Abstract
Part of humans’ primate heritage is the tendency to distinguish members of in-groups and out-groups. This distinction can be reinforced by behaviors and language that distance and dehumanize the out-group. One of the goals of anthropology is to “make the world safe for human differences” (arguably in the words of Ruth Benedict). Anthropologists explore humans’ biological and cultural diversity across space and time while also acknowledging that this represents variations on a theme of common evolutionary origins. Ironically, the way that bioarchaeologists write about these explorations from the perspective of past human bodies actually distances us from some of the people with whom we are trying to communicate. We must do a better job explaining and sharing the outcomes and importance of our research to the public. Research by social psychologists suggests that affective modes of interpretation and accounts of single, identified individuals, successfully elicit empathy from readers. Because fictional, yet evidence-based, osteobiographical narratives about past persons combine these approaches, they should achieve similar effects. This chapter reviews the benefits and challenges of, and procedures for, writing osteobiographical narratives, ultimately arguing that they can rehumanize both the subjects of our research and the discipline itself.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
Multiple lines of evidence suggest that date palms were an important crop, and dates a staple food, in the Early Dilmun period (Nesbitt 1993). The crown of the date palm must be accessed for pollinating, harvesting, and pruning. In pre-industrial times, this would have been done by climbing, up to tens of meters off the ground (Chao and Krueger 2007). It is likely that this task would have been undertaken by males rather than females, based on traditional gender roles in contemporary Old Babylonian Mesopotamia (Steele 2007).
- 2.
Growing old in Mesopotamia was associated with bodily changes (gray or thinning hair, stooped, weaker bodies, impotence and menopause, etc.) and a loss of productivity. The elderly were no longer able to participate in many of the essential duties that able-bodied adults carried out to sustain their societies, such as household and extra-household production, military and labor projects, and sexual reproduction (Harris 2000).
- 3.
A long lifetime of physical activity is evident throughout this male’s skeleton, based on skeletal indicators of robusticity (body size, shape, and mechanical loading; Ruff and Larsen 1990) and osteoarthritis (in which chronic stress on joints damages cartilaginous and bone surfaces; Ortner 2003, pp. 545–546). Indicators of robusticity from the humerus and femur range from average to larger than average compared to other males from the ancient Near East. Mild-to-moderate osteoarthritis is systemic throughout his skeleton, becoming more severe in the right shoulder, cervical (neck) and lumbar (lower back) vertebrae, hips, and knees.
- 4.
Dental health in Dilmun was generally poor, and this male was no exception (see n. 5). Patterns of lightly worn molar enamel, high rates of caries (dental cavities), and extensive loss of teeth prior to death suggest that diets emphasized foods that were non-abrasive (such as fresh meat and fish, and grain that was not stone-ground) and high in carbohydrates (namely, sugar, of which dates and their byproducts were a likely source) (Littleton and Frohlich 1989, 1993).
- 5.
This male lost many teeth prior to his death. No teeth remained in his mandible, and only five maxillary incisors and canines remained at the time of his death. Moderate osteoarthritis of the right temporomandibular joint is evident, although the left side is unaffected. The right half of the mandible is atrophied, perhaps due to a preference for the non-arthritic left side when chewing.
- 6.
Osteoarthritis at both knee joints is indicated by osteophyte formation (new bony outgrowths) on the distal femora, although it is more extensive on the left side. Likewise, the bone on the joint surface of the left patella (kneecap) is eroded and porous. A limp favoring the right leg could, in theory, have resulted from this degeneration of the left knee.
- 7.
The left superior and inferior articular facets of the third, fourth, and fifth cervical vertebrae are porous and lipped, indicating severe degenerative joint disease. Movements of the head at the neck would have been painful on the left side.
- 8.
Many osteophytes are present on the edges of the right humeral head’s joint surface, which would have made movement stiff and painful. But extensive polishing caused by bone-on-bone contact here and on the glenoid fossa of the scapula suggests that he continued to use his right shoulder joint during his last weeks and months. The increased severity of osteoarthritis in the right shoulder and the larger circumference of the right humerus suggest that he may have been right-handed, which could account for his ongoing use of this limb.
- 9.
