TY - JOUR
T1 - Sketchbook archaeology
T2 - Bodies multiple and the archives they create
AU - Novak, Shannon A.
N1 - Funding Information:
My gratitude to Meredith Ellis, Lauren Hosek, and Alanna Warner-Smith for their enthusiasm and encouragement to revive and publish this piece, and to Tony Chamoun, whose keen eye and close reading are unprecedented. I thank Sabrina Agarwal and Alexis Boutin for their invitation to present a version of this work on their SAA panel and, more recently, the valuable feedback provided by participants on the SHA panel “Excavating Bodies in the Archives.” I am especially appreciative of the thoughtful comments and encouraging words offered by Lynn Meskell and three anonymous reviewers. The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by a series of Appleby-Mosher grants from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University.
Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2022.
PY - 2022/6
Y1 - 2022/6
N2 - Archaeological bodies and their afflictions have multiplied in recent years, along with the specialists who study them. The result is a cascade of data, much of it difficult to reconcile. I argue that variable enactments of disease, rather than reflecting an epistemological disconnect or difference in scale, engender ontological gaps. To pursue these malleable matters, I trace the proliferation of “cancer” from the Spring Street Presbyterian Church burial vaults (1820–1850) in Manhattan. To explore the struggles involved in making many things one, I consider emergent multiplicities of this “disease” within specialists’ laboratories, archival records, and the writing process. Rather than force these different cancers to cohere, or make one “win” based on disciplinary domain (science/humanities) or hierarchy of substance (bone/paper), I rely on Stengers’s (2018) ecology of partial connects. The outcome is not a rubric of knowledge gained, but a sketchbook of lessons learned with bodies multiple along the way.
AB - Archaeological bodies and their afflictions have multiplied in recent years, along with the specialists who study them. The result is a cascade of data, much of it difficult to reconcile. I argue that variable enactments of disease, rather than reflecting an epistemological disconnect or difference in scale, engender ontological gaps. To pursue these malleable matters, I trace the proliferation of “cancer” from the Spring Street Presbyterian Church burial vaults (1820–1850) in Manhattan. To explore the struggles involved in making many things one, I consider emergent multiplicities of this “disease” within specialists’ laboratories, archival records, and the writing process. Rather than force these different cancers to cohere, or make one “win” based on disciplinary domain (science/humanities) or hierarchy of substance (bone/paper), I rely on Stengers’s (2018) ecology of partial connects. The outcome is not a rubric of knowledge gained, but a sketchbook of lessons learned with bodies multiple along the way.
KW - Bioarchaeology
KW - cancer
KW - data
KW - multiple ontologies
KW - slow science
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U2 - 10.1177/14696053221102235
DO - 10.1177/14696053221102235
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85130261388
SN - 1469-6053
VL - 22
SP - 212
EP - 232
JO - Journal of Social Archaeology
JF - Journal of Social Archaeology
IS - 2
ER -