The Archaeology of Medicine and Healthcare

by Naomi Sykes (Editor), Julia Shaw (Editor)

Overview

The maintenance of human health and the mechanisms by which this is achieved – through medicine, medical intervention and care-giving – are fundamentals of human societies. However, archaeological investigations of medicine and care have tended to examine the obvious and explicit manifestations of medical treatment as discrete practices that take place within specific settings, rather than as broader indicators of medical worldviews and health beliefs. This volume highlights the importance of medical worldviews as a means of understanding healthcare and medical practice in the past.

The volume brings together ten chapters, with themes ranging from a bioarchaeology of Neanderthal healthcare, to Roman air quality, decontamination strategies at Australian quarantine centres, to local resistance to colonial medical structures in South America. Within their chapters the contributors argue for greater integration between archaeology and both the medical and environmental humanities, while the Introduction presents suggestions for future engagement with emerging discourse in community and public health, environmental and planetary health, genetic and epigenetic medicine, 'exposome' studies and ecological public health, microbiome studies and historical disability studies.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of World Archaeology.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781000591767
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	06/08/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	196
File size:	8 MB

About the Author

Naomi Sykes researches and teaches on human-animal-environment interactions over the past 10,000 years and their impact on the structure, ideology and impact of societies, past and present. She integrates archaeological evidence with data from biomolecular analyses and discourse in anthropology, cultural geography, (art) history and linguistics. She is author of Beastly Questions: Animal Answers to Archaeological Issues (2014).

Julia Shaw researches and teaches on South Asian environmental and socio-religious history and diachronic interfaces between environmental archaeology, ecological public health, and global climate-change activism. Current projects include work on interactions between lowland irrigated agriculture and upland forest-based lifeways in India, and diachronic attitudes towards urban wildlife, 'pests' and pesticides in the UK. She is author of Buddhist Landscapes in Central India (Routledge, 2007) and is writing a book on religion, ecology and medico-environmental worldviews in early India. She co-leads UCL Institute of Archaeology’s Heritage and Archaeology of Health and Medicine (HAHM) initiative.

Table of Contents

Introduction – New directions in the archaeology of medicine: deep-time approaches to human-animal-environmental care 1. Calculated or caring? Neanderthal healthcare in social context 2. Identifying the connection between Roman conceptions of ‘Pure Air’ and physical and mental health in Pompeian gardens (c.150 BC–AD 79): a multi-sensory approach to ancient medicine 3. From mine to apothecary: an archaeo-biomedical approach to the study of the Greco-Roman lithotherapeutics industry 4. Medical therapeutics and the place of healing in early medieval Culmen in Poland 5. Health beliefs, healing practices and medico-ritual frameworks in the Ecuadorian Andes: the continuity of an ancient tradition 6. Medicine in colonial Moquegua, Peru: plants, wine and Belén de Locumbilla 7. Enslavement and institutionalized care: the politics of health in nineteenth-century St Croix, Danish West Indies 8. Contagious objects: artefacts of disease transmission and control at North Head Quarantine Station, Australia 9. Vision and ocular health at a World War II internment camp

Editorial Reviews

Reviewer: Alain Touwaide, PhD (Ronin Institute)
Description: This is a collection of nine articles previously published in 2018 in an archaeological journal that may have been overlooked by the history of medicine community. The book focuses on archaeological traces of medical practice as indicators of non-explicit concepts (what the introduction calls the "worldview") that are telling about the societies whose medical archeological traces are examined within.
Purpose: According to the book, "This volume highlights the importance of medical worldviews as a means of understanding healthcare and medical practice in the past," with the understanding that these "worldviews" can be perceived through the archaeological traces of practice.
Audience: The audience of this collection of essays includes archaeologists, especially bioarchaeologists, and historians of medicine. The audience can be expanded to include practitioners and healthcare professionals as the book excavates the depth of medical practice and constitutes an almost epistemological account of medical practice.
Features: The essays/chapters cover many topics from a broad range of time periods and civilizations, from the Neanderthal age to the 20th century, passing through the ancient Mediterranean, Pompeii gardens, and the uses of minerals; the Middle Ages; the Andean traditions and colonial Peru; 19th-century politics of health in the West Indies; the quarantine centers for immigrants in 19th-20th century Australia; and vision and ocular health in WWII camps in the U.S. The common denominator to this great variety of topics is the materiality of practice and its traces (archaeology) as vehicles of discourses not necessarily clear at first glance in the physical analysis of objects. The perspective is then inverted, going from the conceptual context of the objects, to viewing the objects in a theoretical, nonexplicit frame, transforming the objects into sources for the history of medicine.
Assessment: Though potentially of interest to a broad range of scholars interested in the history of medicine, this is a difficult theoretical work about the epistemology of sources for the history of medicine. This book is complex, bringing together archaeological technicalities and theoretical reflection on the status of the archaeological object as a transmitter of medical knowledge. It is a book with a unique approach worthy of consideration as it promotes venturing into uncharted territories of experimental interpretations of archaeology. It is a difficult work, though certainly interesting and stimulating.

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