Articles by Alanna L . Warner-Smith
Historical Archaeology, 2024
I consider the power of "slow archaeology" in a study of the Huntington Anatomical Collection, fo... more I consider the power of "slow archaeology" in a study of the Huntington Anatomical Collection, focusing on Irish immigrants who lived and worked in New York City over the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries. I argue that normative bioarchaeological categories and methods cannot fully account for the varied life histories of persons in the collection. Instead, I turn to the tenets of slow archaeology to move between scales of analysis and material traces. With a slow approach, embodied experiences of labor are highlighted and discourses about laborers are challenged. A slow approach seeks to recover the lived experiences of individuals exploited in life and made anonymous in death and is one potential way toward a more ethical bioarchaeology.
Historical Archaeology, 2020
As American democracy burgeoned in the 19th century, citizenship was expressed in the young natio... more As American democracy burgeoned in the 19th century, citizenship was expressed in the young nation in part through bodily-care regimes as well as consumption practices. The mouth, in particular, might therefore be considered a locus at which class, medical practices, and ideologies of citizenship and identity articulate. Historical bioarchaeology is uniquely situated to approach the broader social context of dental health in the past. Using multiple lines of evidence, including archaeological and archival sources, bioarchaeologists can investigate the ways discourses on health and the body, as well as urbanizing and industrializing forces, influenced both dental disease and dental care. This study investigates oral health in the skeletal remains from the Spring Street Presbyterian Church burial vaults (ca. 1820-1850) in New York City. Rates of carious lesions, abscesses, and antemortem tooth loss are con-textualized through artifacts and historical documents. Archaeological evidence in the burial vaults for dental care includes prosthetic devices and fillings, while ar-chival sources document preventative dental care, dietary choices, and engagement with discourses on the body and citizenship.
A medida que la democracia estadounidense florecía en el siglo XIX, la ciudadanía se expresaba en la joven nación, en parte, a través de regímenes de cuidado corporal y prácticas de consumo. Por lo tanto, la boca, en particular, podría considerarse un lugar en el que se articulan la clase, las prácticas médicas y las ideologías de ciudadanía e identidad. La bioarqueología histórica se encuentra en una posición única para abordar el contexto social más amplio de la salud dental en el pasado. Al utilizar múltiples líneas de evidencia, incluidas las fuentes arqueológicas y de archivo, los bioarqueólogos pueden investigar las formas en que los discursos sobre la salud y el cuerpo, así como las fuerzas de urbanización e industrialización, influyeron tanto en la enfermedad dental como en el cuidado dental. Este estudio investiga la salud bucal en los restos esqueléticos de las bóvedas funerarias de la Iglesia Presbiteriana de Spring Street (ca. 1820-1850) en la ciudad de Nueva York. Las tasas de lesiones cariosas, abscesos y pérdida de dientes antemortem se contextualizan a través de artefactos y documentos históricos. La evidencia arqueológica en las bóvedas funerarias para el cuidado dental incluye dispositivos protésicos y empastes, mientras que las fuentes de archivo documentan el cuidado dental preventivo, las elecciones dietéticas y el compromiso con los discursos sobre el cuerpo y la ciudadanía. Résumé Alors que la démocratie américaine était en plein essor au 19ème siècle, la citoyenneté s'exprimait en partie dans la jeune nation, par le biais de régimes de soins corporels ainsi que par des pratiques de consommation. La bouche peut notamment et par con-séquent être considéré comme un site où s'articulent la classe sociale, les pratiques médicales et les idéologies Hist Arch
Mapping the GIS Landscape: Introducing "Beyond (within, through) the Grid, 2020
This is an introduction to the special issue entitled "Beyond (within, through) the Grid: Mapping... more This is an introduction to the special issue entitled "Beyond (within, through) the Grid: Mapping and Historical Archaeology." The papers in this issue emerge from a 2017 Society for American Archaeology session, in which archaeologists considered the intersections of mapping and historical archaeology. In this volume, the papers expand upon these discussions and explore the ways in which mapping can generate new archaeological data and contribute to methodological and theoretical problems in historical archaeology. Together, they consider the interplay between visibility and invisibility, the visualization of embodied experience, mapping power and resistance, and the use of mapping in heritage practices.
