The Body Poetic: Violence, Body Processing, and Identity Formation in the Past

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Debra L. Martin" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Deb Martin’s legacy is one of exposing her students and colleagues to new theoretical models, asking everyone to contextualize bioarchaeological data within robust theoretical frameworks. Through Dr. Martin’s mentorship, I began to think of the body differently. The human body can be viewed as an artifact of cultural expression, a mechanism for social communication, a malleable substance that can be shaped to meet the needs of the living. The Poetics model developed by Whitehead has been adapted to the study of the past through both the study of violence and the study of mortuary processing. In this paper, both applications of the Poetics model will be examined through bioarchaeological case studies, combining social theory and bioarchaeology employing a biocultural model. I will examine the role of both violence and processing at Sacred Ridge (~AD 800, southwestern Colorado) and the reuse of burial space within the church at Đurđevac-Sošice (eleventh- to sixteenth-century Medieval Croatia). These case studies span time and space, showing the relationship of the living and the dead and how the dead can be manipulated and processed to suit the needs of the living.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Debra L. Martin   •
• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32116