Archives of Embodiment: Body and Experience in the Archaeological and Historical Record

The ‘material turn’ as applied to the human body in the past arguably poses a challenge to the fundamental premise of social and cultural historians of the body that social identities have been socially and culturally constructed. Important historical work has suggested that during the eighteenth century social identities of gender, rank and race were built upon a discourse of physical and biological differences. Historians study how biology has been perceived, represented or deployed as a discourse, in other words. Though historians are committed to uncovering the experiential and material deficits between those of different genders, ranks and ages, they rarely examine these as located in the body but instead treat them as the material outcome of cultural norms and social practice. This chapter explores the interconnected social identities of gender, rank and age in the long eighteenth century through a combination of osteoarchaeology and social and cultural history. It employs an approach called, ‘from skeletal biography to human biography’. The chapter offers a new and integrated approach that could be adopted by both historians and archaeologists studying embodied identities, seeking to bridge their often different interests.