New Approaches to Medical Archaeology and Anthropology: Practitioners, Practices and Patients A conference to be held at Magdalene College 18--19th November 2000 List of Speakers | Abstracts | Announcement and Information Abstracts Patricia Baker Scholars who specialise in the archaeology of Roman medicine have relied upon the literature of Roman medical writers, such as Celsus, Soranus and Galen, to identify the intended functions of the material remains of medical instruments. There seems to be an understanding in this area of study that one cannot examine the archaeological remains without a juxtaposition to the classical literary sources. This idea is stated by Salazar in her philological study of the treatment of war wounds in Greek and Roman literature: she says for ancient medicine 'In addition to the literary evidence, there is also a fairly large amount of archaeological evidence. Although on its own this material would be open to numerous, contrasting conjectures, it can be used along with the literary evidence and in comparison with it (2000: 230). To be fair Salazar is a philologist, but her understanding of how archaeological material cannot say much on its own is based on the system of examination as it stands. Not only is the field limited by its literary based approach, but it is further limited by the choice of ancient literary sources used in the comparison of medical instruments. The literature upon which most scholars are dependent upon making their interpretations is that which presents a 'rational', as westerners would understand it, approach to curing illness, one that is not hindered by religion or magic. Other literary sources, such as Pliny's Natural History discuss treatments that are not 'rational' , implying that there were other understandings of medical care in the Roman world. The archaeological examinations that have been made are not only limited by their dependence upon the literature, but by the literature that is chosen to help explain medical practice and the function of the tools. What is presented is a modern western rational approach to medicine that was homogeneous throughout the empire, but it may not be reflective of the ancient situation. The archaeological material can be studied on its own to determine more about the practice of medical care throughout the Roman empire. The empire consisted of numerous societies, each with different cultural understandings and practices that did not necessarily conform to Roman (here meaning those in Italy) practices. As the body and medical healing are culturally defined, it is important to question whether there is evidence of these differences not mentioned in the ancient literature, but that may be drawn from contextual archaeological studies. The remains of finds from both civilian and military sited from throughout the empire will be examined to see if there were other tools that might be ascribed a 'non-rational' function and if the tools already recognised by archaeologists might have served other purposes. Moreover, the deposition of the instruments can be examined to see if there were different means of disposal that display ideas about the body, disease and treatment. In this way we can break down the notion of a single body of medical thought and practice in the Roman world. Gilly Carr While medicine, medical practices and medical instruments in Roman Britain are well known, almost nothing is known about medicine in Iron Age Britain. This paper examines the evidence for divination, divination tools and their use during this period in determining auspicious times for sacrifice. I will also examine the evidence for artefacts connected with shamanism and hallucinogenics, and their role in healing during this period. Chris Knusel The crystal ball, so popularly associated with fortune telling and mystical vision is identified as `symbolic of the divine world of light before the creation of the earth' in Fergusons (1961: 175) Signs and Symbols in Christian Art. It is clear from the variety of contexts in which the crystal ball is found that the object is polythetic in Clark's (1968) sense. This contribution examines the funerary contexts of the crystal ball and traces possible early meanings from them. References Clarke, D. 1968. Analytical Archaeology. Methuen, London. Ferguson, G. 1961. Signs and Symbols in Christian Art. Oxford University Press, London. Charlotte Roberts There is both historical and skeletal evidence to suggest that tuberculosis has plagued populations for many thousands of years. World-wide, tuberculosis today has been claimed to be responsible for more morbidity and mortality than any other bacterial pathogen, and it is believed that one third of the world's population is, or has been, infected with the tubercle bacillus (Young, 1998:515). The World Health Organisation (2000) estimates a world total of 8.08 million cases, and claimed that if it received funding equivalent to one jet fighter then the global incidence of tuberculosis would halve (Grange, 1999:26). The confounding factors associated with its occurrence are wide ranging, difficult to measure and hard to separate out (Bates, 1994). Nevertheless, this is what makes the disease so fascinating and thought provoking and a disease that has attracted artists' and authors' attention throughout history. Clearly, tuberculosis has been with us for several thousand years with frequency rates today being influenced by specific aetiological factors. Consideration of this disease in the past has focused mainly on using solitary pieces of evidence to reconstruct its history. For example, biological anthropologists have focused on the skeletal evidence (e.g. Canci et al., 1996), and historians have used documentary sources (e.g. Bryder, 1988). Clearly, the most rewarding way to approach any disease in the past is to consider multiple forms of evidence, putting the data in clinical context and focusing on living population's concepts of how and why the disease occurs within a specific group of people or an individual. This paper uses palaeopathological evidence for tuberculosis as its base to consider the disease's history but considers some of the many variables that influence the occurrence and courses of the infections, and a population's experience (westernised and non-westernised). Biological anthropology, archaeology, history, iconography, medical anthropology and clinical science are all disciplines considered to provide a more holistic view of what tuberculosis meant to people in the past, particularly in the later and post-Medieval periods. References Bates, B. 1994 Bargaining for life. A social history of tuberculosis 1876-1938. Pennsylvania, University Press Bryder, L. 1988 Below the magic mountain. Oxford, Clarendon Press Canci, A., Minozzi, S. and Borgognini Tarli, S. 1996 New evidence of tuberculous spondylitis from Neolithic Liguria, Italy. Int. J. Osteoarchaeology 6:497-501 Grange, J.M. 1999 The global burden of tuberculosis. In J.D.H.Porter and J.M. Grange, (eds): Tuberculosis: an interdisciplinary perspective. London, Imperial College Press, pp. 3-31 World Health Organisation 2000 Global tuberculosis control. Geneva, World Health Organisation Young, D.B. 1998 Blueprint for the white plague. Nature 393:515-516 Simon Stoddart Shamans have been readily identified in ethnographic contexts. How easy is it to identify shamanistic activities from prehistoric material culture ? A clearly demarcated area in the centre of a prehistoric mortuary complex in Gozo provided a potential context for the identification of a mortuary shaman. A bundle of stick figurines and other associated artefacts appear to have been strongly associated with a ritual specialist of the transition between life and death. The paper will examine the identification of the practitioner behind these artefacts and how controlled context can inform the archaeologist. Ralph Anderson The ancient Greeks did not shy away from using magic to do their rivals down. Some of their methods have left visible traces in the archaeological record in the form of folded and pierced lead curse tablets and mutilated 'voodoo dolls', often buried in the graves of the 'untimely' dead. This paper argues that, while clearly intended to harm the target, such curses played an important therapeutic role for their users in handling the experience of the acute fear which was a by-product of encounters with the highly intimidating Athenian legal system. To see how this works, we must pay attention not only to the metaphors employed in the texts of the curse tablets, which tap into Greek notions of the constitution of the human self, but also to the techniques of manufacture of the figurines and tablets, and the ways in which these interact with the curser's self to free it from a disabling and constraining condition of chronic fear. If we do this, it will become apparent that the actions involved in making a figurine or tablet, and the place chosen for its deposition, are vital in giving the curse its feeling of effectiveness and in its restorative effect on the consciousness of the curser. Francoise Barbira Freedman In the Upper Amazon, shamanic medicine, besides the treatment of illness, involves the wider management of the relations between people, animals, plants and cosmic elements in a forest environment perceived as cosmos. The cosmologies found in the region, although they are diversified (axis mundi, layers, cosmic serpent), are unified by a distinctive material culture based on hunting that all shamans share and that enables them to constitute inter-ethnic networks extending across national borders in Western Amazonia. In this paper I first use slides to present the paraphernalia of Upper Amazon shamanism, which only Tessman (1936) has described in a general illustrated ethnography of the material culture in the Upper Amazon. Shamanic pipes, the size of which is an indication of their owner' status, medicine pouches, leaf rattles, nut necklaces and various power objects are all used with the action of blowing tobacco smoke and with reference to tobacco, with or without the use of other psychotropic plants such as Ayahuasca (Banisteriopsis caapi and additives). Shamanic healing has mostly been analysed as metaphorical. Making use of Viveiros de Castro's ideas on 'perspectivism' and animism in Amazonia, I argue that the shaman's tools, most particularly tobacco, offer clues to look at the relation between agency and metaphor in the medicine of Upper Amason shamans. Tobacco, which is also a potent hallucinogen (Wilbert) mediates between forest and cosmos, hunting and shamanic practice, plant teachers and the plant and animal worlds. In the forest-cosmos perceived as a transformative matrix, it acts as support of the shape-shifting through which shamans, male or female, actualise the subjectivities of non-human beings as 'medicine'. David Zeitlyn Studies of divination have focused on the objects, verses and other aspects of divinatory technology but tend to only include schematic/paradigm accounts of how these are used. In part this is because it is hard to study the processes through which divinatory objects and understandings are deployed. This paper reports an experiment in using computer based simulation to gather data from a large number of divination sessions with different diviners (base on field