“Interesting Characters Find Graves in the Potter’s Field”: The Value of Storytelling in Historical Bioarchaeology

Summary

This is an abstract from the "There and Back Again: Celebrating the Career and Ongoing Contributions of Patricia B. Richards" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Dr. Patricia Richards had an indelible impact on these married authors’ time as UWM doctoral candidates. Her support as the former’s dissertation advisor was unfailing, and she provided a useful anthropological perspective for the latter’s English creative writing committee. In this paper, her multifaceted contributions and our academic worlds collide as we explore the value of humanistic and data-driven narratives in archaeology. Guided by Dr. Richards' passion for revealing personal stories forgotten by written history and influenced by scholars known for their storytelling—including Deetz, Praetzellis, and particularly Spector and her seminal publication, “What this Awl Means”—we first introduce what we know from archival and archaeological data about the unusual life, death, and burial of 24-year-old James Jones. The inevitable research gaps are then filled through a fictive narrative meant to enrich our understanding of the complex agents and sociocultural factors that resulted in his pauper’s grave. While guided by data, this narrative is also the product of imagination. As Deetz argued, archaeologists are storytellers; it is our responsibility to communicate beyond the ivory tower not only our often tedious data, but the significance of unknown and unknowable individuals whose lives form the foundations of our work.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• There and Back Again: Celebrating the Career and Ongoing Contributions of Patricia B. Richards   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 40279.0