Inside and Out: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Injured Bodies in Industrializing London (1760–1901)

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Skin and Bone examines the embodied experience of injury, accidents, and interpersonal violence of over 65,000 Londoners during the Industrial Revolution (1760–1901). Osteoarchaeological datasets from the Museum of London Centre for Human Bioarchaeology in combination with contemporary hospital (Middlesex, Royal London, Guy’s, St. Thomas’) and criminal justice records (England and Wales Criminal Registers, Millbank Prison Register, Home Office Prison Licenses, Metropolitan Police Habitual Criminal Register) from London, which note age, sex, and occupation alongside many bodily features (such as wounds and scars), provide a means of accessing and contextualizing embodied experiences. This project has generated an open-access multivariate database and innovative approaches to studying and visualizing the historic body. Uniting bioarchaeological, historical, and digital humanities datasets, this project explores the possibilities of studying the impact of industrialization and urbanization on the human body. This work is centered within the ecological model of violence, emphasizing the interconnections between individual, relationship, community, and society. Layering the osteoarchaeological and text-based data sources highlights how violence is literally embodied, as healed (e.g., remodeled fracture trauma; a fading scar) and unhealed (e.g., bones showing evidence of healing processes; fresh wounds requiring hospital treatment) injuries are considered within individual bodies and across the broader sample.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38546.0