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'.