Treating Material Culture Data and Biological Data Equally: An Example from the Alameda Stone Cemetery in Tucson, AZ

Summary

In the analysis of historic cemeteries, there are many instances, especially in recent years, of biological data taking precedence over data derived from material culture. In part, this is because analysts can often assign a probability to a biological decision, and material culture decisions do not come with specific probabilities. However, regardless of the nature of the data, all lines of evidence should be considered valid and significant. In the excavation and analysis of the Alameda Stone Cemetery in Tucson, we treated each line of evidence as having equal value, and found that this approach resulted in complementary and significant decisions in terms of cultural affinity and in terms of conclusions about the nature of the cemetery. Using what we learned, I outline how different lines of evidence can be used collaboratively to come to a better and more realistic set of conclusions about the nature of a historic cemetery.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2018   •
• The Red Shoes: Toward a Materialized Relationship Between the Living and the Dead

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 335