International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 2020
Using ArcGIS, I map the ways in which primary and secondary sources describing an 1850s cholera e... more Using ArcGIS, I map the ways in which primary and secondary sources describing an 1850s cholera epidemic in the Caribbean spatialize the epidemic. More specifically, I probe the scale at which varying narratives report the epidemic to consider whether it was understood as a broad, regional event, or at the level of specific colonies or islands. I draw upon post colonial and feminist critiques of the map, and keeping in view the
situated nature of knowledge, create alternative maps of the epidemic. I approach the epidemic’s archival traces through the lens of archaeological theory, discussing them in relation to scale and movement.
Archaeological Review from Cambridge, 2021
Conference Presentations by Alanna L . Warner-Smith
Society for Historical Archaeology Annual Meeting, Boston, MA, 2020
I consider the potentials of a slow bioarchaeology of the Huntington Anatomical collection, focus... more I consider the potentials of a slow bioarchaeology of the Huntington Anatomical collection, focusing on the collection’s Irish immigrants, who lived and worked in New York City in the nineteenth century. Taking the skeleton as a record of experience, life course approaches interpret evidence of health, activity, and diet across individuals’ entire lives. This brings together multiple lines of evidence—skeletal, archival, and material—to disentangle the processes shaping their bodies and experiences, from the accelerating pace of urbanization, to the tempos of capitalist labor, and the daily rhythms of everyday, embodied practice. While such an undertaking may be “slow” methodologically, it enters the ethical space of slow approaches, as it seeks to recover the lived experiences of individuals exploited in life and anatomized and anonymized in death. I therefore consider how the tenets of slow archaeology might be applied to ethical (bio)archaeological studies of the dead.
Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG) UK, 2019
This paper is about movement at many scales and tempos: the bending of a joint; the rubbing of bo... more This paper is about movement at many scales and tempos: the bending of a joint; the rubbing of bone on bone; the wandering of a body across an urban landscape; the movement of bodies through mass immigration; the circulation of goods, services, and labor in a nineteenth-century market; and the collection and transfer of human remains following death. It is also about the literally embodied experiences of these movements in a particular individual.
This individual, whom I call Bridget*, was born in Ireland and died at the New York City Almshouse Hospital on Blackwell’s Island in 1900 at the age of 70 years. After her death, she became part of an anatomical collection (1893-1921) curated by a New York City doctor.
I start from Bridget’s knees to explore how the lived experiences of an individual are entangled in wider social and material movements. To do so, I consider pain. While it is true that bioarchaeologists primarily study the material remains of bodies—and thus tend to focus on health, activity, and trauma—the experience of pain itself is less visible in interpretations. Recognizing pain in archaeological bodies perhaps relies upon the archaeologists’ own embodied knowledge and corporeal history of pain, making it a difficult phenomena to quantify and to index. I consider the theoretical, methodological, and ethical contours of this absence and probe the possibilities for its inclusion in studies of labor, industrialization, and immigration.
*Pseudonym.
In bioarchaeology, conversations surrounding the political, legal, and ethical dimensions of work... more In bioarchaeology, conversations surrounding the political, legal, and ethical dimensions of working with human remains have emerged since NAGPRA’s passing in 1990. Here, we focus on more intimate encounters with human remains to explore the emergent character of what it means to work with the dead. In doing so, we adapt the term “care-full acts” (Chua 2014, 2016), gestures that, out of care, enfold life and death. Our paper presents autoethnographic analyses from the field and lab, where we have worked with human remains, exploring moments where embodied and rote research practices were interrupted, and we were given pause. Warner-Smith describes her experience conducting osteological analysis on a curated anatomical collection. Chamoun describes working in Ecuador and Lebanon. Despite different locations, we both find ourselves carefully—and care-fully—navigating similar unruly politicoethical terrains. The political and ethical landscapes are particularly troubling when studying collections and
assemblages of individuals who were marginalized in life and/or death, imbuing researchers with particular responsibilities and “response-abilities” (Haraway 2016) to our research subjects. Thus, through our encounters with the dead, we engage ethics, care, and politics as intimately entangled domains. At stake is apprehending how intimate politics resonate with and through broader disciplinary histories. At the same
time, we are concerned with what it means to share space and time with the dead and living in research contexts. Reflecting on the relations between empathy and coloniality, love and abandonment, witnessing and silencing, we explore the (un)intended potentials and troubles of a care-full bioarchaeology.
