Addressing Structural Violence Through the Untold Life Histories of Marginalized Individuals Buried in San Francisco’s City Cemetery

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Life and Death in the San Francisco Bay: Multi-Disciplinary Approaches to Historic Lifeways", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Construction activity at the Legion of Honor Museum in the 1990s uncovered more than 900 burials from the former City Cemetery in northwest San Francisco. Bones from human burials that exhibited pathological conditions were accessioned at the San Francisco Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (SFOCME) and subsequently became the SFOCME collection. The individuals within this collection were no longer associated with their memorial markers. While their names remain unknown, archaeological context can be utilized to understand pre- and postmortem structural violence during San Francisco’s historical period. This study uses stable isotope analysis on skeletal remains representing 18 individuals from the SFOCME collection to reconstruct diet and migration patterns. Combined with previously conducted osteological analysis and archival research, this new data supplements the life histories of marginalized individuals to restore their social memory which was hindered as a result of structural violence.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2024   •
• Life and Death in the San Francisco Bay: Multi-Disciplinary Approaches to Historic Lifeways

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow