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- Convenors:
-
Effie Gemi-Iordanou
(University of Manchester)
Rhiannon Pettitt
Robert Matthew (University of Manchester)
Stephen Gordon (University of Manchester)
Ellen McInnes (University of Manchester)
- Location:
- Wills G25
- Start time:
- 19 December, 2010 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
This session aims to locate the concept of healing within the wider context of human activity and belief. Using a theoretically led understanding of performance, religion and materiality, we hope to re-examine the social, economic and political contexts of medical practice.
Long Abstract:
Archaeological investigations into medicine and healing practices traditionally favour systemic and processual approaches and methodologies, such as the evolution of disease, skeletal pathology, and the chemical properties of plant-matter. Whilst informative, these approaches alone do not articulate the lived-in world of the people or things in question.
Medicine can be considered a 'science', grounded in the material, observable world. Yet outside the modern western world, health and the treatment of disease are understood in many different ways. Incantations, séances, and acts of scapegoating are examples of performative techniques often used to tame supernatural forces and 'heal' fractures in people and society. Apotropaic amulets, charms and surgical tools are material manifestations of such medicinal processes. We consequently wish to consider a number of themes. How were medical practitioners or sufferers of ill-health and disability perceived by the wider community? Can healing performances be observed in the archaeological record? And where does the distinction between science and religion lie?
For this session we encourage participants to consider a more theoretical and integrated analysis of medicine, medical practitioners and their patients. We would be interested to receive papers which evaluate the relationship between the socio-religious and physical processes of healing, disease prevention and body maintenance. We also welcome participants who seek to assess the role of the scientific method within the wider theoretical framework and who try to reconcile the methodological divide.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Ellen McInnes (University of Manchester) Rhiannon Pettitt
Paper short abstract:
This paper forms an introduction to this session and a review of the archaeological approaches to medicine, healing and performance.
Paper long abstract:
With the majority of cultures employing some form of practice to restore or maintain a person's health, the practice of medicine and healing often forms an important part of 'being in the world'. Each culture creates such practices from and within their own social contexts and consequently there is huge variation in the manifestation of medicine and healing. With some societies we may find healing and medicine integrated with religion and religious practices. Medical practice can often be akin to, or indeed indivisible from ritualized acts. Even with the modern day dislocation and confinement of medical practices to clinics and hospitals, health related body maintenance and cleanliness still permeate everyday tasks. This paper aims to illustrate the variety of forms to which such knowledge and practices takes, whilst also deconstructing the science bounded view of medicine which dominates the western world. This paper will also review past and current themes involving healing and medicine. In particular, noting continuation and divergence from the 1998 TAG session 'The Archaeology of Medicine'.
Patricia Baker (University of Kent)
Paper short abstract:
The core question of this paper asks how the indigenous populations of Rome’s three Spanish provinces appropriated Graeco-Roman medical philosophies and practices into their own healing traditions after the area was colonised by the Romans. By examining the design and deposition of medical instruments multi-variant beliefs and customs will be explored to see how the exchange and assimilation of knowledge between societies with different ideologies affected medical systems in Hispania.
Paper long abstract:
Roman medicine can be explored from many critical angles because information survives in the skeletal, archaeological and literary records. Literary examinations have evinced that differing views existed about health amongst ancient medical writers who lived in the same region and period. Surprisingly, studies of the material remains of medical tools, with a rare few exceptions, not only ignore the variations in medical thoughts, but have favoured a cultural historical approach to instrument identification and distribution that are informed by modern understandings of surgical procedures, promoting an unjustified impression that beliefs about health became identical throughout the empire. It is necessary to move beyond this assessment of material to one whose critical, theoretically-informed methodology is sensitive to the context of artefacts to see how cultural beliefs affected such concepts as health, disease and the body.
