Alexis Boutin
Professor of Anthropology, Sonoma State University
Exploring Ancestorhood and Social Memory: Biographies of Early 20th Century Residents from the Sonoma Developmental Center Cemetery
Located in Eldridge, California, the Sonoma Developmental Center (SDC) opened in 1891, eventually serving thousands of residents who would today be described as developmentally or physically disabled, mentally ill, or deviating from social norms. Between 1892 and 1960, its cemetery received the remains of over 1900 residents—after which its use ceased and gravemarkers were removed. The SDC closed in 2018, and the core of its 945 acre campus is now slated for redevelopment. Our research project works collaboratively with stakeholders to document and preserve the cemetery as a site of social memory and cultural heritage. In this presentation, I will discuss how we are using non-invasive bioarchaeological methods to reconstruct the contextualized biographies of two groups of siblings who lived at the SDC during the early 20th century, a time characterized by a growing eugenics movement as well as the 1918-19 influenza pandemic. The circumstances of their lives and deaths, and their commemoration—or lack thereof—in the SDC cemetery, offers a unique opportunity to explore the concepts of ancestorhood and social memory within the contexts of disability and institutionalization.
Michele R. Buzon
Professor of Anthropology, Purdue University
Exploring Identity, Variability, and Transformation in the Ancient Nile Valley
At the Third Cataract of the Nile River in the region known as Nubia, interaction between groups intensified with Egypt’s imperial expansion beginning in the New Kingdom period (~1450 BCE). Over the next several hundred years through the end of Egyptian colonial control and into Early Napatan period (ending ~700 BCE) people at the site of Tombos expressed variability in burial ritual. Through a theoretically informed approach, the complexity of intercultural interactions during these dynamic sociopolitical times is , expanding beyond the Egyptian/Nubian binary. The graves at Tombos are used to demonstrate that a diverse set of traditions were used that transcend these categories. Through the examination of tomb structures, grave inclusions, burial containers, body position and orientation expressions of personal and group identities in the burials are explored. Bioarchaeological data including demography and isotopic indications of mobility are examined in conjunction with mortuary patterns to illuminate overlapping identities and social statuses. Practices are entangled with multidimensional influences that question what is considered local and foreign. With variations showing similarities and differences of structures and practices found in the region during earlier, contemporary, and later periods, an innovative group of customs is revealed.
Rebecca Gowland
Professor of Archaeology, Durham University
Materializing Motherhood and the Beginnings of Life in the Archaeological Record
Feminist archaeology has been pivotal for foregrounding topics such as childhood, infancy and reproduction in studies of the past. This paper builds upon this seminal work through a synthesis and discussion of recent theoretical and methodological advances in the archaeological study of infancy and the mother/infant nexus.
While still woefully understudied, we are increasingly cognisant of the considerable variation in cultural conceptions and material expressions of maternity, fertility, pregnancy, and the beginnings of life. Contrary to popular belief, the archaeological record pertaining to reproduction and reproductive loss is abundant and has produced some of the most powerfully emotive forms of material evidence. These include special funerary rites, votive offerings and objects of care, in addition to the wealth of information provided by the physical remains of the mothers and infants themselves.
New theoretical approaches, rooted in feminist archaeology, along with novel scientific techniques, have enabled us to ask new questions about motherhood and infancy in the past. It is only now that the significance of the mother-infant relationship is starting to be understood as an entangled ‘unit’ rather than two completely discrete entities. Archaeologists can now obtain insights into maternal health via the biomolecular and histological analysis of infant bodies, providing hitherto unexplored links between generations.
This paper will provide a brief overview of some of these recent approaches to the study of the infant/mother nexus in archaeology. It will also draw upon the work of Karen Barad and ‘agential realism’ to conceptualise infant bodies as simultaneously coming from and ‘becoming with’ the social, material and biological world that both surrounds and pre-exists them. Through this lens it will situate the maternal body within a complex ecosystem of co-determined events and agencies.
Tisa N. Loewen
Visiting Instructor of Sociology/Anthropology, SUNY Cortland
Illuminating Lived Experiences in the Iron Age and Roman East Adriatic and Hinterland
My research explores the complex population dynamics that followed Roman intervention in the Eastern Adriatic and hinterland. This area experienced many changes as the larger region was affected by the expansion of the Roman Republic and Empire, later becoming the provinces of Pannonia and Dalmatia in the early 1st c. CE. Much research on how people negotiated their identities within this evolving landscape has drawn from material culture, epigraphic and historical accounts, providing valuable insights on multiple identities, localized belief systems, and resistance to Roman rule. Nevertheless, discourse on how the Adriatic was “Romanized” has traditionally been framed around simplistic views of population “pacification”, “collapse”, “assimilation”, and “erasure”. Research on Late Antique migration in the Balkans describes settlements on abandoned “native Roman” sites and on previous “Roman soil” with little reference to ancestral origins. Furthermore, scholarship concerning these provinces between the 1st and 5th c. CE typically refer to the inhabitants with political identities, such as peregrine civitates or Roman, though it has been unclear who these people were relationally. While the residents were increasingly granted Roman citizenship during the 1st and 2nd c. CE, these identifiers do not really encapsulate the nuances of “becoming Roman”. Bioarchaeological approaches to pre-Roman Adriatic population change have largely been unexplored until recently, now offering a deeper understanding of the interplay between historical events, individual agency, and imperial pressures.
