Trends in Biological Anthropology

Malin Holst, Michelle Alexander

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781785706219
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Biology
• Index: Social Sciences

The articles included in this volume were all presented at the 15th annual British Association for Biological Anthropology and Osteoarchaeology (BABAO) conference held at the University of York on the 13th and 15th of September 2013. Ten papers are presented, on a range of topics and themes, including that of 'Constructing Identities: Ethnicity and Migration' exploring theoretical approaches to the multiple identities of the body and multidisciplinary approaches to investigating the African origin of African American communities in parts of South America. Papers exploring the theme 'Treatment of the Body: Understanding and Portrayals' focus on the visibility of prehistoric burial practice in Britain and the Levant (the 'invisible dead'), and evidence for diversity in late medieval Christian burial practice in Taunton, Somerset. Three papers are incorporated in the theme 'Investigating Lifeways: Diets, Disease and Occupations', focusing on ancient DNA to investigate Mycobacterium tuberculosis from 18th century mummies from Hungary; a bioarchaeological perspective on military communities in Roman London; and a methodological approach to testing a faster method for recording past activity-patterns in skeletal remains. The final three papers of the volume have both archaeological and methodological aspects, using osteological and archaeological evidence to investigate health in Roman York; exploring ostoarchaeological sampling strategies in the presentation of data from a large-scale sieving programme of a 19th century crypt and detailing a methodological study of estimating age of non-adults.

1

Matryoshki, Masks and Identities: Bioarchaeology and the Body

Sonia Zakrzewski

Bioarchaeology focusses upon the interaction between the skeletal body and the archaeology of the living and dead population. The study of bioarchaeology may therefore focus on the study of a series of identities expressed both on and by the body itself. In this sense, bioarchaeology views the body as a dynamic entity with multiple levels of interpretation and engagement. This paper considers these different identities as a series of matryoshki dolls and explores these ideas with a series of exemplar case studies.

Keywords Identity; Ethnicity; Demography; Disability; Body

1. Introduction

Bioarchaeology is commonly considered to comprise the study of human remains within a broader archaeological context. This paper considers the possibilities of studying aspects of identity from the human body as expressed through biological mechanisms. Despite some notable exceptions, many bioarchaeological studies have primarily been single-issue studies of identity (Meskell, 2001), and have usually focused on palaeopathology. Similarly to Gowland and Thompson (2013), I argue here that bioarchaeology should instead consider how skeletal or mummified evidence for disease, trauma, or other aspects of identity might be evaluated as part of a synthetic holistic bodily entity, and, from this, the potential impact on both the individual person and on his/her peers further explored. Gamble (2007) has described Hawkes’ (1954) ladder of inference as an ‘onion of inference’. Following this analogy, I argue here that bioarchaeological identity comprises a series of overlapping existences which can be viewed as matryoshki dolls. Each matryoshka doll comprises an aspect of identity which might be opened to explore and disentangle the biological inferences underneath.

2. Bioarchaeology and Identity: What is Identity?

The body is central in the forging of identities, and study of this multiply layered body, with its own materiality, enables identities to be disentangled from the archaeological record. Bioarchaeology and osteoarchaeology study the people rather than just the palaeopathological lesions. In this sense, bioarchaeology uniquely comprises the study of people living in the past, using archaeological approaches, but situated within a broader framework developed from biological methods. In this sense, in contrast to Marty Rubin, the blogger who argued that each person has a story1, for bioarchaeologists, each individual has multiple stories. These multiple stories, reflecting the embodied individual, comprise multiple matryoshka-like identities for that person. These many stories, however, written in varying degrees of detail, not only exist layered on top of one another, but also crosscut each other.

The archaeological or osteological body has long been seen as a source of information from which to reconstruct past human lifeways. By contrast, the ‘explicit theorisation of these [skeletal or mummified] remains as the physiological embodiment of social processes and integration with social theory’ (Gowland and Thompson, 2013: 3) has only developed more recently. Gowland and Thompson (2013: 2) explore the concept of the body as being more than a ‘passive clothes horse for material culture’. This paper develops this approach further using examples from everyday life, albeit with a focus on Egyptian archaeology, to enable this multivocality of identity to be demonstrated. Common foci of archaeological studies of identity include gender (Walde and Willows, 1991; Díaz-Andreu, 2005; Sofaer, 2006; Knüsel, 2011), age (Moore and Scott, 1997; Lucy, 2005a; Sofaer, 2006; Prowse et al., 2007), personhood (Fowler, 2004; Boutin, 2011), power, rank or social status (Wason, 1994; Babić, 2005; Knüsel, 2011; Stodder, 2011), religion (Scott, 2011), sexuality (Dowson, 2000, 2008; Schmidt and Voss, 2000), ethnicity (Jones, 1997; Tyson Smith, 2003; Lucy, 2005b; Lozada, 2011; Zakrzewski, 2011), diet and culinary practice (Ambrose et al., 2003; Eriksson et al., 2008) and/or disability (Hubert, 2000a; 2000b). Despite some important and notable exceptions, such as specific papers in Powell et al., (1991), Grauer and Stuart-Macadam (1998), Steckel and Rose (2002), Gowland and Knüsel (2006), Knudson and Stojanowski (2009) and Baadsgaard et al. (2011), these multiple strands of identity have rarely been integrated within bioarchaeology, although the importance of such an approach has been highlighted, most notably by Gowland and Thompson (2013). Bioarchaeology, palaeopathology and funerary archaeology can act as mechanisms by which these different categories can be coalesced to form overarching but multiple identities.

