From Individual Bodies to Bodies of Social Theory: Exploring Ontologies of the Americas

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "From Individual Bodies to Bodies of Social Theory: Exploring Ontologies of the Americas," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Since its inception, bioarcheology has been an essential approach to reconstructing otherwise inaccessible details of past human behavior. Recent years have seen an increasing interest in re-engaging with social theories prompting some to call for a new "Social Bioarchaeology". However, as the fields of mortuary archaeology and bioarchaeology have grown, those past engagements have faded in favor of the more routine application of techniques. Interestingly, while centered on corporeal remains of humans, mortuary and bioarchaeologists have only recently explored the nature of varied emic notions or ontologies of the body. The participants in this symposium explore worldviews across the Americas using non-Western ontologies of corporeality to inspire new approaches in bioarchaeology and social theories of the body.