Archaeology, Disability, and Healthcare Systems in California

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Disability Wisdom for the Covid-19 Pandemic" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The Covid-19 pandemic has brought greater awareness to the relationship between identity and healthcare systems. Processes of identification have long been an important topic of study within archaeology, but while archaeologists often consider the intersection between race, gender, class, and other facets of identity, they fail to consider disability. Archaeology can be an important means for examining how concepts of disability have changed over time and continue to be negotiated in the present, and the roles that spatiality, materiality, and time play in these processes. In this paper, I discuss infectious disease and the healthcare system in relation to changing concepts of disability in California during the early twentieth century. I focus on the Weimar Joint Sanatorium for tuberculosis, and issues of mobility, containment, access and contagion. I relate these issues to contemporary approaches and reactions to the Covid-19 pandemic and draw on theory from critical disability studies.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2021   •
• Disability Wisdom for the Covid-19 Pandemic

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology