Bioarchaeology of Individuals: Identity, Social Theory, and Skeletal Analysis

Abstract

Bioarchaeological analysis of human remains almost always begins with reconstructing the basic identity of the individuals whose bones have been recovered. Part of what makes bioarchaeology such an interdisciplinary and integrative approach to under-standing the past is that it relies on gleaning as much information as possible from the human remains in conjunction with many other cultural and environmental con-siderations. While context and taphonomy are important (Chaps. 4 and 5), the bio-logical remains have many indicators of what life was like for the person prior to their death. For bioarchaeologists, human remains represent the only direct informa-tion about human biology. There are many methods for the analysis of human remains and new techniques are regularly advanced in bioarchaeology and forensic journals and books. Methods for the analysis of human remains offer insight into aspects of identity such as the age at death, sex/gender, stature, pathology, trauma, and activity that in turn provide unique and nuanced information about the lived experience of the person who died. Not often, but sometimes, it is even possible to say how and why the person died. Before reviewing how to reconstruct identity, it is important to discuss what the term identity implies. In today's society identity is the way in which individuals express themselves (e.g., the clothes they wear, their jobs, their ethnicity and age, or having a tattoo on their body), the group or subculture that they associate with (e.g., believing in one religion or another), and the way they perceive and describe themselves (e.g., liberal, middle class, vegetarian). Díaz-Andreu and Lucy (2005 :1–2) state that identity is something that people consciously choose and therefore it is never in stasis but rather it changes throughout the life of an individual. Given the complex, abstract, and fl uid nature of identity, it is challenging to reconstruct these kinds of self-identifi cations from human remains. However, people " live " their identities and as such there are huge social/cultural forces that affect the body. Some theoreticians go so far as to suggest that physical bodies are largely socially created (Lorber and Martin 2011). Another way to think about this is that the physi-cal body is actually an embodiment of the biological, social, and material worlds that people live in (see Chap. 9 for examples of materiality and human remains).