Based on textual evidence from first-millennium Mesopotamia (one of the only ancient Near Eastern settings for which it exists), men usually married for the first time in their mid-20s to early 30s. By this time, the “overwhelming majority” of them no longer had living fathers (Roth 1987, p. 737). Therefore, this male’s advanced age suggests that he would have been one of the rare few who lived to see his grandchildren grow up.
References
Abu-Lughod, L. (1991). Writing against culture. In R. Fox (Ed.), Recapturing anthropology (pp. 137–162). Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.
Abu-Lughod, L. (2008). Writing Women’s worlds: Bedouin stories. (15th anniversary ed.). Berkeley: University of California Press.
Achenbach, J., & Sun, L. H. (2017, May 23). Trump budget seeks huge cuts to science and medical research, disease prevention. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2017/05/22/trump-budget-seeks-huge-cuts-to-disease-prevention-and-medical-research-departments/?utm_term=.1afa03822670
American Anthropological Association. (2016). Retrieved May 25, 2017, from http://www.americananthro.org/
Arnold-de-Simine, S. (2013). Mediating memory in the museum: trauma, empathy, nostalgia. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Assmann, A., & Detmers, I. (Eds.). (2016). Empathy and its limits. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Baron-Cohen, S. (1999). Evolution of a theory of mind? In M. Corballis & S. Lea (Eds.), The descent of mind: Psychological perspectives on hominid evolution (pp. 261–277). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bernbeck, R. (2015). From imaginations of a peopled past to a recognition of past people. In R. M. Van Dyke & R. Bernbeck (Eds.), Subjects and narratives in archaeology (pp. 257–276). Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado.
Boutin, A. T. (2011). Crafting a bioarchaeology of personhood: Osteobiographical narratives from Alalakh. In A. Baadsgaard, A. T. Boutin, & J. E. Buikstra (Eds.), Breathing new life into the evidence of death: Contemporary approaches to bioarchaeology (pp. 109–133). Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press.
Boutin, A. T. (2012). Written in stone, written in bone: The osteobiography of a bronze age craftsman from Alalakh. In A. L. W. Stodder & A. M. Palkovich (Eds.), The bioarchaeology of individuals (pp. 193–214). Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida.
Boutin, A. T. (2015, June 26). Guest post: Telling stories about the Dilmun Bioarchaeology Project. In D. J. Mennear (Ed.), These bones of mine. https://thesebonesofmine.wordpress.com/2015/06/26/guest-post-telling-stories-about-the-dilmun-bioarchaeology-project-by-alexis-boutin
Boutin, A. T. (2016). Exploring the social construction of disability: An application of the bioarchaeology of personhood model to a pathological skeleton from ancient Bahrain. International Journal of Paleopathology, 12, 17–28.
Boutin, A. T., & Porter, B. W. (2014). Commemorating disability in early Dilmun: Ancient and contemporary tales from the Peter B. Cornwall collection. In B. W. Porter & A. T. Boutin (Eds.), Remembering the dead in the ancient near east: Recent contributions from bioarchaeology and mortuary archaeology (pp. 97–132). Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado.
Boutin, A. T., & Porter, B. W. (in press). The elders of Dilmun: A bioarchaeological analysis of masculinity from the Peter B. Cornwall collection. In L. Gregoricka & K. Williams (Eds.), Life and death in ancient Arabia: Mortuary and bioarchaeological perspectives. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida.
Brett, P. (2016). “Frost still clings to the shadows”: Port Arthur, convict history, pedagogy, and place. The International Journal of the Inclusive Museum, 9(4), 33–46.
Brooks, S. (2009). Historical empathy in the social studies. Journal of Social Studies Research, 33(2), 213–234.
Buikstra, J. E. (1977). Biocultural dimensions of archeological study: A regional perspective. In R. L. Blakely (Ed.), Biocultural adaptation in prehistoric America (pp. 67–84). Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.
Buikstra, J. E. (2016). Ethical issues in biohistory: No easy answers! In C. M. Stojanowski & W. N. Duncan (Eds.), Studies in forensic biohistory: Anthropological perspectives (pp. 288–314). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chao, C. T., & Krueger, R. R. (2007). The date palm (Phoenix dactylifera L.): Overview of biology, uses, and cultivation. Hortscience, 42(5), 1077–1082.
