Paper short abstract:

Teaching biological anthropology means students unknowingly working with the skeletons of individuals who likely did not consent to their post-mortem use. This paper proposes an osteobiographical method to acknowledge the difficult truths inherent in biological anthropological epistemology.

Paper long abstract:

Teaching biological anthropology in the 21st century means having to acknowledge numerous difficult truths within the classroom. Disciplinary pedagogy is necessarily built on the use of skeletal remains to teach about human morphological variation through time and space. Students are expected to learn through working with skeletons that were obtained from a global bone trade that only became illegal in the 1980s. Universities, medical schools and individual students were able to buy, for educational purposes, the remains of individuals who likely did not consent to the use of their body after death. The use of these skeletons in the present day leads to challenging discussions with students regarding the provenance of the individuals and the ethical issues that come about due to the continued use of such human remains. This paper proposes a method of developing a more transparent way of teaching biological anthropology to acknowledge and address the difficult truths highlighted by such discussions with students. It is proposed that through the development of osteobiographies of these anatomical collections we can create a more ethical, critical and trauma-informed pedagogy of skeletal variation and human evolution. The object of this work is to create a transparency about the methods we use and the individuals we teach with to provide a starting point for further discussion around the difficult epistemology of the discipline.