Queer (Re)Collections: How Anatomical Collections Obscure Identities

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Future Is Fluid...and So Was the Past: Challenging the 'Normative' in Archaeological Interpretations" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Anatomical skeletal collections have often been framed as encompassing "the poorest of the poor" or the most marginalized of a given society. This framework has shaped the way that these collections have been studied for decades. A queered understanding of how these collections were formed and who is actually encompassed within them reveals a much more nuanced understanding. These collections stand at the intersections of race, class, and gender and therefore an intersectional approach must be used in order to question the assumptions we hold about them. Using the George S. Huntington Anatomical Collection as an example, this paper takes a queerly-situated approach to understand the ways that anatomists, medical professionals, and now bioarchaeologists obscure the identities of the dead.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Future Is Fluid...and So Was the Past: Challenging the 'Normative' in Archaeological Interpretations   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23304