Past perspectives: What can archaeology offer disability studies?

Abstract

The undertaking of disability studies is primarily and rightly focused on the contemporary marginalization and discrimination that face disabled people globally. Nonetheless, one of the most powerful implications the social model and subsequent understandings of disability contain is that of the historically variable nature of how societies have understood, perceived, and treated impairments crossculturally. While there are increasing rejections and reformulations of the social model within disability studies (e.g., Shakespeare 2006), its most basic insights are still of key historic interest, especially for disciplines that have hitherto not fully heeded them. By decoupling the physical fact of impairment and the socially constructed nature of reactions to it in the form of disability, the social model implicitly and explicitly posed a crucial question: If disability is not a universal "given" inherent to a condition, what are its origins, and how has it varied in the past? The earliest iterations of the social model recognized the historic implications of understanding the societally constructed nature of disability, and subsequently a prolific number of disability histories spanning a wide chronological and geographical range have arisen to examine varying conceptions of what it meant to be disabled in the past.