Who was Maria Grann? Balancing Archives of Narratives and Facts of a Contested Sámi(?) Skull

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper Bodies: Excavating Archival Tissues and Traces", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

One of the late nineteenth-century skulls in the anatomical collection at Lund University (Sweden) belongs to a middle adult woman (28-45 years of age); according to the archival documentation (including writing on the skull) she was a 28-year-old Sámi woman named Maria Grann. Media reports in Sweden have generally disseminated inaccurate narratives and outright factual fabrications relating to this skull, for the purpose of creating controversy and upset. The identity of Maria Grann is not possible to confirm from church records or other archives, and considering that other recorded identities of skeletons in the anatomical collection have been proven wrong, aDNA and isotope analyses are—alongside macromorphological analysis and historical research—applied to seek to illuminate her provenance and ultimately reveal her identity. But what is identity? What constitutes a reliable source to find this out from? Whose narrative is being told? And why does all this matter?

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023   •
• Paper Bodies: Excavating Archival Tissues and Traces

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow