Archaeologies of Health, Wellness, and Ability

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Archaeologies of Health, Wellness, and Ability," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Thanks to black feminist and queer theory, there is a growing awareness of the diversity and

intersectional nature of identity. In archaeology, such perspectives are allowing the voices of

underprivileged groups to become better represented in discourses of the past and encouraged

our discipline to confront racism, sexism, homophobia, and colonialism. However, one category

of identity that is perhaps less developed in archaeology is that of health and ability. Perhaps

because archaeology itself is a discipline that often demands a certain degree of physical

prowess, archaeologists rarely consider health, beyond simple demographic measures. This

session seeks to explore how communities and individuals manage health and ability. We wish

to initiate conversations into how healthiness/wellness are defined, experienced, and embodied

by people within a society. How have those in the past and archaeologists in the present

experience limitations due to neuro-divergence & learning disabilities, mental illness, physical

disability, or chronic illness? How can we observe health, wellness, and ability archaeologically

and use this to better represent the ill and differently-abled? How do archaeologists with different

physical or health constraints overcome biases in a physically demanding discipline? We

encourage session participants to share both archaeological and contemporary examples.