research among Mambila in Cameroon). A version of the simulation and other background papers is available from http://era.anthropology.ac.uk/Divination Vivienne Lo Spirit of Stone: Technical Considerations in the Treatment of the Jade Body With the pervasive influence of wuxing (five agent - wood, fire, earth, metal and water) theories of generation and conquest in Han political, philosophic and scientific thought it is easy to overlook the importance of the agent shi (stone) in early Chinese attitudes to the mysteries of life and death. Stone, in its many forms of rock and mineral, played a central role in the prevention of decay as well as in various forms of physical alchemy aimed at prolonging vitality and strength in life and even beyond death. From Neolithic times the finest qualities of stone are found in crafted jades, and utilised lavishly in burial culture. By Western Han times, certain medical texts that describe self-cultivation, take jade as the metaphor for an idealised alchemy of body essences. They describe ways to nurture a 'jade body', a body replete with strength, vitality and longevity, through techniques of self-cultivation. In the ensuing centuries we can see in medical literature attempts to canonise a similar body as the target of sophisticated medical attention. Any change in perceptions of the body necessitates equivalent changes in medical technology. We can see both archaeological and documentary evidence of many kinds of medical stones - - ritual stones for quelling the demons of sickness, lancing stones for petty surgery and for hot-pressing the body's aches and pains. But treatment of the jade body demanded something more than incantations or lancing, bleeding and cauterising. Ultimately stone was superseded by the more tensile metal, but there is no archaeological evidence to support these documentary accounts. It is against the essential background of attitudes to stone - - its importance in the pursuit of long life and immortality - - that this paper reviews and collates documentary and archaeological evidence of medical stones and their different applications. Charlotte Hardman The first part of the paper will focus on how the Lohorung ( a tribe living in the hills of Eastern Nepal) distinguish between those aspects of the material and natural world that can be known by a ritual names and those that cannot. This section will look at those with ritual names which can be used as medical instruments, how they are understood within the culture and how used in general terms in healing rituals. The second part of the paper looks at what are essentially the main preparatory tools and medical instruments of the ritual healers, their methods of diagnosis, the healing ritual and how the material of the constructed shrine creates the circumstances for healing. This section will look in detail at only a few of the most important objects that are used in healing rituals (eg chickens, beer, a pig) but will show how their use reveals Lohorung attitudes to health and disease and their view of the body. The final section will suggest some interpretations of the rituals: as ways to manage illness and misfortune; their expressive aspect and the meaning of the symbols involved; and their performative and creative aspect. Barbara Potrata The New Agers are usually seen as the adherents to the unconventional spirituality and as the practitioners of alternative healing practices. Even though they belong to a particular religious subculture, their healing practices enjoy wide acceptance in dominant culture. For example, Brown (1997) claims that in 1997, Americans used 10 to 14 billions USD for alternative therapies. As a PhD candidate in social anthropology, I spent one year, between 1998-1999, in post-socialist Slovenia doing the fieldwork among the Slovene New Agers. In my paper I would like to present a New Age healing practice of shamanic sauna. I argue that even though the New Agers believe in the redemptive power of ancient knowledge, especially as preserved by the native people, the New Age shamanic sauna is in fact a New Age re-definition of the shamanic practices. As such, the practice of shamanic sauna is a re-enactment and re-affirmation of the New Age understanding of the humans and their position in the world, New Age ideas about body, health and illness. I intend to present this New Age understanding more in detail. The aim of experiencing shamanic sauna is to achieve a New Age goal, to attain personal transformation through four processes: the one of awakening, coming into contact with one's true self, achieving power and healing. The latter occurs corollary to personal transformation. The Slovene New Agers do use certain presumable shamanic tools and practices, such as shamanic drums, sauna tents, invocation of the ancestral spirits, chanting and the rituals of sacrifice. However, under the label of shamanic sauna, they also use other, non-shamanic tools and practices, such as energy pendants, re-birthing, and opening of bodily cakras and sufi dance, re-defining in this way a shamanic practice into a New Age one. Ann Starr Teratology is a troublesome concept. Witness its description in one justifiably respected American dictionary as the "biological study of the production, development, [and] anatomy...of monsters." For most people, "biological study of...anatomy" is one thing: it is medicine, founded as it is in the rational traditions of Western science, and unassailable as such. "Monsters" is quite another. Monsters arise from the sleepers in Goya prints, from the descriptions moderns find so fanciful in Pare, from Maurice Sendak stories. Monsters, whatever medicine wants to