Osteobiographies: Multidisciplinary contributions to the study of human remains

Abstract

Bioarchaeology has proven to be a discipline that provides valuable information about the lifestyles of human populations from the study of bone and dental remains, tissues that record the situations experienced. The bioarchaeological study provides unique evidence that contributes to the understanding of problems that are fundamental to the knowledge of the past such as work and subsistence, health and disease, diet and nutrition, sedentary lifestyle, the adoption of cultigens and the domestication of animals, inter-ethnic contact, social conflict and European colonization, among others. More recently, and hand in hand with Social Theory, bioarchaeology has expanded its scope to other aspects, for example, considering social relationships as part of the formation of the biological body (Sofaer, 2006). These new approaches formulated the need to consider the physical body as socially created (Lorber and Martin, 2011), being a real and symbolic vehicle of political and social identities (Knudson and Stojanowski, 2008).

In its origins, the term “osteobiography” was coined to refer to the compilation of all the information available from the analysis of a skeleton that makes it possible to narrate the life of an individual (Saul, 1972). Currently, osteobiography has established itself as a specific analysis framework within a humanistic bioarcheology, which promotes the study of “biography as a cultural narrative” based on human remains (Robb, 2002, p. 160). This perspective raises and responds to different types of research questions from those addressed by traditional quantitative bioarcheology, focused at the population level, both being independent and complementary analysis frameworks (Hosek and Robb, 2019, p. 2). This diversity of current perspectives has been called “the bioarchaeologies” of the 21st century (Buikstra and Beck, 2006) and they recognize its bases in social biology (Angel, 1946), the biocultural proposal (Blackely, 1977; Goodman and Leatherman, 1998) and the osteobiography of Frank Saul (1972).

Various proposals that consider individuals in their historical and cultural dimension allow us to think in a new way about the bioindicators that are registered to reconstruct the identities of the subjects from integrated perspectives. Examples of these are the theory of the three bodies -physical, social and political- (Scheper-Hugues and Lock, 1987) and the theory of life courses (Gilchrist, 2004). In this sense, the bioarcheology of individuals (Stodder and Palkovich, 2012) or of the personality (Boutin, 2011), stands as valid alternatives that allow not only to humanize the past, but also to address problems generally not considered in bioarchaeological studies. traditional traditions, such as gender and sex, age and life courses, human body and identity, social roles, disability, the concept of embodiment and even the post-mortem agency of human remains (Hosek and Robb, 2019). In this way, they contribute to the generation of multivocal readings about the past.

All these perspectives are inserted in the need to problematize bodies, an aspect to which both archeology and anthropology have contributed significantly. From different avenues of analysis, researchers have argued that bodies are at the same time biology and culture, overcoming that position that sees them as a natural and pre-social entity on which cultural meanings are imprinted (Knapp and Meskell, 1997; Ingold, 2000; Fowler, 2002; Hamilakis et al., 2002; Thomas, 2007).

This dossier brings together five of the seventeen works presented in the homonymous symposium developed within the framework of the XX National Congress of Argentine Archeology, from July 15 to 19, 2019 in the city of Córdoba, under the coordination of Mariana Fabra and Soledad Salega, and the report of Leticia Cortés.

The main objective of this symposium was to socialize and reflect on bioarchaeological research carried out from an osteobiographical perspective that recounted unique life stories from the study of human remains. This space made it possible to debate, based on specific case studies, the generation of knowledge about the lives of people, historically and culturally situated.