2023-03-01, BB- T. Trombley: A bioarchaeological approach to religious lifeways and deathways in...
Channel: Archaeological Research Facility, UC Berkeley
Date: 2023-03-01

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TITLE: Crossing the divide: A bioarchaeological approach to religious lifeways and deathways in medieval Santarém, Portugal

March 1, 2023
Speaker:  Trent Trombley

About: Bioarchaeology, the contextual and anthropological analysis of human skeletal remains recovered from historic and/or archaeological contexts, often seeks to elucidate the lived experience of everyday people of the past by reconstructing aspects of people's lifeways such as diet, activity, health and disease, identity, and growth/development. Yet despite bioarchaeology's emphasis on mortal remains, aspects of death, dying, and post-burial processes are typically de-emphasized, and conducted as part of mortuary archaeology or simply routine reporting rather than a worthwhile means of anthropological inquiry. This presentation seeks to bridge this life|death divide by focusing on the culmination of doctoral research carried out on a municipally-excavated medieval cemetery site in Santarém, central Portugal. Given the city's rich and complex history of differing politico-religious communities throughout the middle ages (c. 500 - 1500), we are afforded a unique opportunity to see how religious identity, as evidence by prescribed religious burial customs, explain some of the variation observed both in the livelihood and deadlihood of the city's residents. Results suggest that while religious identity explains little of the variation in the lifeways as reconstructed through traditional bioarchaeological techniques, tremendous differences were observed in the deathways (preservation and bodily integrity) between religious funerary groups. These results are interpreted within the context of urbanization, both in the Christian later middle ages as well as contemporary urbanization efforts, and how certain religious communities may be more subjected to post-mortem damage and careful excavation procedures.

00:00 Introduction
00:00 Talk
00:00 Questions