Clifford, J., & Marcus, G. E. (Eds.). (1986). Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Cook, M. R. (2016). Counter-narratives of slavery in the deep south: The politics of empathy along and beyond river road. Journal of Heritage Tourism, 11(3), 290–308.
Curtis-Richardson, M. M. F. (1997). Corpses as commodities: The ethnography of covert medical practices in Georgia, circa 1835-1997. In R. L. Blakely & J. M. Harrington (Eds.), Bones in the basement: Postmortem racism in nineteenth-century medical training (pp. 340–370). Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Davidson, J., & Black, R. (2015). The confederate and the freedmen: Bioarchaeological comparisons from the reconstruction-era south. Southeastern Archaeology, 34(1), 1–22.
Davis, O. L., Jr., Yeager, E. A., & Foster, S. J. (Eds.). (2001). Historical empathy and perspective taking in the social studies. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Deb, S. (2017, March 15). Trump proposes eliminating the arts and humanities endowments. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/15/arts/nea-neh-endowments-trump.html?_r=0
Endacott, J., & Brooks, S. (2013). An updated theoretical and practical model for promoting historical empathy. Social Studies Research and Practice, 8(1), 41–58.
Epstein, S. (1994). Integration of the cognitive and the psychodynamic unconscious. American Psychologist, 49(8), 709–724.
Fowler, C. (2004). The archaeology of personhood: An anthropological approach. London: Routledge.
Fowler, C. (2016). Relational personhood revisited. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 26(3), 397–412.
Geertz, C. (1988). Works and lives: The anthropologist as author. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Gero, J. M. (1991). Who experienced what in prehistory? A narrative explanation from Queyash, Peru. In R. W. Preucel (Ed.), Processual and postprocessual archaeologies: Multiple ways of knowing the past (pp. 126–139). Carbondale, IL: Center for Archaeological Investigations, Southern Illinois University.
Hamilakis, Y. (2013). Archaeology and the senses: Human experience, memory, and affect. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Harris, R. (2000). Gender and aging in Mesopotamia: The Gilgamesh epic and other ancient literature. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.
Hegmon, M. (Ed.). (2016). Archaeology of the human experience [Special issue]. Archeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association, 27(1).
Hodder, I. (1985). Postprocessual archaeology. Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory, 8, 1–26.
Hollan, D. W., & Throop, C. J. (Eds.). (2011). The anthropology of empathy: Experiencing the lives of others in Pacific societies. New York: Berghahn.
Houston, S. D., Stuart, D., & Taube, K. (2006). The memory of bones: Body, being, and experience among the Classic Maya. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Jameson, J. H., Jr., Ehrenhard, J. E., & Finn, C. A. (Eds.). (2003). Ancient muses: Archaeology and the arts. Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press.
Joyce, R. A., Preucel, R. A., Lopiparo, J., Guyer, C., & Joyce, M. (2002). The languages of archaeology. Oxford: Blackwell.
Killgrove, K. (2016, January 12). Young woman with disabilities found in artifact-packed bronze age burial. Forbes Science. http://www.forbes.com/sites/kristinakillgrove/2016/01/12/ young-woman-with-disabilities-found-in-artifact-packed-bronze-age-burial/
Koch, C. (1998). The contest for American culture: A leadership case study on the NEA and NEH funding crisis. Public Talk: Online Journal of Discourse Leadership, 2(Fall 1998). http://www.upenn.edu/pnc/ptkoch.html
Kuper, S. (2016, September 21). Barack Obama: Anthropologist-in-chief. Financial Times. https://www.ft.com/content/fa665f2a-7ac6-11e6-b837-eb4b4333ee43
Littleton, J., & Frohlich, B. (1989). An analysis of dental pathology and diet on historic Bahrain. Paléorient, 15, 59–75. https://doi.org/10.3406/paleo.1989.4509
Littleton, J., & Frohlich, B. (1993). Fish-eaters and farmers: Dental pathology in the Arabian gulf. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 92, 427–447. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.1330920403
Lozada, M. C. (2011). Cultural determinants of ancestry: A lesson for studies of biological relatedness and ethnicity in the past. In A. Baadsgaard, A. T. Boutin, & J. E. Buikstra (Eds.), Breathing new life into the evidence of death: Contemporary approaches to bioarchaeology (pp. 135–149). Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press.
