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Osteobiography: The History of the Body as Real Bottom-Line History
Abstract
What is osteobiography good for? The last generation of archaeologists fought to overcome the traditional assumption that archaeology is merely ancillary to history, a substitute to be used when written sources are defective; it is now widely acknowledged that material histories and textual histories tell equally valid and complementary stories about the past. Yet the traditional assumption hangs on implicitly in biography: osteobiography is used to fill the gaps in the textual record rather than as a primary source in its own right. In this article we compare the textual biographies and material biographies of two thirteenth-century townsfolk from medieval England—Robert Curteis, attested in legal records, and “Feature 958,” excavated archaeologically and studied osteobiographically. As the former shows, textual biographies of ordinary people mostly reveal a few traces of financial or legal transactions. Interpreting these traces, in fact, implicitly presumes a history of the body. Osteobiography reveals a different kind of history, the history of the body as a locus of appearance and social identity, work, health and experience. For all but a few textually rich individuals, osteobiography provides a fuller and more human biography. Moreover, textual visibility is deeply biased by class and gender; osteobiography offers particular promise for Marxist and feminist understandings of the past.
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“Bioarchaeological analyses of the remains of women from this era can assist in the reconstruction of the historic West in a more complete way that is often included in written records.”
From The Land of Opportunity: Bioarchaeological Perspectives of Women’s Lives in the Industrial Expansion into the Western UNITED STATES (1850–1915) (2024) · cites this paper as Robb et al. 2019
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P. Anderson, C., P. Harrod, R., & M. Baustian, K. (2024) · International Journal of Historical Archaeology · doi:10.1007/s10761-024-00744-8
Metadata
- Authors
- Robb, J., Inskip, S. A., Cessford, C., Dittmar, J., Kivisild, T., Mitchell, P. D., Mulder, B., O'Connell, T. C., Price, M. E., Rose, A., & Scheib, C.
- Venue
- Bioarchaeology International
- Publisher
- University Press of Florida
- Published
- 2019-08-13
- Volume
- 3
- Issue
- 1
- ISSN
- 2472-8357
- 2472-8349
- PMC
- PMC7250652
- Cited by
- 35
- References
- 0
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