The George S. Huntington anatomical collection is comprised of the skeletal remains of some 3600... more The George S. Huntington anatomical collection is comprised of the skeletal remains of some 3600 immigrants and U.S.-born individuals. These persons died in public institutions, hospitals, and almshouses around New York City between 1893 and 1921. They were dissected as part of anatomical instruction at New York’s College of Physicians and Surgeons and subsequently became part of the doctor’s comparative skeletal collection.
Scholars who study similar skeletal series—e.g., from almshouses and other public institutions—tend to interpret skeletal data in relation to the “biology of poverty.” That is, scholars categorically treat individuals in such assemblages as “the poor.” Instead, I take an intersectional approach and focus on “elderly” Ireland-born women in the collection, exploring the relations between gender, class, citizenship, disability, and age. Understandings of old age and the life course were in flux at the turn of the century. Industrialization, urbanization, and immigration reshaped communities, kinship, and notions of utility and productivity, affecting notions of aging and the aged body. This paper explores the embodied experience of aging in the Huntington collection in relation to discourses of aging in America. In particular, I consider how the skeletal remains and textual sources of the Huntington individuals challenge the simple ways in which immigrants––aging in public institutions––might be categorically understood as able or debilitated.
Between 1893 and 1921, the skeletons of some 3700 individuals were collected by Dr. George Huntin... more Between 1893 and 1921, the skeletons of some 3700 individuals were collected by Dr. George Huntington, a professor of anatomy at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City. This anatomical collection was meant to be no “[mere] a catacomb of human bodies,” but rather a “series available for scientific comparative work” (Huntington 1901:610).
The collection is quite diverse, with approximately 52% comprised of foreign-born individuals. With five continents and nearly 40 countries represented, the Ireland-born individuals form the largest contingent—nearly 22% of the overall collection. Both females and males are present, with birth dates spanning the nineteenth-century. As such, it is an important mortuary context in which to consider the diverse life and death experiences of Irish immigrants living in New York City during the nineteenth century. In this paper, I present the collection’s history along with data on the demographic composition of the Huntington Irish. I also future directions of my work, as well as the ethical considerations that inform my study.
Second author, with Tony Chamoun.
In the 1850s, a cholera epidemic moved through much of the Caribbean, killing thousands from the ... more In the 1850s, a cholera epidemic moved through much of the Caribbean, killing thousands from the Bahamas to British Guiana. Reports circulated of individuals abandoned in their homes and others buried alive. With shortages of able-bodied gravediggers, infectious corpses accumulated, triggering shifts in burial and funerary practices. The epidemic thus drastically altered the social and material landscape. The remains—skeletal, memorial, spectral—of the epidemic continue to exert force, as some claim that it shapes collective identities and histories in the Caribbean today.
In this paper, I present research conducted in the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Bahamas, Barbados, and Guyana (formerly British Guiana), bringing together archival research, site visits, and oral history. Key to my discussion are bodies and burials. Their presence, and more often, their absence, become marked with notions of contagion and entangled in broader post-colonial contexts and politics of race. Furthermore, many of the known cholera sites have become associated with other uneasy places and uses today. In discussing this persisting contagion, I question the definition of the mortuary site, as the properties of the dead—particularly the property of contagion—emerges with other materials and their properties on the landscape, moving beyond the grave itself.
Several scholars have explored the role of the empirical sciences in colonial contexts; far from ... more Several scholars have explored the role of the empirical sciences in colonial contexts; far from a neutral study of the world, they were actively making and remaking material, social, and geographic boundaries. Cartography was part of these boundary-making practices, as the varying positions and views of actors engaging with the world are dissolved into the singular, authoritative view offered by the map.
