Our current understanding of bioarchaeology has shifted its material focus from animal and plant remains to human remains. Consequently, while early bioarchaeologists took Clark's lead and endeavored to humanize the discipline of archaeology, they never used human remains to reconstruct the lives of past humans. He writes, "I was interested in the conjunction of human society and natural environment implicit in the fact that men could only live by utilising their habitat and eating components of the biome." In other words, Clark sought to comprehend how systems function in light of their ecological settings. With ecosystem frameworks in place, Clark's primary concerns were of an economic nature, namely sustenance and seasonal patterns. He anticipated moving beyond reconstructions of chronology and community boundaries in order to tease out how people lived in the past. These were the remains of fauna and to a lesser extent flora. Rather than trumpeting analysis of durable archaeological materials (i.e., ceramics and stone tools), as did most cultural historians, Clark examined organic materials, or the natural resources, that sustained humans. Clark called for a shift in researchers' conceptual and material foci. In his piece entitled "Bioarchaeology: Some Extracts on the Theme," broadly defines bioarchaeology as the archaeology of life.Ĭlark's conceptual project embraced ecosystems approaches to frame his understanding of the past. While his understanding has historical precedence, Clark's usage was distinctly different from how the term is conceived of today. Zooarchaeologist Grahame Clark first used the term in the early 1970's. Thus, it is necessary to first define the term "bioarchaeology." "Bioarchaeology" has a somewhat confusing history. To analyze burials, this dissertation draws partly on bioarchaeological models that inform understandings of the past. These include "bioarchaeology" "the body" "individual", "self", and "person" Īnd "social identity" and "self-identity." Bioarchaeology To avoid confusion, I define terms that are important to this dissertation at its onset. Skeletal information on sex, age, cranial shaping, dental modification, and body position is drawn, by permission, from analyses directed by Frank to 2001. Cultural information about these burials was compiled from excavations conducted over the last decade. Pre-Columbian human burials from northwestern Belize serve as a case study. In addition, I argue that identity construction, in which corporeal change is implicated, structures ritual and quotidian practices and grounds embodied experience. In the instance of the pre-Columbian Maya, I argue that manipulating bodies of the living and the dead facilitated construction and re-construction of identity. Cross culturally, manipulation and alteration of the body are highly informative about belief, experience, and practice. This dissertation takes a humanistic approach to understanding the body and its intentional manipulation in life and after death. At the heart of any anthropological analysis of bodies is the way in which they are changed -via biological processes, environmental forces, social action, culture and self-creation bodies are not immutable, as Grosz's quotation so eloquently articulates. Anthropology is a discipline that owes its formation to the study of bodiesevolving bodies, controlled and resisting bodies, dead and buried bodies, visible differences between bodies, symbols drawn from bodies' biology and anatomy. This history would include not only all the contingencies that befell a body, impinging on its outside -a history of the accidents, illnesses, misadventures that mark the body and its functioning such a history would also have to include the "raw ingredients" out of which the body is produced -its internal conditions of possibility, the history of its particular tastes, predilections, movements, habits, postures, gain and comportment. It is possible to construct a biography, a history of the body, for each individual and social body. It comes in different variety cost and shapes.Every body is marked by the history and specificity of its existence. Polygon Presenting NFT on Matic Blockchain.
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