3. Egypt and Bioarchaeological Identity

The majority of this paper will employ examples deriving from the Ptolemaic-Roman delta cemetery of Quesna in order to exemplify aspects of identities. The site of Quesna lies in Minufiyeh province to the north of Cairo within the Egyptian delta. The necropolis is primarily Ptolemaic and Roman in date (c. 332 BC–AD 6412), with most individuals interred in simple pit graves dug straight into the sand (for details, see Rowland, 2008; Rowland et al., 2010). The actual orientation of the burials varies; most individuals are oriented east–west with their heads positioned towards the west, with a smaller proportion buried north–south, primarily with their heads to the north. Although most of the burials are of single inhumations, there are also people interred within multiple burials – sometimes with several individuals buried in one depositional event, whereas others are buried in separated and discrete burials within the same tomb. A relatively small proportion of the skeletal assemblage derives from burial in ceramic coffins. This diversity and patterning of mortuary treatment and variation in the associated funerary architecture hints at differing aspects of identity being recognised and acted upon by the burying (i.e. surviving and living) population.

3.1. Demographic Identities

At Quesna, a life course approach has been employed to understand demographic identity. Rather than simply count the number of individuals within specific age categories, such as young adult or adolescent, the approach has been to develop a holistic series of individual osteobiographies. This approach aims to develop a nuanced approach to social aspects of age, rather than focussing entirely on the accuracy and/or precision of biological age estimation. Of the burials excavated at Quesna, only just over half the adults excavated could be assigned into even broad age categories, such as young adult, middle-aged adult or older adult. Many were simply classified as being ‘adult’. These individuals, however, each had their own distinct life and lived experiences, some of which may be reflected osteologically. For example, did any of these people experience pain during their lives, such as from arthritis in their joints? Can their biological age, currently noted simply as ‘adult’, be linked to and integrated with their funerary context so as to gauge their relative social age within the assemblage?

One burial demonstrates the validity of such a life-course approach to age and osteobiography. Skeleton B6, buried in an anthropoid mudbrick grave, was the best preserved of all the inhumations. The skeleton is that of an edentulous old female (Rowland 2008). She was relatively short (only approximately 142 cm tall) and exhibited an enlarged nutrient foramen in her right first metatarsal. She had a septal aperture and exhibited osteophytes on many of her vertebrae. The very fact that she survived so long, despite her lack of teeth and apparent osteoarthritis, suggests that she was ‘cared for’, and was thus considered to be a valued and potentially important member of the community. She was thus a ‘person’, possibly viewed as an ‘older woman’ or ‘old lady’, rather than simply ‘being’ an individual. One might also argue that she ‘lived’ rather than simply ‘survived’.

Children have started to become relatively well contextualised within bioarchaeology (Sofaer Derevenski, 1997; Lewis, 2007, 2011). In Egyptian archaeology, despite some notable exceptions (Power, 2012; Wheeler, 2012; Wheeler et al., 2013), the bioarchaeology of children and the link with children’s multiple identities is still not much explored. At what biological, physiological or skeletal age are children socialised into being ‘people’? Is there a recognised social period of childhood, and can this be identified from the mortuary bioarchaeology? Such an approach is being attempted at Quesna, although at present the juvenile skeletal sample is still too small to develop these ideas greatly. There are, however, two juvenile inhumations, burials B21 and B26, which are of particular note in terms of their identities. These two juveniles have very different funerary contexts, but share aspects marking their identities as being of particular importance to the local community.

B26 was found lying supine in the top layer of a mud-brick multiple burial (Rowland, 2008). Five other inhumations were also recovered from the burial structure, with each layer of burials having all the inhumations facing the same but alternate directions. B26 was a juvenile, with almost all epiphyses unfused. The only fused bones were the neural arches of the vertebrae and the innominates; the sacral bodies, heads of ribs, humerus heads, distal radial epiphyses, spinous processes and endplates of the vertebrae were all unfused. B26 lacked a skull, potentially as a result of grave robbing. The individual was estimated to have been 15–24 years old at death on the basis of pubic symphysis morphology following the Suchey-Brooks method (Brooks and Suchey, 1990). As noted above, the head was missing, and hence dental wear could not be used to aid in age estimation. B26, however, possessed many epiphyses, which, by age 15–24, should have either fused or have started to fuse together. Furthermore, the long bones were extremely long. Given the length and relative robustness of these long bones, the individual was assumed to be male. This sex assignation remains uncertain as this was the skeleton of a juvenile, but, if male, his height was calculated to have been approximately 1.7 m (following Raxter et al., 2008).