Studying a cholera epidemic that moved through the Caribbean in the 1850s, I consider how archaeologists might employ mapping technologies while also keeping in view post-colonial and feminist concerns for positionality, scale, and the situated nature of knowledge. Through the use of ArcGIS and its time-enabled feature, I map the ways in which primary and secondary sources describing the experience of cholera and the disease’s movement spatialize the epidemic. More specifically, I probe the scale at which these varying narratives report the epidemic to determine whether it is understood as a broad, regional event or at the level of specific colonies or islands. In exploring these cholera narratives, I raise questions about the concept of the archaeological site, problems of scale, and the power (and limitations) of maps to represent “views from somewhere.”
Bodies are not closed systems, but rather dynamic and permeable social entities composed of multi... more Bodies are not closed systems, but rather dynamic and permeable social entities composed of multiple materials and temporalities. As Ingold notes, bodies are “flow(s) of materials comprising corporeal life” (2011:16). Expressions of identity and formations of personhood are relational, generated and distributed through social interactions and material things. While this sense of relational, extended personhood is well attended to in prehistoric archaeology, historical archaeologists have engaged less with theories of personhood and tend to rely more on modern Western notions of bounded individuals and bodies (Wilkinson 2013; Fowler 2010). In this paper, we examine 19th century dental prostheses—a stone tooth, a gold bridge, and gold fillings—found with commingled skeletal remains in the Spring Street Presbyterian Church burial vaults (ca. 1820-1846) in New York City. A microhistorical analysis of these prostheses demonstrates how objects and substances are incorporated into bodies, becoming part of the overlapping processes and temporalities that make up corporeal life. The mouth is an especially active social interface where materials with biological and geological histories of their own intersect with experiences, habits, and practices. We examine the microscale entanglements of class, gender, medical practices, and ideologies of morality and aesthetics in the dynamic social landscape of 19th century New York City. Finally, we consider how the relational nature of bodies and materials allows personhood to be experienced, performed, and extended through a smile, a stone, or a glint of gold.
Bodies are not closed systems, but rather dynamic and permeable social entities composed of multi... more Bodies are not closed systems, but rather dynamic and permeable social entities composed of multiple materials and temporalities. As Ingold notes, bodies are “flow(s) of materials comprising corporeal life” (2011:16). Expressions of identity and formations of personhood are relational, generated and distributed through social interactions and material things. While this sense of relational, extended personhood is well attended to in prehistoric archaeology, historical archaeologists have engaged less with theories of personhood and tend to rely more on modern Western notions of bounded individuals and bodies (Wilkinson 2013; Fowler 2010).
In this paper, we examine 19th century dental prostheses—a stone tooth, a gold bridge, and gold fillings—found with commingled skeletal remains in the Spring Street Presbyterian Church burial vaults (ca. 1820-1846) in New York City. An analysis of these prostheses demonstrates how objects and substances are incorporated into bodies, becoming part of the overlapping processes and temporalities that make up corporeal life. The mouth is an especially active social interface where materials with biological and geological histories of their own intersect with experiences, habits, and practices. We examine the microscale entanglements of class, gender, medical practices, and ideologies of morality and aesthetics in the dynamic social landscape of 19th century New York City. Finally, we consider how the relational nature of bodies and materials allows personhood to be experienced, performed, and extended through a smile, a stone, or a glint of gold.
In 1854, a cholera epidemic swept through Barbados, claiming an estimated one-sixth of the popula... more In 1854, a cholera epidemic swept through Barbados, claiming an estimated one-sixth of the population. Unsurprisingly, the epidemic drastically altered the social landscape, as families, neighborhoods, and congregations were decimated. This paper engages with the question “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” by examining the notion of movement on multiple scales and the historical nature of the term ‘cholera.’ Understandings of cholera, as medical historians argue, were enmeshed with and created by the global movement of peoples, goods, and armies. At the same time, networks of trade, immigration, colonization, and capitalism act as conduits for the movement of disease. This paper examines how the cholera-stricken body is thus connected to these broader networks, as cholera arrived at Barbados via a sea-faring ship, the very symbol of global movement in the 19th-century Caribbean world. At the same time, the ways in which cholera was experienced and mediated at the micro-scale of the individual, families, and Barbadian communities was related to the shared understandings of what actually constituted cholera—itself a product of broader historical and global forces. Thus, the reorganization of communities and families, the experience of space and place on the island during the epidemic, and the interventions enacted through and upon individual bodies are all part of broader historical processes and networks. This paper thus examines how individual bodies are part of these broader historical processes and networks through a microhistorical analysis of the 1854 epidemic.
