Individual and Collective Insights Lost through Commingling

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Continued Advances in Method and Theory for Commingled Remains" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Commingling of skeletal remains is largely acknowledged to occur in response to taphonomic factors in situ or secondary practices post-interment. However, data is frequently lost from commingling in museum collections due to curatorial practices. Here, commingling through curation and its ramifications are explored in an Egyptian legacy skeletal collection, Lisht. Skeletal remains from Lisht were excavated beginning in 1906 and, starting in 1908, were curated by the National Museum of Natural History. This skeletal collection represents one of the first collections Dr. Hrdlička curated as the Physical Anthropology curator and exemplifies the ramifications of commingling through his curatorial practices. A comparison between archival and osteological datasets from Lisht shows that while information is lost at the excavation and documentation stage of fieldwork, there is precipitous data loss at the curation stage. A minimum of 585 individuals were identified; however, postcranial elements were associated with only 51 individuals. During curation, skeletal elements were separated by bone type, removing the potential for analyzing distributions of an individual’s features. These ramifications are compounded by the loss of associated mortuary contexts, for which 48% of tombs recovered with skeletal remains have lost skeletal data, further limiting narratives on mortuary experiences.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• Continued Advances in Method and Theory for Commingled Remains

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38472.0