The Bioarchaeology of Socio-Sexual Lives

This volume uses bioarchaeological remains to examine the complexities and diversity of past socio-sexual lives. This book does not begin with the presumption that certain aspects of sex, gender, and sexuality are universal and longstanding. Rather, the case studies within-extend from Neolithic Europe to pre-Columbian Mesoamerica to the nineteenth-century United States-highlight the importance of culturally and historically contextualizing socio-sexual beliefs and practices.

Pamela Geller is an assistant professor at the University of Miami (Coral Gables, FL) where she teaches in the Department of Anthropology and the Program in Women's and Gender Studies. She is also co-convener of the Queer Studies Research Group, an interdisciplinary research group supported by UM's Center for the Humanities. She is strongly committed to a study of the past that is inter- and intra-disciplinary. Her research interests include anthropological bioarchaeology and biohistory, feminist and queer studies, the materiality of identity, and thesocio-politics of archaeology. In bringing these areas of interest together, she investigates the role of bodily change in identity formation, focusing on markers resultant from intention (e.g,. cranial shaping, violent trauma) or habitual physical activities. She also examines modifications in conjunction with biological data (e.g., age, sex, health) and social information culled from burials, iconography, ethnohistory, and ethnography. Contextualized biocultural data indicate how past peoples literally embodied social identities that were culturally contingent, mutable, and complex.