Posters by Alanna L . Warner-Smith
Second author, with Soleil Young
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Articles by Alanna L . Warner-Smith
A medida que la democracia estadounidense florecía en el siglo XIX, la ciudadanía se expresaba en la joven nación, en parte, a través de regímenes de cuidado corporal y prácticas de consumo. Por lo tanto, la boca, en particular, podría considerarse un lugar en el que se articulan la clase, las prácticas médicas y las ideologías de ciudadanía e identidad. La bioarqueología histórica se encuentra en una posición única para abordar el contexto social más amplio de la salud dental en el pasado. Al utilizar múltiples líneas de evidencia, incluidas las fuentes arqueológicas y de archivo, los bioarqueólogos pueden investigar las formas en que los discursos sobre la salud y el cuerpo, así como las fuerzas de urbanización e industrialización, influyeron tanto en la enfermedad dental como en el cuidado dental. Este estudio investiga la salud bucal en los restos esqueléticos de las bóvedas funerarias de la Iglesia Presbiteriana de Spring Street (ca. 1820-1850) en la ciudad de Nueva York. Las tasas de lesiones cariosas, abscesos y pérdida de dientes antemortem se contextualizan a través de artefactos y documentos históricos. La evidencia arqueológica en las bóvedas funerarias para el cuidado dental incluye dispositivos protésicos y empastes, mientras que las fuentes de archivo documentan el cuidado dental preventivo, las elecciones dietéticas y el compromiso con los discursos sobre el cuerpo y la ciudadanía. Résumé Alors que la démocratie américaine était en plein essor au 19ème siècle, la citoyenneté s'exprimait en partie dans la jeune nation, par le biais de régimes de soins corporels ainsi que par des pratiques de consommation. La bouche peut notamment et par con-séquent être considéré comme un site où s'articulent la classe sociale, les pratiques médicales et les idéologies Hist Arch
situated nature of knowledge, create alternative maps of the epidemic. I approach the epidemic’s archival traces through the lens of archaeological theory, discussing them in relation to scale and movement.
Conference Presentations by Alanna L . Warner-Smith
This individual, whom I call Bridget*, was born in Ireland and died at the New York City Almshouse Hospital on Blackwell’s Island in 1900 at the age of 70 years. After her death, she became part of an anatomical collection (1893-1921) curated by a New York City doctor.
I start from Bridget’s knees to explore how the lived experiences of an individual are entangled in wider social and material movements. To do so, I consider pain. While it is true that bioarchaeologists primarily study the material remains of bodies—and thus tend to focus on health, activity, and trauma—the experience of pain itself is less visible in interpretations. Recognizing pain in archaeological bodies perhaps relies upon the archaeologists’ own embodied knowledge and corporeal history of pain, making it a difficult phenomena to quantify and to index. I consider the theoretical, methodological, and ethical contours of this absence and probe the possibilities for its inclusion in studies of labor, industrialization, and immigration.
*Pseudonym.
assemblages of individuals who were marginalized in life and/or death, imbuing researchers with particular responsibilities and “response-abilities” (Haraway 2016) to our research subjects. Thus, through our encounters with the dead, we engage ethics, care, and politics as intimately entangled domains. At stake is apprehending how intimate politics resonate with and through broader disciplinary histories. At the same
time, we are concerned with what it means to share space and time with the dead and living in research contexts. Reflecting on the relations between empathy and coloniality, love and abandonment, witnessing and silencing, we explore the (un)intended potentials and troubles of a care-full bioarchaeology.