Unlike B26, B21 was a single burial in a simple pit grave, oriented north–south, and cut directly into the sand (Rowland, 2008). Like B26, the body was missing most of the skull, most likely as a result of past grave robbing activity, and like B26, this inhumation had completely unfused epiphyses. Based on the pubic symphysis, age was again estimated as 15–24 years (Brooks and Suchey, 1990). The dental wear and development was also found to be similar (Brothwell, 1981; AlQahtani et al., 2010). B21, like B26, had many epiphyses, such as the heads of the metacarpals, metatarsals and the proximal phalanges, that should, by 15–24 years, have either fused or have been in the process of fusing. The long bones were also relatively long, providing a height estimate of almost 1.6 m if female and almost 1.65 m if male (following Raxter et al., 2008).

Both these juvenile burials were found with grave goods, although those from B26, a Ptolemaic pot sherd and a sherd incised with a wedjat eye (Rowland, 2008), were found in the grave fill rather than directly associated with the body. B21 was found with a Hathor plaque, a winged bird collar, a large scarab, several small scarabs, a Djed pillar and a diverse array of other amulets, plaques and pieces of cartonnage (Rowland, 2008). Both these burials were of unusually tall subadults who were still growing at time of death. This delay in epiphyseal fusion and continued growth might result from disruptions or changes to endocrine hormone levels within the body, such as somatotropin (Ortner and Putschar, 1981; Aufderheide and Rodríguez-Martín, 1998). The actual cause, such as castration, is not of importance, but rather it is the very fact that these two people were afforded non-normal burial which is. This implies that both juveniles were considered important people within the community. They may have been recognised as ‘different’ in some way, but, if so, this was simply one part of their multiple identities.

3.2. Race and Ethnicity

In the popular media, ethnicity and population affiliation or affinity are frequently conflated with aspects of skin colouration to form reified static race constructs. These widespread common-or-garden ‘race’ constructs develop from late 19th- and early 20th-century anthropological thought, which classified individuals into anatomical shape complexes and viewed these as fixed and discrete entities. This thought construct itself derives partially from a basic understanding of Darwinism and evolutionary processes, and partially from the use of skin colour as one of the main characteristics used for ethnic differentiation as early as the 17th century (Benthien, 2002). Developing this approach, anatomical and morphological patterning has been directly mapped, in such folk taxonomies of race, onto skin colour as a layer of identity. Despite the continuous range of colouring in skin pigmentation (Relethford, 2009), these discrete folk taxonomy entities are usually viewed in binary distinctions, and so are simplified into ‘Black’ and ‘White’ (Shanklin, 1998). For a concise discussion of some of the issues surrounding skin ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Introduction (Malin Holst and Michelle Alexander)
• 1. Matryoshki, Masks and Identities: Bioarchaeology and the Body: Sonia Zakrzewski
• 2. Revisiting Genetic Ancestry in African Diaspora Communities from Atlantic South America: César Fortes-Lima and Jean-Michel Dugoujon
• 3. The ‘Invisible Dead’ Project: The Database as a Work-in-Progress: Mandy Jay, Chris Scarre, Charlotte Roberts, Graham Philip, Jennie Bradbury and Douglas Davies
• 4. Diverse Burial Practices from a Late Medieval Cemetery in Somerset: Heidi Dawson-Hobbis
• 5. Whole Genome Analysis of Mycobacterium tuberculosis in 18th-Century Natural Mummies from Vác, Hungary: Helen D. Donoghue, Mark Spigelman, Ildikó Pap, Ildikó Szikossy, Oona Y-C Lee, David E. Minnikin, Gurdyal S. Besra, Andrew Millard, Martin J. Sergeant, Jacqueline Z.-M. Chan, Mark J. Pallen6. From Soldiers to Military Communities in Roman London: A Bioarchaeological Perspective
• 6. From Soldiers to Military Communities in Roman London: A Bioarchaeological Perspective: Rebecca Redfern
• 7. 3D Recording of Normal Entheses: A Pilot Study: Charlotte Y. Henderson
• 8. A Biocultural Assessment of Health in Roman York: Lauren McIntyre and Andrew T. Chamberlain
• 9. The Riddle of the Sands: Sieving Methodology in the Recovery of Human Remains: Don P. O’Meara
• 10. Biological Age Estimation of Non-Adult Human Skeletal Remains: Comparison of Dental Development with the Humerus, Femur and Pars Basilaris: Carla L. Burrell, Carole A.L. Davenport, Raymond J. Carpenter and James C. Ohman