Case Studies Reveal Material Complexities of Reconstructing Physical Impairment, Disability, and Health-related Caregiving in the Past

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Care and Power" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Bioarchaeological approaches to health-related caregiving fundamentally engage with the inequities, differential draws upon community and household resources, and agency and social identities of providers and recipients of care in past populations. Thus, conducting this research in a way that incorporates the cultural, community, spatial, and temporal complexities of the necessity, availability, and efficacy of past care requires highly context-specific investigations. However, as we emphasize here, these are dependent upon substantial variation in the availability of both direct material evidence for impairment and care (e.g., skeletal individuals) and relevant contextual information (e.g., mortuary archaeological data, archival medical records). Here, we highlight several case studies to explore how reconstructions of physical impairment, disability, and caregiving, especially downstream to trauma and endemic infectious disease (e.g., treponematosis) can be differentially facilitated and constrained. These range from highly stratified well-documented contexts, such as industrializing 18th to 19th century London, UK and institutions for those with chronic illnesses in early 20th century Mississippi, US, to scarce evidence from egalitarian sociopolitical systems in Mississippian-era Tennessee, US. Combined, these enable us to begin to comprehend the role of material evidence in reconstructing entanglements between social, economic, and political systems and caregiving in the past.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• The Archaeology of Care and Power

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53584