Continued Advances in Method and Theory for Commingled Remains

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Continued Advances in Method and Theory for Commingled Remains" at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In 2012, Kathryn Baustian, Debra Martin, and Anna Osterholtz organized a session at the SAAs on commingled human remains in archaeological contexts, partly to get people in the same room talking about assemblages of human remains long thought to be data-poor and often relegated to appendices in site reports. In the 12 years since that session, a tremendous amount of research has been conducted highlighting the importance of commingled remains to overall site interpretation. Commingling, no matter how it occurs, tells a significant story about mortuary activity, site formation, and/or the changing curatorial standards within which we work as bioarchaeologists. In this session, we highlight methodological rigor and new viewpoints on how the interpretation of commingled remains brings depth and breadth to the understanding of lived experience in the past through methodological advances and/or richly nuanced interpretation into the actions that lead to commingling.