Commingled Stories, Embodied Inequalities: An Historical Bioarchaeology of the Huntington Irish

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.

The George S. Huntington anatomical collection is comprised of the skeletal remains of some 3600 immigrants and U.S.-born individuals. These persons—who are now collectively named for the doctor who collected them—were gathered from institutions, hospitals, and almshouses around New York City between 1893 and 1921. They were dissected as part of anatomical instruction at New York’s College of Physicians and Surgeons and subsequently became part of the doctor’s comparative skeletal collection. These skeletal remains provide insights into health and inequality in the nineteenth century. By treating the laboratory space in which they are currently stored as a mortuary site, I excavate and articulate these individuals’ various traces—archival, skeletal, and material. This historical bioarchaeological approach allows for the examination of the ways in which the treatment of these individuals in life and in death sheds light on the effects of inequalities over the life course. Such insights have important implications for how we conceptualize poverty, for how we define ethical practices in archaeology, and for our understandings of long-term histories of inequality embodied in immigrant bodies.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23368