Grave Anatomy: Dissecting Bodies of Meaning in Historical North American Burials

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Materialities of (Un)Freedom: Examining the Material Consequences of Inequality within Historical Archaeology", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, changes in philosophical and medical knowledge resulted in new relationships between the living and the dead in the Western world. This resulted in new strategies of deciding who was part of a community and how best to achieve ontological security in a fundamentally changing society. Medical processes of anatomization challenged this security and reinforced inequality between classes and social groups. In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, agentful actors on both sides of the interaction negotiated these challenges through mortuary ritual and material reciprocity. To explore this behavior, an archaeological method of determining personhood in burial was developed. This paper presents this research, exploring the construction and destruction of the social person through both anatomical practices and the mortuary treatment of the body. By examining patterns in how bodies are created, recreated, and unmade within historical and social contexts, the material interactions that drive mortuary inequality are revealed.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023   •
• Materialities of (Un)Freedom: Examining the Material Consequences of Inequality within Historical Archaeology

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow