Are All Bones Equal?

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Animal Matters: Ethics in Zooarchaeology from Discovery to Display" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The ontological turn in the humanities has been challenging the traditional nature/culture dichotomy in perceiving humans as animals like any other, particularly within a perspectivist framework. This shift encourages us to consider humans and other-than-human animals as part of a unified multispecies world. But what about their bones? Do animal and human bones undergo the same epistemological scrutiny and treatment by archaeologists, especially zooarchaeologists? If humans and animals are equals, does this equality extend to their skeletal remains? In this presentation, we will explore how the discovery of human bones among faunal or bone tool assemblages raises ethical and epistemological questions regarding the analysis and display of these findings - questions that often lack a clear or universal answer.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Animal Matters: Ethics in Zooarchaeology from Discovery to Display   •
• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51046