With Cane In Hand: Going Deeper Into A Bioarchaeology of Innovative Disability

Abstract

Impairment and disability are understudied and under-explored dimensions in bioarchaeological reconstruction of past lives. As methodology improves and bioarchaeologists continue to embrace new branches of social theory, in tandem with greater embrasure and application of evolutionary theory, the characteristic difficulties of studying the lives of impaired and disabled people in the past are not the barriers they once were. New approaches to the problematic paucity of information available at the surface level of archaeological remains have begun to allow deeper molecular and proteomic investigation of formerly invisible processes. Because of this opening of new avenues, traditional resistance to expanding research into disability in the past is no longer a tenable stance. Furthermore, as bioarchaeology engages with extended theories of evolution in human history and deep time, it is pertinent to address the great antiquity of impairment and disability survivorship as participant of the evolutionary history of the human lineage, rather than a static byproduct or an artifact of modernity. In accordance with an inclusive view of disabled lives as integrated in the processes and systems of human evolution, it is here proposed that disability itself represents a signature feature of the evolved plasticity characteristic of human beings at the embodied, communal, and cultural levels.