Today’s blog is written by ASM’s bioarchaeologist Dr. James Watson.

I was recently asked by archaeologists at the Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia Sonora (INAH: National Institute of Anthropology and History) to come to Hermosillo to analyze several prehistoric human skeletons that had been recently recovered from several archaeological investigations throughout the state.  Skeletal analysis is an important part of my job as a bioarchaeologist because it can tell us a great deal about the lives of past people.

We effectively ‘read’ the variation present in the human skeleton to estimate things like the age, sex, and height of the individual.  It can also inform us about patterns in health, disease, diet, behaviors, and population relationships and provide crucial information that compliments the artifcatual evidence archaeologists traditionally use to understand past human behaviors. Another set of behaviors that we can reconstruct from human skeletal remains is the actions of the relatives of the deceased during the burial process.  In this case, the analysis is less about understanding bone tissues and more about the circumstances, or context, in which the skeleton is recovered.

Context is the THE most important element for archaeologists to reconstruct the past.  In the case of human burials, context preserves the last rites enacted to send an individual on to the afterlife.  These often reflect important values in the lives of the family, community, or society as a whole and can be seen as physical evidence in the archaeological record in body treatment, position, orientation, and grave accompaniments as a few examples.  But this process is constructed by the living, for the dead, and can often reflect an idealized social persona.  These concepts can be observed today in our own decisions about treatment of the deceased during the wake and funeral, and in grave monuments.

Memorial to Rafaela C. Ochoa along the roadside to Trincheras, Sonora. Photo by Jim Watson, 2009.

On my way back from Hermosillo, I was struck by the numerous and highly variable descansos that I observed along the side of the highway, in both Sonora and Arizona.  Descansos are memorials placed by families near the location of a relative’s death, most often in traffic accidents.  It struck me that these also represent the same behaviors that bioarchaeologists try and reconstruct from burials and can be an important part of the grieving process at a location away from the grave.  The commonality of these along the highways of Mexico and much of the southwest US identify their importance at a societal level, but the variability observed in their constructions and the objects accompanying them reflect the ideals, values, sentiments and circumstances of the relatives and can form part of the reconstruction of social persona of the deceased at the location of death.

Human behavior is infinitely complex, and archaeologists do their best to reconstruct the behavior and lives of past peoples using the material objects they leave behind.  Mortuary behavior is one example of this complexity that is comprised of the ideology of a group exacted on the remains of an individual.