The Red Shoes: Toward a Materialized Relationship Between the Living and the Dead

Critiques of how effectively physical anthropology and archaeology have worked together to produce a more theoretically contextualized bioarchaeology argue generally for the need to incorporate social theory (Goldstein 2006; Sofaer 2006; Blakely 1977; Buikstra 1977). With regard to historical bioarchaeology, Buikstra (2000), among others, argues for recognition of the complexity introduced by social, economic and ideational factors(see also Blakey 2001; Perry 2007). Lack of integrating biological and archaeological data has hampered historic cemetery research, and incorporating multiple lines of evidence is certainly the implied goal of a bioarchaeological approach. This session considers the integrative analyses of material culture and biological data that can be used to explore the ways in which material objects acquire meaning through practice in an historic mortuary setting and how such objects create materialized relationships between the living and the dead.