"Care-Full" Bioarchaeologies- Rethinking Care through Bioarchaeological Approaches

While discussions of “care” existed in the literature on human bioarchaeology and paleopathology, the publication of Lorna Tilley’s “Bioarchaeology of Care” model in 2011 reenergized bioarchaeologists’ discussions of care in the past. This model depends on identifying whether an individual’s physical impairment would have required health-related provisioning of care for survival, and it has expanded to address care at the level of populations. Other human bioarchaeological studies of care extend to experiences beyond impairment, considering phenomena like careful (or haphazard) mortuary treatment, the care of children, the violence of care in institutional contexts, restrictions on access to care, and care as politico-ethical practice and relation. This Research Topic aims to extend how “care” is conceived and studied in bioarchaeology, seeking a fuller understanding of how care is enmeshed in the physical and social environments shaping persons’ lived experiences. We are in part inspired by what ethnographer Jocelyn Chua calls “care-full acts,” or gestures that enfold life and death, at times generating and other times reinforcing difficult relations. Thus, if bioarchaeology can elucidate evidence of power, inequality, violence, and politics, as well as individual agency and experience, how might it also do so through engaging the multiple ways that “care” braids life and death? How might bioarchaeology “rethink care” as phenomenon, relation, practice, politics, and ethics? How might this work require bioarchaeologists to “care differently” in their studies of the past, in the research decisions they make, and in their present-day engagements? Contributions may concern care practices and care in the past, including relations of care between humans, as well as human: non-human relations. We especially welcome contributors to consider present-day relations between researchers, descendant communities, landscapes and the dead; practices of curation and care; and the ways care shapes bioarchaeological knowledge production practices. Contributors may also critically analyze the ways care-centered work might transfigure traditional models of science, in alignment with new materialist, STS, and “heart-centered” archaeological approaches to knowledge production and bioarchaeological storytelling. Moreover, we welcome papers that meld traditional bioarchaeological approaches with archival, spatial, archaeological, zooarchaeological, and mortuary archaeological methods. Topic editors: Tony Chamoun, Alanna Warner-Smith, Jordi Rivera Prince Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/80481/care-full-bioarchaeologies--rethinking-care-through-bioarchaeological-approaches