Mennear, D. J. (2017). Highlighting the importance of the past: Public engagement and bioarchaeology of care research. In I. L. Tilley & A. A. Schrenk (Eds.), New developments in the bioarchaeology of care (pp. 343–364). Cham: Springer.
Meskell, L. (1999). Archaeologies of social life: Age, sex, class etcetera in ancient Egypt. Oxford: Blackwell.
Meyers Emery, K., & Killgrove, K. (2015). Bones, bodies, and blogs: Outreach and engagement in bioarchaeology. Internet Archaeology, 39. https://doi.org/10.11141/ia.39.5
Nesbitt, M. (1993). Archaeobotanical evidence for early Dilmun diet at Saar, Bahrain. Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy, 4, 20–47.
Nystrom, K. C. (2014). The bioarchaeology of structural violence and dissection in the 19th-century United States. American Anthropologist, 116(4), 765–779.
Ogilvy, J. (2017, February 1). Alternative facts in a post-truth world? Stratfor.https://www.stratfor.com/weekly/alternative-facts-post-truth-world
Ortner, D. J. (2003). Identification of pathological conditions in human skeletal remains (2nd ed.). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
Pollock, S. (2015). Wrestling with truth: Possibilities and perils in alternative narrative forms. In R. M. Van Dyke & R. Bernbeck (Eds.), Subjects and narratives in archaeology (pp. 277–286). Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado.
Porter, B. W., & Boutin, A. T. (2012). The Dilmun bioarchaeology project: A first look at the Peter B. Cornwall collection at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology. Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy, 23, 35–49. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1600-0471.2011.00347.x
Potts, D. T. (1990). The Arabian Gulf in antiquity. Oxford: Clarendon.
Praetzellis, A., Ziesing, G. H., & Praetzellis, M. (Eds.). (1997). Tales of the Vasco: Being the stories of a rancher from France, an abandoned wife who took to the law, a cowboy who got on the wrong side of the law, a much loved ranch woman, and an archaeologist, all reconstructed from the authentic sources. Rohnert Park: Anthropological Studies Center, Sonoma State University.
Premack, D., & Woodruff, G. (1978). Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1(4), 515–526.
Rakita, G. F. M. (2014). Bioarchaeology as a process. An examination of bioarchaeological tribes in the USA. In B. O’Donnabhain & M. C. Lozada (Eds.), Archaeological human remains. Global perspectives (pp. 213–234). Cham: Springer.
Robb, J. (2009). Towards a critical Ötziography: Inventing prehistoric bodies. In H. Lambert & M. McDonald (Eds.), Social bodies (pp. 100–128). New York: Berghahn.
Roberts, D. G., & McCarthy, J. P. (1995). Descendant community partnering in the archaeological and bioanthropological investigation of African-American skeletal populations: Two interrelated cases from Philadelphia. In A. L. Grauer (Ed.), Bodies of evidence: Reconstructing history through skeletal analysis (pp. 19–36). New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Rockefeller, C. (2016). Stronger than family: Framing modern-day seamen as figurative descendants of nineteenth century merchant mariners buried at the presidio of San Francisco. M.A. thesis, Sonoma State University.
Rosati, A. G., Santos, L. R., & Hare, B. (2010). Primate social cognition: Thirty years after Premack and Woodruff. In M. L. Platt & A. A. Ghazanfar (Eds.), Primate neuroethology (pp. 117–143). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rosefield, H. (2017, February 8). Did a lack of empathy cause both Brexit and Trump? New Statesman. http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2017/02/did-lack-empathy-cause-both-brexit-and-trump
Roth, M. T. (1987). Age at marriage and the household: A study of neo-Babylonian and neo-Assyrian forms. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 29(4), 715–747.
Rothschild, N. A. (1996). Review of What this awl means: Feminist archaeology at a Wahpeton Dakota Village by Janet D. Spector. American Anthropologist, 98(1), 180.
