Abstract
Over the past 30 years, research in the anthropology of the body has documented the fact that many cultures do not view bodies as inherently individual, like in Western societies. Rather, bodies in many cultures have permeable boundaries, are internally partible with regard to the location of specific souls (animating essences) or other aspects of personhood, and are defined in terms of their relationships to objects and other people’s bodies. Bioarchaeologists have become increasingly aware of the need to engage such non-individualized perspectives of bodies over the past 15 years and considering fragmented bodies is one way to do so. Commingled, secondary contexts are particularly fertile ground for considering aspects of partibility, permeability, and relationally defined bodies. One challenge for considering embodiment in such contexts is identifying when fragmentation was intentional and thus reflects an attempt to manipulate bodies on the basis of partibility or permeability. Here, we use a spatial analysis, Ripley’s K function, to argue that bodies in a Maya mass grave were fragmented and manipulated by virtue of their partible, permeable, and relational nature. The case study highlights the fact that many elusive aspects of embodiment may be engaged in the material record in an empirically rigorous fashion through spatial analysis coupled with contextual data.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the editors for inviting our participation. All of the members of Proyecto Maya Colonial, in particular Drs. Prudence M. Rice, Don Rice, and Leslie Cecil, were particularly helpful throughout the various stages of this work. We would like to thank the faculty and students of Centro Universitario del Petén (CUDEP) in Guatemala, notably Lics. Rómulo Sánchez Polo, Rolando Torres, Ivo Romero, Mara Reyes, Edy Barrios, Aura Soto, and Tierso Morales, for their valuable contributions to this project. Timothy Pugh provided data from a test trench. This project could not have been possible without cooperation of IDAEH in Guatemala, in particular Lics. Boris Aguilar and Sheila Flores. Several conversations with Drs. Andrew Scherer, Gabriel Wrobel, Vera Tiesler, Andrea Cucina, and Rosaura Yépez about Maya bodies were particularly helpful as this manuscript was being written. Drs. Andrew Scherer and Melissa Schrift gave particularly constructive peer reviews of this manuscript. Dr. Della Cook gave similarly constructive comments and encouragement regarding an earlier version of this paper. Carmen Arendt and Felix A. Duncan provided unflagging support, for which W. N. D. is most grateful. Funding was provided in part by NSF doctoral dissertation improvement grant BCS 0125311. Any remaining errors are solely ours.
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Duncan, W.N., Schwarz, K.R. (2014). Partible, Permeable, and Relational Bodies in a Maya Mass Grave. In: Osterholtz, A., Baustian, K., Martin, D. (eds) Commingled and Disarticulated Human Remains. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7560-6_9
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