Archaeological Review from Cambridge 16.2, 2003, Contending with Human Bones Edited by Mary Baxter, General Editors David Barrowclough and Susanne Hakenbeck (original) (raw)
Related papers
Bodies and persons. In Oxford Handbook of Archaeological Theory (online version, 2015)
This chapter offers a critical review of the main research approaches focusing on the body and the notion of the person in archaeology. Particular emphasis is placed upon research trends that have emerged in the last thirty years, as this period witnessed the increasing importance of such themes in archaeological analysis. Initially, I discuss three research agendas that have approached the human body from a positivist viewpoint, largely drawing on research methodologies developed in the ‘hard sciences’ (i.e. bioarchaeology, processualism, and Darwinian and evolutionary archaeology). Secondly, I discuss approaches that tend to explore the person as both a social and a biological entity, thereby focusing on the socio-cultural practices through which past people were ‘constructed’ differently in different cultural contexts (i.e. postprocessualism and interpretative archaeology). In the final sections of the chapter I critically assess two major strands that have largely developed from this second framework, namely gender and personhood.
Burial is a uniquely human behavior. Among the mortuary behaviors of extant societies, burial constitutes one of many practices concerning the treatment of the dead. Examples are curation (the carrying around of the dead either of the entire corpse or of a preserved part); diverse forms of interest in the dead body (e.g., dismembering, cannibalism, veneration of parts); "abandonment" on the landscape; funerary caching; and other practices, including variously complex forms of inhumation (formal burial) (Pettitt 2011, 8-10). The interest of archaeologists specifically in burial is a default of the archaeological record due to the higher likelihood of the preservation of physical evidence when burial has taken place. In the case of mortuary practices, the commonalities of observable behaviors in cross-cultural ethnographic studies allow anthropologists to draw analogies between the present and the past. Such inferences are evaluated through taphonomic studies and contextual analyses of the human fossils. Necessary criteria for identifying burials include completeness of skeletal remains found within horizons of human occupation, elimination of natural processes of interment, stratigraphic indications of interments (e.g., burial pits or sealed contexts of skeletal remains), and osteological evidence for treatment of the corpse (Belfer-Cohen and Hovers 1992; Gargett 1999). Typically, arguments for intentional Paleolithic burials need to be based on a consilience of several lines of evidence. As an outcome of this epistemological approach, identifications of Paleolithic burials are necessarily carried out on a case-by-case basis rather than being generated from top-down overarching theory and ensuing hypotheses.
Associated bone groups; one archaeologist’s rubbish is another's ritual deposition
This paper was part of a project investigating the nature and interpretation of associated bone groups (ABGs). The project involves collecting all available data from published reports for the Wessex region. The information presented here comprises the initial results from the Iron Age investigating species proportions, placement and composition of ABGs. The data shows that sheep/goat comprise the most common ABG, with differences in species proportion shown between hillforts and non-hillfort sites. The majority of ABGs consist of partial carcasses, with their composition changing throughout the Iron Age and into the Romano-British period, possibly linked to changes in butchery practices. The final part of the paper discusses how the interpretation of ABGs is linked to trends within archaeological theory.
Updated Guidelines to the Standards for Recording Human Remains, 2017
Jo completed her PhD, on later Anglo-Saxon funerary archaeology and osteology, at the University of Sheffield in 2004. She joined the University of Bradford later that year, where she is now a Reader and programme leader for the MSc in Human Osteology and Palaeopathology. She continues her research into Anglo-Saxon funerary archaeology, from a bioarchaeological perspective, alongside research into age estimation and sex assessment, aspects of palaeopathology, and evidence of violence-related trauma. She is currently analysing the human remains from Stirling Castle.
Dissertation (2011): IS THE BODY IN PIECES AT PEACE? An analysis of the practice of Osteoarchaeology
"This paper is an exploration of what osteoarchaeology is: what happens in the laboratory of an osteoarchaeologists, when and how. It is an account of the way the dead human body is enacted as part of the osteoarchaeological analysis of human bones. It is an analysis of the way in which (current, western) osteoarchaeologists define, manipulate and talk about the human body. In other words, I intend to explore the way the dead human body is brought into view in the practice of osteoarchaeology, as its object of study. It is not a paper about the knowledge osteoarchaeologists claim to have about the human body. Rather, I propose a reflective approach that follows step by step scientists in their work to obtain that knowledge and I will critically deconstruct their actions. In the laboratory, scientists describe, measure, quantify the human bones, in the end turning them into data that become the topic of anthropological reports or articles. Through this process, the dead human body looses the link with the former living individual, by taking on the identity of a specimen that can be displayed, manipulated, and reconfigured according to the adopted scientific paradigm." Dissertation supervised by Prof John C Barrett MSc Human Osteology and Funerary Archaeology Department of Archaeology, University of Sheffield