Ruff, C. B., & Larsen, C. S. (1990). Postcranial biomechanical adaptations to subsistence strategy changes on the Georgia Coast. In C. S. Larsen (Ed.), The archaeology of Mission Santa Catalina de Guale: 2. Biocultural interpretations of a population in transition (pp. 94–120). New York: American Museum of Natural History.
Schrire, C. (1995). Digging through darkness: Chronicles of an archaeologist. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia.
Skultans, V. (2007). Empathy and healing: Essays in medical and narrative anthropology. New York: Berghahn Books.
Slovic, P. (2007). “If I look at the mass I will never act”: Psychic numbing and genocide. Judgment and Decision making, 2(2), 79–95.
Spector, J. D. (1993). What this awl means: Feminist archaeology at a Wahpeton Dakota Village. St. Paul, MN: Minnesota Historical Society Press.
Steele, L. D. (2007). Women and gender in Babylonian. In G. Leick (Ed.), The Babylonian world (pp. 299–316). New York: Routledge.
Stojanowski, C. M., & Duncan, W. N. (2015). Engaging bodies in the public imagination: Bioarchaeology as social science, science, and humanities. American Journal of Human Biology, 27, 51–60. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajhb.22522
Strauss, C. (2004). Is empathy gendered and, if so, why? An approach from feminist psychological anthropology. Ethos, 32(4), 432–457.
Toon, R., & Stone, L. (2016). Game of thrones: Richard III and the creation of cultural heritage. In C. M. Stojanowski & W. N. Duncan (Eds.), Studies in forensic biohistory: Anthropological perspectives (pp. 43–66). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tringham, R. (1991). Households with faces: The challenge of gender in prehistoric architectural remains. In J. M. Gero & M. W. Conkey (Eds.), Engendering archaeology: Women and prehistory (pp. 93–131). Oxford: Blackwell.
Van Dyke, R. M., & Bernbeck, R. (Eds.). (2015). Subjects and narratives in archaeology. Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado.
Vezzali, L., Stathi, S., Giovannini, D., Capozza, D., & Trifiletti, E. (2015). The greatest magic of Harry Potter: Reducing prejudice. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 45, 105–121.
de Waal, F. (2005). Our inner ape: A leading primatologist explain why we are who we are. New York: Riverhead Books.
Walker, S. M. (2009). Written in bone: Buried lives of Jamestown and colonial Maryland. Minneapolis, MN: Carolrhoda Books.
Wheeler, R. (2017, January 14). Ruth Benedict and the purpose of anthropology. The Peabody. Robert S. Peabody Museum of Archaeology. https://peabody.andover.edu/2017/01/14/ruth-benedict-and-the-purpose-of-anthropology/
Wilkie, L. A. (2003). The archaeology of mothering: An African-American Midwife’s tale. New York: Routledge.
Will, G. (2016, November 18). Higher education is awash with hysteria. That might have helped elect trump. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/higher-education-is-awash-with-hysteria-that-might-have-helped-elect-trump/2016/11/18/a589b14e-ace6-11e6-977a-1030f822fc35_story.html
Yancy, G., & Butler, J. (2015, January 12). What’s wrong with ‘all lives matter’? The New York Times Opinion Pages. https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/12/whats-wrong-with-all-lives-matter/?_r=0
Yilmaz, K. (2007). Historical empathy and its implications for classroom practices in schools. The History Teacher, 40(3), 331–337.
Acknowledgments
I am deeply grateful to Jane Buikstra for her generous invitation to contribute to this volume. I also thank my colleagues on the Dilmun Bioarchaeology Project, especially Benjamin Porter, Jennifer Jacobs (ethnographer), and Gloria Nusse (forensic artist). Finally, all of these ideas come back to the encouragement and advice I received from my graduate advisor, Bob Preucel, who has my eternal gratitude.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Boutin, A.T. (2019). Writing Bioarchaeological Stories to Right Past Wrongs. In: Buikstra, J.E. (eds) Bioarchaeologists Speak Out. Bioarchaeology and Social Theory. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93012-1_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93012-1_13
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-93011-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-93012-1
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)