What is It? Doing Bioarchaeology with Matter

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Future of Bioarchaeology in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

To know and to name bodies and their parts, bioarchaeologists rely on intimate encounters with material traces. At times, they closely examine the "same" objects, yet see quite different things. Understanding such difference is usually treated epistemologically. People have alternative vantage points on the same reality, and divergent interpretations are explained in terms of training, experience, or social position. Attending to difference using an epistemological approach tends to focus on the "knower" rather than the "known." Alternatively, an ontological approach involves shifting our focus from the knower to the material traces themselves and the multiple forms they can take. Rather than simply bringing different perspectives to "an object," these things are more active and in flux, enacted and altered in ecologies of people, objects, ideas, and practices. If the question "What entity?" is raised, then the ontological answer would be, in the words of Annemarie Mol (2002), "a slightly different one each time." To consider these malleable matters, I follow the proliferation of "cancer" from the Spring Street Presbyterian Church vaults (ca. 1820-1850) in Manhattan. By exploring the struggles involved in making many things one, I trace this "disease" through historic landscapes, archival records, specialists’ laboratories, and the peer-review process.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Future of Bioarchaeology in Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23123