affective power derived from their inherent closeness to the historical body, to the life of a particular individual. Despite being quotidian and even mass-produced, such artifacts become singular by virtue of their role in practices of embodiment....