Scholars who study similar skeletal series—e.g., from almshouses and other public institutions—tend to interpret skeletal data in relation to the “biology of poverty.” That is, scholars categorically treat individuals in such assemblages as “the poor.” Instead, I take an intersectional approach and focus on “elderly” Ireland-born women in the collection, exploring the relations between gender, class, citizenship, disability, and age. Understandings of old age and the life course were in flux at the turn of the century. Industrialization, urbanization, and immigration reshaped communities, kinship, and notions of utility and productivity, affecting notions of aging and the aged body. This paper explores the embodied experience of aging in the Huntington collection in relation to discourses of aging in America. In particular, I consider how the skeletal remains and textual sources of the Huntington individuals challenge the simple ways in which immigrants––aging in public institutions––might be categorically understood as able or debilitated.
The collection is quite diverse, with approximately 52% comprised of foreign-born individuals. With five continents and nearly 40 countries represented, the Ireland-born individuals form the largest contingent—nearly 22% of the overall collection. Both females and males are present, with birth dates spanning the nineteenth-century. As such, it is an important mortuary context in which to consider the diverse life and death experiences of Irish immigrants living in New York City during the nineteenth century. In this paper, I present the collection’s history along with data on the demographic composition of the Huntington Irish. I also future directions of my work, as well as the ethical considerations that inform my study.
In this paper, I present research conducted in the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Bahamas, Barbados, and Guyana (formerly British Guiana), bringing together archival research, site visits, and oral history. Key to my discussion are bodies and burials. Their presence, and more often, their absence, become marked with notions of contagion and entangled in broader post-colonial contexts and politics of race. Furthermore, many of the known cholera sites have become associated with other uneasy places and uses today. In discussing this persisting contagion, I question the definition of the mortuary site, as the properties of the dead—particularly the property of contagion—emerges with other materials and their properties on the landscape, moving beyond the grave itself.
Studying a cholera epidemic that moved through the Caribbean in the 1850s, I consider how archaeologists might employ mapping technologies while also keeping in view post-colonial and feminist concerns for positionality, scale, and the situated nature of knowledge. Through the use of ArcGIS and its time-enabled feature, I map the ways in which primary and secondary sources describing the experience of cholera and the disease’s movement spatialize the epidemic. More specifically, I probe the scale at which these varying narratives report the epidemic to determine whether it is understood as a broad, regional event or at the level of specific colonies or islands. In exploring these cholera narratives, I raise questions about the concept of the archaeological site, problems of scale, and the power (and limitations) of maps to represent “views from somewhere.”
In this paper, we examine 19th century dental prostheses—a stone tooth, a gold bridge, and gold fillings—found with commingled skeletal remains in the Spring Street Presbyterian Church burial vaults (ca. 1820-1846) in New York City. An analysis of these prostheses demonstrates how objects and substances are incorporated into bodies, becoming part of the overlapping processes and temporalities that make up corporeal life. The mouth is an especially active social interface where materials with biological and geological histories of their own intersect with experiences, habits, and practices. We examine the microscale entanglements of class, gender, medical practices, and ideologies of morality and aesthetics in the dynamic social landscape of 19th century New York City. Finally, we consider how the relational nature of bodies and materials allows personhood to be experienced, performed, and extended through a smile, a stone, or a glint of gold.
