Theme:
2. Archaeological Sciences, Humanities and the Digital era: Bridging the Gaps
Session format:
Regular session
Title:
?From Chaos to Coherence? The Scientific Value and Perspective on Commingled and Fragmentary Human Remains
Content:
Human skeletons provide valuable insights into the lives of individuals, including their life quality, activities, and various biosocial factors they may have experienced. On a larger scale, they can help understand mortuary patterns, population dynamics, and the distribution of diseases. However, if human remains are commingled and fragmentary, they can create significant challenges both for archaeologists and anthropologists. Human remains can form into such conditions due to various processes, including secondary burials, post-depositional processes such as human interactions and diagenesis which can disturb the original contexts of interments. In the past, graves may have also been disturbed by robbery, while modern agricultural or construction activities can also lead to disturbances. All of these can lead to an accumulation of partially or completely decomposed disarticulated elements. Contrary to these, it is still possible to gain important insights into past behaviors by assessing the taphonomic parameters and funerary behavior, and researchers can cross-reference anthropological data with spatial and stratigraphic information.
Our session aims to bring together researchers from the fields of archaeology, anthropology, and forensic anthropology to share their expertise on this special bioarchaeological source, with a focus on methodological solutions and ethical considerations.
Through case studies, we seek to evaluate possible methodological solutions that can help us fully explore the nature and processes that lead to the formation of these chaotic and complicated contexts. We aim to answer questions such as: How can we work with these remains? How much information can we obtain from them? Ultimately (in some cases), we need to reason why their preservation and maintenance is important not only from scientific, but also from ethical perspectives. Hence, these remains can have different scientific values and therefore deserve our attention.
Keywords:
Funerary archaeology, Commingled remains, Archaeothanatology, Osteoarchaeology, Bioarchaeology, Ethics
Session associated with MERC:
no
Session associated with CIfA:
no
Session associated with SAfA:
no
Session associated with CAA:
no
Session associated with DGUF:
no
Session associated with other:
Main organiser:
Orsolya László-Mateovics (Hungary) 1
Co-organisers:
Liisa Seppänen (Finland) 2,3
Olga Dec (Poland) 4
Affiliations:
1. ARDIG-Archaeological Service GesmbH
2. University of Turku
3. University of Helsinki
4. Adam Mickiewicz University | UAM · Faculty of Archaeology Master of Arts
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