Life Course as Slow Bioarchaeology: Recovering the Lives of Laborers and Immigrants in an Anatomical Collection

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Slow Archaeology + Fast Capitalism: Hard Lessons and Future Strategies from Urban Archaeology" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

I consider the potentials of a slow bioarchaeology of the Huntington Anatomical collection, focusing on the collection’s Irish immigrants, who lived and worked in New York City in the nineteenth century. Taking the skeleton as a record of experience, life course approaches interpret evidence of health, activity, and diet across individuals’ entire lives. This brings together multiple lines of evidence—skeletal, archival, and material—to disentangle the processes shaping the individuals' bodies and experiences, from the accelerating pace of urbanization, to the tempos of capitalist labor, to the daily rhythms of everyday, embodied practice. While such an undertaking may be “slow” methodologically, it also enters the ethical space of slow approaches as it seeks to recover the lived experiences of individuals exploited in life and anatomized and anonymized in death. I therefore consider how the tenets of slow archaeology might be applied to ethical (bio)archaeological studies of the dead.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Slow Archaeology + Fast Capitalism: Hard Lessons and Future Strategies from Urban Archaeology   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 731