(De)Pathologizing the Past: New Perspectives on Intervention and Modification as Care in the Americas

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "(De)Pathologizing the Past: New Perspectives on Intervention and Modification as Care in the Americas" at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Considering over a decade of research on the bioarchaeology of care and disability, and a half-century of paleopathology, the prevalence of healing and care in past societies is well-established. However, (bio)archaeology has yet to reckon with the cultural assumptions that underpin the study of care, and the difficulties that these assumptions present for researchers embedded in our own historical contexts. These issues are particularly urgent for investigators in the Americas, where anthropological and medical concepts of disease were built through the colonial study of marginalized groups, whose perspectives on their own experiences of health were often misrepresented or omitted altogether. We explore these themes with a focus on bodily intervention and modification that are, could be, or have been erroneously construed as healing and care, including: cranial and dental modification (head-shaping; dental-filing, drilling, adornment, ablation), trepanation, amputation, bone-setting, psychoactive substance use, and tattooing. Specifically, we ask: what constitutes care? What is (paleo)pathological? Who and what needs to be healed? What has historically been considered pathological, but was actually considered ‘healthy’ in context—and vice versa? How might we measure care, particularly if the treated condition does not align with modern criteria of disability, and can we compare different forms of care?