Archaeological remains are key to understanding past medical practices, particularly in the provinces, where few literary references exist. The core question of this paper asks how the indigenous populations of Rome's Spanish provinces appropriated Graeco-Roman medical philosophies into their own healing traditions after the area was colonised by the Romans. By examining the design and deposition of instruments multi-variant beliefs and customs will be explored to see how the exchange of knowledge between societies with different ideologies affected medicine in Hispania. The project resonates with current post-colonial studies of life in the Roman provinces, gives greater attention to Roman-period medical archaeology and provides a case study for finding beliefs about medical practices in the archaeological record.
Annette Frölich (University of Copenhagen)
Paper short abstract:
Medical instruments, among archaeological artifacts, from first millennium, excavated from Danish offering-bogs, and from Uppåkra and Helgö, in Sweden; shows that the society in Roman Iron Age Scandinavia treated wounded warriors; and medical treatment (offerings?) took place within cultic areas.
Paper long abstract:
In the geographical area of Southern Scandinavian we have no written sources informing us about medical treatment or care in the societies in the first millennium. All our knowledge is based on interpretation of archaeological excavated artifact-material.
Re-evaluation has identified medical instruments, among previous excavated archaeological artifact - material, dating to the Roman Iron Age. Artifacts excavated from six Danish war booty offering-bogs, shows that the society in Roman Iron Age Scandinavia cared for and treated wounded warriors. In the paper are given examples concerning types of identified surgical instruments, excavation contexts and for what kind of treatments the instruments could have been used.
Additional, my re-interpretation of archaeological material from Uppåkra, Helgö and Birka in Sweden, shows medical artifacts excavated about fifty years ago and dated to the first millennium. More exact dating is unfortunately not possible. The newly identified instruments prove that medical treatment has been carried out and that the theories behind the performed treatment followed contemporary medical ideas of Southern Europe. The deposition location of the excavated instruments shows that some medical treatment may have been carried out within a cultic/holy site. It was however necessarily not only medical treatment that was executed but perhaps also ceremonial performed offering of humans or maybe animals, or both, which took place at the site. The medical equipment for caring out both purposes is equal.
Effie Gemi-Iordanou (University of Manchester)
Paper short abstract:
This paper aims to discuss a more integrated approach to the discussion of the social function of medicine in the Aegean Bronze Age, focusing on the identity and the social roles of the actors involved in healing practices and how these roles were renegotiated by the act of healing.
Paper long abstract:
The necessity and practice of medicine is interlinked with human existence. The notion of medicine and healing is discussed in Aegean archaeology to a large extent, focusing mostly on the medical uses and properties of certain plants, such as saffron, and the connection of healing practices with the worship of the Goddess. In that way, current research has not expanded to incorporate medicine within the wider social structure and determine the roles of the actors involved.
This paper seeks to address the missing elements from the study of Aegean medicine, posing questions that deal with social roles fulfilled by the healers and the healed; how that influenced both their respective status as well as the quality of the treatments; the potential differences between treatments offered from and by people of different social strata; the various functions of the religious element in healing practices.
Johanna Bergqvist (Inst. of archaeology and the history of antiquity, Lund university)
Paper short abstract:
This paper focuses on medical-surgical and hygienic artifacts from Swedish Cistercian monasteries. In comparing materials from male and female institutions, interesting differences between the two are revealed. The author suggests it reflects gendered attitudes to the body and its well being.
Paper long abstract:
In studying leech craft and medicine an important aspect is to try to discern not only the wielders, but also those who received their treatments. Osteological studies is one way to do this, but also the medical artifacts (i.e. instruments and other equipment) can to a certain extent be used to attain this.
Archeological materials from medieval monasteries and nunneries may be such a material. The highly regulated lifescapes and gender differentiated habitats of these institutions provide an attractive backcloth on which we can project the material culture in our attempts to analyze it. When it comes to the material culture of hygiene and leech craft the gender separated milieus gives an interesting opportunity to investigate similarities or possible differences between the two genders (monks and nuns).
