Reconsidering sex and gender in relation to health and disease in bioarchaeology

Abstract

As an interdisciplinary field that integrates historical, ethnographic, archaeological, and biological data, bioarchaeology is well positioned to contribute to understandings of the health of past peoples in their socio-cultural contexts. Recently, following a longstanding trend in archaeology, many bioarchaeologists have begun to productively engage with concepts of sex, gender, and to a lesser extent, sexuality, particularly in relation to issues of health and disease. In response, this review interrogatively and synthetically surveys recent bioarchaeological work on this nexus, querying how bioarchaeologists theorize sex and gender, how they operationalize these concepts relative to health and disease, and the relative merits of these approaches. Within this, the review focuses on studies addressing metabolic disease, trauma and violence, infectious disease, and overall health (e.g., frailty). Throughout, the review highlights how theoretically informed bioarchaeological data can be used to further elucidate the biosocial factors that shape past patterns of health. It also highlights the distinct insights generated from this scholarship, as well as the unresolved questions, methodological difficulties, and theoretical tensions facing it. The aim throughout is to give future scholars novel, social theory-informed, and operationalized theoretical frameworks and interpretive devices that can be used to answer these questions and resolve these conflicts within bioarchaeology.