THE UNWRITTEN HISTORY OF MEDICAL TREATMENT: EVIDENCE FOR RITUAL-HEALERS AND THEIR ACTIVITIES
Channel: European Association of Archaeologists
Date: 21/03/2021

The capacity to act as a “healer” forms part of the social identity of a diverse range of uniquely specialized individuals cross-culturally who also perform a variety of other roles associated with transcendent ideologies, beliefs, and religion. They are ambivalent, capable of doing both good and ill. They defend the health and well-being of the individual and the community but, using the same knowledge, are also implicated in attacks on individuals and groups within and outside their communities. The ambivalence and the diversity of medico-religious healers in the recent ethnographic past and historically have made the identification of such individuals in the anthropo-archaeological record controversial. The argument presented here is that not only are such individuals identifiable in the archaeo-anthropological record, but that their practices disproportionately influence that record, acting as a powerful complement to historical sources for the development of medicine and medical knowledge. The evidence consists of the elaborate burials of such individuals as well as repeated funerary treatments of the dead.


Author(s): Knusel, Christopher (UMR 5199, Université de Bordeaux)