As such, I examine population change in the Eastern Adriatic and hinterland during the end of the (Croatian) Iron Age and into the Roman Empire (particularly 200 BCE- 300 CE), contextualized by the Roman imperial environment and factors which shaped the world and choices of communities during “Romanization”. Using biological distance analyses of Liburnian, Pannonian, Delmatae, and Japodes dental morphology, with supplementary data from the Italian peninsula, my research has identified that pre-Roman residents in the Adriatic were indeed biological ancestors to their local “Roman” descendants. Population shifts identified in my research seem challenging to reconcile in light of established history on the ferocity with which Pannonian and Delmatae groups resisted Rome. However, important context gives light to these outcomes. By examining war, conscription, and population movement, we can begin to understand the complex motivations which influenced exogamy and acculturation. By exploring the embodied communal experiences of violence, my findings illuminate transformations unrealized by prior methodologies, that those who are referentially pan-Roman were descended from those who died rebelling against Roman expansion.
John Robb
Professor of European Prehistory, Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge
Other People’s Lives: Telling Life Stories through Bioarchaeology
Like biography, osteobiography is a deceptively simple enterprise. We usually think of it simply as using skeletal and molecular data to tell the story of a human life. But there are many ways to do so. Using examples from both the recent, familiar past and the distant unfamiliar past, this paper presents three basic ways we can approach telling ancient lives: (i) a sociological life-course/ social history approach aimed at depicting patterning across how multiple lives unfold, (ii) a public engagement approach based on our own ontological ideas about bone, bodies and life and aimed at humanising and familiarising the past so we can relate to it and relate it to modern political contexts, and (iii) an ontological approach aimed at exploring ancient alterity. Each route has conceptual, epistemological and ethical advantages and drawbacks, as well as practical implications for the analytical choices we make. Which is the best route depends on context rather than rigid prescriptive rules. Thus, we need to explore ancient lives by writing multiple or different kinds of stories, and the tension between them can be an exploratory force.
Christina Torres
Professor of Anthropology & Heritage Studies, UC Merced
Questioning the Value of Permanence: Head Shaping as Intimate Care
Studies of the practice of cranial vault modification in archaeology foreground its role as a socially relevant and visible practice among the adults who bear these long-lasting marks. This has been particularly true where textual or iconographic elements to support other interpretations are lacking. Nevertheless, head shaping, like many other forms of body modification is, at its most basic, an experience, albeit one that alters human form. In many cases, these experiences are ones imbued with social significance, and encountered with discomfort or even pain. Alterations of the body, therefore, are not solely oriented towards a final product. I argue here that our imposition of a modern perception of the importance and inherent social value of permanence can result in what was perhaps a collateral result overshadowing other elements of an important practice of childcare and the defining of personhood.
Archaeological perspectives are frequently, in fact often necessarily as a consequence of the material under study, focused on the permanent marks of this practice on adults. Shifting focus from an archaeologically visible aesthetic to one that is structured around the appropriate ways to treat an infant moves the discussion away from a focus on an inherent and intentional end goal of permanence. Studies of tattooing, tooth filing, and piercings, for example, show ways that the acquiring of these modifications carries just as much, if not more, significance than the permanent mark. Similar arguments have been made for head shaping in other regions. Tiesler and Zabala, speaking of Mesoamerica, note that the practice of head shaping was likely multi-layered and perhaps whole suites of it were unrelated to eventual visible head shape.
To that end, here I consider our understanding of the body as dynamic in a broad appraisal of head shaping among ~1,700 individuals who lived in northern Chile’s Atacameño Oases before the colonial era. Using data that is less focused on the type and shape of the head and more on the simple presence and degree of modification, I argue that perhaps permanence is our own fixation, and that final shape may not have been what was important for the people who bound their child’s head in this part of the prehistoric world. The dramatic and emphasized head shapes of adults in other places, including neighboring parts of the Andes, demonstrate that a durable and permanent mark is possible when it is so desired. The overwhelming moderation of the practice in this part of northern Chile, occasionally leaving only subtle marks would argue for a practice focused on the moments and experience of head shaping and the intimate and socially salient acts of child rearing, more than the visibility of the shaped head in adulthood.
Trent M. Trombley
Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Augustana University
From Noise to Signal: Decomposition under the Microscope and the Utility of Histotaphonomy in Elucidating Deathways
Histological analysis of archaeological bone is both an old, but relatively bespoke methodology. Traditionally, numerous histological methods require immaculate preservation of microstructure, a luxury not commonly observed in many bioarchaeological contexts due to the variety of taphonomic variables such as fungal and bacterial attack – termed bioerosion – which obfuscates microstructures. Consequently, in many cases, taphonomically ‘compromised’ samples are often excluded from analyses entirely. In this presentation, I follow paleontologists and funerary taphonomists to challenge our tendency in bioarchaeology to view taphonomic signatures being distortive, destructive, or interfering and instead reposition them as both informative and revelatory, with specific reference to histological slides. Rather than seeing taphonomically compromised slides as wasted potential, recent decades of both observational and experimental studies have posited that microscopic destruction of bone is a product of both internal and external factors, including microburial environments and even the proliferation of gut bacteria following death. Termed “histotaphonomy”, this burgeoning subfield gives us an opportunity to center taphonomy and decomposition in bioarchaeological contexts, and possibly elucidate funerary treatment in the past through microscopic analysis. I then present a histotaphonomic analysis of approximately 150 individuals from a multi-faith medieval cemetery in central Portugal to elucidate how religiously-informed funerary patterns may correspond with microscopic taphonomic signatures. Results show that nearly all individuals (99%) experienced significant bioerosion, primarily from bacterial sources, suggesting a relatively rapid interment of bodies postmortem and/or microburial environmental signatures. While a relatively new subfield of inquiry, the potentials are profound, allowing us to integrate histological methods with larger theoretical perspectives on death and funerary preparation of the body. Rather than seeing microtaphonomic signatures as “noise” inhibiting us from gaining access to the lived experience of past people, I proffer that such signatures instead be reframed as signals of the death experience.