Detailed work with the materials from Swedish Cistercian institutions has revealed differences in the artifact materials when it comes to both quality or diversification and quantity. Different possible explanations for the observed results will be considered, but as a conclusion the author suggests that it reflects disparities in the appreciations of how piously religious men and women in medieval Sweden related to their bodies and to privation in terms of ill health and deficient hygiene.
Stephen Gordon (University of Manchester)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the rhetoric of social disease in medieval England, and its manifestation in the form of the walking dead. I will examine the disparity between official, textual interpretations of revenant encounters and the practical, local methods for keeping pestilent bodies in the grave
Paper long abstract:
The concept of pestilence in the Middle Ages extended beyond the confines of the material, observable world. Outbreaks of disease and destruction were often seen as physical indexes of social unrest. Indeed, contravention of the prevailing habitus of the community (heresy; ill-timed death) was a degenerate social performance, the manifestation of which sometimes took the form of a walking, disease-spreading corpse. Utilising the revenant narratives in William of Newburgh's Historia Rerum Anlgicarum (c.1198), I will explore the interrelations between the greater, textual traditions of disease theory and the local, practical methods for assuaging the dangerous dead. That is, to what extent did a chronicler's educational background, their conception of the sinful body and knowledge of humeral theory influence the ways in which they understood and transcribed their informants' 'wonderful' tales? Moreover, how useful are the anthropological approaches when trying to analyse the local, practical methods of dealing with outbreaks of social unrest? The rationale behind decapitation and the staking of a body is absent from liturgical texts and, as the anthropological literature suggests, the contagious nature of the liminal body was an issue which was not confined to European sources alone. Thus, using a combination of literary and archaeological evidence, and with reference to the theories of practice advocated by Michel de Certeau, I will illustrate how smaller (practical) traditions could be improvised within the larger (textual) traditions of society to form idiosyncratic patterns ('rhetorics') of apotropaic response.
Alaba Simpson (Crawford University, Nigeria)
Paper short abstract:
This paper gives a first-hand account of the indigenous therapeutic involvement of Yoruba female elders of south western Nigeria in the post natal treatment of mothers and their newly delivered infants. The important position of the female dominated Yoruba indigenous non-consultative health care pattern is usually overlooked in discussions relating to modern day health enterprises.The paper notes that this traditional health care practice of body pressing nuances the dual conception of health, first as `well being' and then as `cosmetic'.
Paper long abstract:
The paper notes that despite the modernity that has brought with it unimpeded contact with foreign cultures, the long term practice of hot water body pressing (ara jijo) as a form of cultural body maintenance has persisted among the Yoruba till the present time. The paper notes with interest that this indigenous traditional health care practice of body pressing nuances the dual conception of health, first as `well being' and then as `cosmetic'. Usually dispensed by older female members of the family, hot water body pressing is believed by the Yoruba to carry with it, the essence of rejuvenation that ensures physical fitness as well as good carriage, following the stress of child delivery. Emphasis is given in the paper concerning the two categories of the recipients of ara jijo, an aspect that draws attention to the health related traditional believes surrounding the newly born child and the newly delivered mother. On the whole, the paper highlights the important position of the female dominated Yoruba indigenous non-consultative health care pattern that is usually overlooked in discussions relating to modern day health enterprises.
Bryn James (University of Manchester)
Paper short abstract:
An exploration of the materialisation of indigenous and Islamic beliefs within West African 'spiritual medicine'.
Paper long abstract:
An analysis of initial findings, and potential archaeological implications, following qualitative and quantitative study of curative material practices, amongst healing practitioners in Ghana. This research is focused upon ways in which systems of 'traditional' belief may be signified through inherited medical knowledge, curative assemblages, and associated material culture. Interpretation particularly centres around exploring the tensions inherent to the variable materialisations of indigenous and Islamic belief within West African 'spiritual medicine'.