Approaches to the Archaeology of Health: Sewers, Snakebites, and Skeletons

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Approaches to the Archaeology of Health: Sewers, Snakebites, and Skeletons" at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

What is “health” and how do societies promote and create it? The WHO states “health” is defined not just “by the absence of illness, but is a state of wellness, physically, mentally and socially.” However, health is not a static concept and varies widely within and among cultures and settings. Moreover, health is negotiated between individuals, families, and communities, and between human and nonhuman populations. How can we examine conception(s) of health archaeologically? What can we say about health practices on an individual, neighborhood, and community level? And how can we investigate variations in health by race, class, gender, age, and species? Typically, archaeological approaches to health focus on identifying disease, malnutrition, or wounds through osteological analysis, and increasingly through aDNA. However, we also seek papers that examine other aspects of health such as preventative measures, wellness promoting activities, and healing. Topics could include water infrastructure, sanitation systems, spatial planning of hazardous activities, the construction of living environments, fire prevention, zoonotic outbreaks, trash disposal, the use of medicines, and healing practices, as well as bioarchaeological studies. Our goal is to make full use of the archaeological record to examine how health was conceived of, experienced, and enacted in the past.