Posters by Alanna L . Warner-Smith
A medida que la democracia estadounidense florecía en el siglo XIX, la ciudadanía se expresaba en la joven nación, en parte, a través de regímenes de cuidado corporal y prácticas de consumo. Por lo tanto, la boca, en particular, podría considerarse un lugar en el que se articulan la clase, las prácticas médicas y las ideologías de ciudadanía e identidad. La bioarqueología histórica se encuentra en una posición única para abordar el contexto social más amplio de la salud dental en el pasado. Al utilizar múltiples líneas de evidencia, incluidas las fuentes arqueológicas y de archivo, los bioarqueólogos pueden investigar las formas en que los discursos sobre la salud y el cuerpo, así como las fuerzas de urbanización e industrialización, influyeron tanto en la enfermedad dental como en el cuidado dental. Este estudio investiga la salud bucal en los restos esqueléticos de las bóvedas funerarias de la Iglesia Presbiteriana de Spring Street (ca. 1820-1850) en la ciudad de Nueva York. Las tasas de lesiones cariosas, abscesos y pérdida de dientes antemortem se contextualizan a través de artefactos y documentos históricos. La evidencia arqueológica en las bóvedas funerarias para el cuidado dental incluye dispositivos protésicos y empastes, mientras que las fuentes de archivo documentan el cuidado dental preventivo, las elecciones dietéticas y el compromiso con los discursos sobre el cuerpo y la ciudadanía. Résumé Alors que la démocratie américaine était en plein essor au 19ème siècle, la citoyenneté s'exprimait en partie dans la jeune nation, par le biais de régimes de soins corporels ainsi que par des pratiques de consommation. La bouche peut notamment et par con-séquent être considéré comme un site où s'articulent la classe sociale, les pratiques médicales et les idéologies Hist Arch
situated nature of knowledge, create alternative maps of the epidemic. I approach the epidemic’s archival traces through the lens of archaeological theory, discussing them in relation to scale and movement.
This individual, whom I call Bridget*, was born in Ireland and died at the New York City Almshouse Hospital on Blackwell’s Island in 1900 at the age of 70 years. After her death, she became part of an anatomical collection (1893-1921) curated by a New York City doctor.
I start from Bridget’s knees to explore how the lived experiences of an individual are entangled in wider social and material movements. To do so, I consider pain. While it is true that bioarchaeologists primarily study the material remains of bodies—and thus tend to focus on health, activity, and trauma—the experience of pain itself is less visible in interpretations. Recognizing pain in archaeological bodies perhaps relies upon the archaeologists’ own embodied knowledge and corporeal history of pain, making it a difficult phenomena to quantify and to index. I consider the theoretical, methodological, and ethical contours of this absence and probe the possibilities for its inclusion in studies of labor, industrialization, and immigration.
*Pseudonym.
assemblages of individuals who were marginalized in life and/or death, imbuing researchers with particular responsibilities and “response-abilities” (Haraway 2016) to our research subjects. Thus, through our encounters with the dead, we engage ethics, care, and politics as intimately entangled domains. At stake is apprehending how intimate politics resonate with and through broader disciplinary histories. At the same
time, we are concerned with what it means to share space and time with the dead and living in research contexts. Reflecting on the relations between empathy and coloniality, love and abandonment, witnessing and silencing, we explore the (un)intended potentials and troubles of a care-full bioarchaeology.
Scholars who study similar skeletal series—e.g., from almshouses and other public institutions—tend to interpret skeletal data in relation to the “biology of poverty.” That is, scholars categorically treat individuals in such assemblages as “the poor.” Instead, I take an intersectional approach and focus on “elderly” Ireland-born women in the collection, exploring the relations between gender, class, citizenship, disability, and age. Understandings of old age and the life course were in flux at the turn of the century. Industrialization, urbanization, and immigration reshaped communities, kinship, and notions of utility and productivity, affecting notions of aging and the aged body. This paper explores the embodied experience of aging in the Huntington collection in relation to discourses of aging in America. In particular, I consider how the skeletal remains and textual sources of the Huntington individuals challenge the simple ways in which immigrants––aging in public institutions––might be categorically understood as able or debilitated.
The collection is quite diverse, with approximately 52% comprised of foreign-born individuals. With five continents and nearly 40 countries represented, the Ireland-born individuals form the largest contingent—nearly 22% of the overall collection. Both females and males are present, with birth dates spanning the nineteenth-century. As such, it is an important mortuary context in which to consider the diverse life and death experiences of Irish immigrants living in New York City during the nineteenth century. In this paper, I present the collection’s history along with data on the demographic composition of the Huntington Irish. I also future directions of my work, as well as the ethical considerations that inform my study.