claim or do with them, arise from imagination, fear and metaphor. They are routinely tamed through literature, illustration, and parental reassurance. Verbal and visual images tame monsters because most people have no experience at all of the real thing. Therefore occasional exposure to their "reality" via the that most-trustworthy transmitter, the camera, challenges our ability to keep them in their place. Despite, however, the "unblinking truth" of the camera, even contemporary documentary photos of preserved fetal and infant specimens safely distance us from experience of the subject. While photographed "babies in bottles," as Susan Squire calls them, are used to generate fire-storms in public policy about abortion and genetic therapies, I suggest that contemporary documentary photographs are no more objective in their interpretations of this subject than completely unobserved images in other media, from whatever era. My paper, then, will examine contemporary medical images of abnormally developed infants and fetuses, considering them as documents about both medical and non-medical reactions to monstrosity as well. I will include some of my own observational, life-sized pencil and ink drawings of preserved fetal specimens and discuss them as another kind of evidence about the subject: "objective," but neither medical nor fanciful. Teratology; deformity; abnormality; handicap; monster. The spectrum of vocabulary used for the same human phenomena are based much more on imagery than on experience. Most people have encountered very few severely deformed people, let alone been in the pathology museum where preserved specimens might be found. The importance of images has always been paramount in cultural thinking about monsters. Even our most "objective" are overdue for inspection and analysis. Philip Crummy A remarkable grave of a British doctor or surgeon was discovered in 1996 at a high status funerary site at Stanway on the outskirts of Colchester. The doctor's grave was identified by the presence of thirteen surgical instruments. These consist of two scalpels, two double-ended hooks, a small saw, two pairs of forceps, a ligula, a set of three handled needles or points, and an unusual double-hooked instrument. The thirteenth instrument is too incomplete to deduce its original form. Other objects in the grave included a wooden gaming board with the playing pieces set out as if ready to play, a strange set of eight long thin metal rods, and a copper-alloy strainer bowl. Four of the rods are iron, and four are copper alloy. They are all the same shape, and there are two sizes. Currently two interpretations for the rods are favoured. One is that they were cauteries, and that they were employed in pairs of the same size and metal to allow the surgeon some choice over the 'speed' of the instruments he used. The other explanation for the rods is that they were cast or drawn in some way for divination. The strainer bowl is also of exceptional interest because, very unusually, a small lump of artemisia was preserved in its spout. The strainer bowl would have been used to prepare infusions, and the artemisia suggests that the last drink prepared in it was either medicinal or flavoured wine or beer. Jenny Blain This paper deals with magical/shamanistic practices within Northern European spirituality, as it is being reconstructed in the present day, drawing on archaeological and saga evidence. Shamanistic practices (known as 'seidr') are indicated in the Icelandic sagas: for instance, the Saga of Eric the Red includes descriptions of a seid-woman's clothing, staff, talisman pouch and the platform on which she sits to practice divination. Archaeological finds have included staffs and talisman pouches, one including several hundred seeds of the psychoactive plant henbane, and there is considerable evidence for seidr as involving altered consciousness states and spirit helpers. Seid-magical practices are referred to in the sagas with regard to divination and protection, and for personal attack, with some instances which can be described as 'socially constitutive', bringing elements of the community into balance. Most practitioners seem to have been women. Today's seid-workers extend their practices to healing, or bringing 'a person' into balance, and instances of today's seid-healing will be outlined. The paper examines some controversies over the practices, use or significance of artefacts, and implications of seidr in the past and present, including questions of whether seidr could have been conducted for healing, or whether it was regarded as 'evil magic'. Cursing and curing may be two sides of the same coin. Issues of the 'morality' of seid-workers, who act as mediators between human and spirit worlds, may be related to other contestations around shamanic or shamanistic practices, whether in the past or in seidr constructed for communities of post-modernity. Elisabeth Hsu How can medical anthropology contribute to the history and archaeology of medicine? Medical anthropology credits medical practice of other peoples its own rationale, and it points out that for assessing the efficiency of medical treatment, one has to consider the actors' own accounts and understanding (i.e. the insider's viewpoint or the 'emic' point of view). Medical anthropologists have also emphasised that, contrary to the profession's aims, Western biomedicine has in no society the monopoly over health care and that medical pluralism is the norm. The speaker is a medical anthropologist who has for several years worked with historians of Chinese medicine and religion, and this paper will report on some of the observations made in the course of it.