Patients and Practitioners: Archaeological and Ethnohistorical Approaches to Ancient Medicine and Healing Practices in the Americas

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Medicine and Healing in the Americas: Archaeological and Ethnohistorical Perspectives" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Medicine, health care, and healing comprise a sub-set of cultural practices that are under-represented in archaeological work in the Americas. In other parts of the world, rich textual traditions consisting of medical treatises or surgical manuals combined with archaeological evidence in the form of metal implements or tools have contributed to the rising popularity of an archaeology of medicine. Such textual traditions do exist, to an extent, in the Americas, often the focus of colonial or ethnohistorical work which is subsequently used by archaeologists to interpret archaeological data. However, there is much more that archaeologists can be saying about medicine and healing in the past, particularly from the perspective of material culture, or how these practices might have interfaced with the human body. Collaboration between archaeologists and ethnohistorians on this topic has the potential to truly paint a holistic picture. This paper will examine the history of the study of medicine and healing in the Americas from the perspectives of archaeology and ethnohistory and discuss some of the ways in which archaeological data from osteology, paleoethnobotany, archaeometry, and other methodologies can contribute to the study of medicine and healing in the Americas.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Medicine and Healing in the Americas: Archaeological and Ethnohistorical Perspectives   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25291