In this paper, I present research conducted in the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Bahamas, Barbados, and Guyana (formerly British Guiana), bringing together archival research, site visits, and oral history. Key to my discussion are bodies and burials. Their presence, and more often, their absence, become marked with notions of contagion and entangled in broader post-colonial contexts and politics of race. Furthermore, many of the known cholera sites have become associated with other uneasy places and uses today. In discussing this persisting contagion, I question the definition of the mortuary site, as the properties of the dead—particularly the property of contagion—emerges with other materials and their properties on the landscape, moving beyond the grave itself.
Studying a cholera epidemic that moved through the Caribbean in the 1850s, I consider how archaeologists might employ mapping technologies while also keeping in view post-colonial and feminist concerns for positionality, scale, and the situated nature of knowledge. Through the use of ArcGIS and its time-enabled feature, I map the ways in which primary and secondary sources describing the experience of cholera and the disease’s movement spatialize the epidemic. More specifically, I probe the scale at which these varying narratives report the epidemic to determine whether it is understood as a broad, regional event or at the level of specific colonies or islands. In exploring these cholera narratives, I raise questions about the concept of the archaeological site, problems of scale, and the power (and limitations) of maps to represent “views from somewhere.”
In this paper, we examine 19th century dental prostheses—a stone tooth, a gold bridge, and gold fillings—found with commingled skeletal remains in the Spring Street Presbyterian Church burial vaults (ca. 1820-1846) in New York City. An analysis of these prostheses demonstrates how objects and substances are incorporated into bodies, becoming part of the overlapping processes and temporalities that make up corporeal life. The mouth is an especially active social interface where materials with biological and geological histories of their own intersect with experiences, habits, and practices. We examine the microscale entanglements of class, gender, medical practices, and ideologies of morality and aesthetics in the dynamic social landscape of 19th century New York City. Finally, we consider how the relational nature of bodies and materials allows personhood to be experienced, performed, and extended through a smile, a stone, or a glint of gold.
This session seeks to elucidate what it means to become vulnerable to the everyday relationships researchers enter throughout the sciences and humanities (Smuts 2006; Das 2015). We ask participants to consider "care” in its many permutations, particularly as “care” emerges in research practices. We also encourage participants to think about how their research practices imbricate them with other bodies, broadly conceived, and the social relations therein cited. Participants may also wish to probe the limits of care, e.g., when care might produce politically undesirable relationships, or when care becomes inadequate.
Archaeologists are increasingly theorizing movement and mobility in their analyses of people and things. While engagements with the “new materialism” invite an exploration of the ways in which materials and substances are in flux, studies of globalization and the Anthropocene attend to global flows of people and things. The embodied subject—one that moves, perceives, dreams, does—adds another interpretive challenge in archaeological knowledge-making practices. Perceptions and experiences were not only situated in past bodies, but the reconstruction of those experiences is also situated in the embodied practices of archaeologists.
We invite papers spanning geographic and temporal contexts (including archaeologies of the contemporary and of the Anthropocene, as well as archaeologies of the deeper past) that engage with the body, scale, and archaeological knowledge-making practices. How might archaeologists understand the ways in which movement sediments in objects, bodies, and landscapes? How might we (re)-locate scalar knowledge of global precarity in bodies? Will this (re)-situating help to untie snarls of universalism, and tie scalar ties?
described the histories of cities, often framing the urban landscape in terms of rapid transformation, long-term occupation, boom and bust cycles, and growth and decline. Yet no singular temporal narrative adequately captures these frenetic places, where multitudes of histories, materialities, and temporalitiesvie for the archaeologist’s attention.
To answer such challenges, we turn to the tempo of research itself, exploring the potential of slow approaches to untangle the sheer volume of experiences that comprise urban materiality. Such an approach might consider the body of a single individual or an artifact; an urban townlot or city block; an ordinance, a business, or institution; or the larger settlement, all while attending to wider global interactions. In this session, we encourage a broad definition of the urban, from ancient to contemporary cities. At the same time, contributors should not feel limited to urban landscapes in the past, but may also probe the expression of multiple temporalities and anticipated futures in contemporary urban spaces, particularly through heritage practices and archaeologies of the contemporary.