Archeology, Disability, Healthcare, and the Weimar Joint Sanatorium for Tuberculosis

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Health, Wellness, and Ability" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Social expectations regarding normative abilities, behavior, and bodies have changed through time. Archaeology lends itself well to the study of disability because social expectations about normative ability and behavior are embedded into the built environment, landscape, artifacts, material culture and daily practices. Archaeologists are well situated to study and destabilize these norms by investigating the ways in which normative expectations varied over time. Additionally, locating the body in buildings, landscapes, artifacts and other forms of material culture can assist in separating the study of disability and the body from a humanist concept of individuality. Archaeology can also be a mode of exploring the intersection between embodied experiences, agency, and identification, and archaeological research into embodied and social experiences of disability can inform current debates about accessibility and healthcare inequality. This paper presents approaches to studying disability in the past using examples from the Weimar Joint Sanatorium for tuberculosis in Placer County, California.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Archaeologies of Health, Wellness, and Ability   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23025