How People Lived Centuries Ago: This Volume Explores Their Identity

How did people live centuries ago? How did they see themselves? How were they perceived by others? Today, archaeology uses modern methods to examine skeletons, personal belongings, burial practices, material culture and social and spatial relationships. The book “Human Identities in the Archaeological Record: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from Late Antiquity to the Modern Period” shows how past identities can be reconstructed from this evidence.

“Identity is an extraordinarily timely topic,” says co-editor Jun.-Prof. Dr. Alice Toso of the University of Bonn’s Center for Archaeological Sciences. “We all experience identity as something shaped by belonging, difference, memory, social expectations, and personal decisions.” The scholar is fascinated by the question of how people in the past may have understood themselves and how they were perceived by others.

Of course, researchers can never fully understand people from the past. They must always be careful not to impose their own categories on them. “The possibility of reconstructing something of a person’s experiences, affiliations, or struggles after such a long time gives me goosebumps,” says the bioarchaeologist from the University of Bonn. “For me, this sense of human connection across centuries is one of the most powerful aspects of archaeological research.”

Co-edited by Annamaria Diana (Independent researcher, Ireland), Daniela Marcu-Istrate (Vasile Pârvan Institute of Archaeology, Romania), and bioarchaeologist Alice Toso (University of Bonn), “Human Identities in the Archaeological Record” brings together international perspectives on belonging, diversity, resilience, and otherness from Late Antiquity to the modern period.

Science Across Borders

Using innovative analytical methods, researchers can investigate what people ate, where they grew up and how their bodies were affected by disease, diet, work, and inequality. However, the editors emphasize the importance of a transdisciplinary approach: “Large datasets remain incomplete as long as they are not interpreted within the archaeological context, using historical evidence and incorporating social science theories”, says Diana.

Diet is an excellent example of the complexity of this research. “What a person ate depended not only on their personal preferences,” says Toso. Rather, it was also shaped by the landscape and the resources available there, as well as by religious regulations, agricultural practices, access to markets, political power, household structures, and social status.

Interpreting a burial is just as complex. “A grave does not simply express the identity of the deceased”, says Marcu-Istrate, senior researcher at the Vasile Pârvan Institute of Archaeology in Bucharest, “it also reflects the decisions of relatives, religious authorities, and the wider community.” Thus, the location, design, grave goods, and treatment of the body reflect the relationships between the individual, the community, and social institutions.

Which identities are concealed?

The fundamental question addressed by the book is how people understood themselves and others. But also, how these identities were expressed, negotiated, imposed, altered, or suppressed. “Every person is both unique and part of one or more communities” says Diana. The volume examines how individuality coexisted with collective affiliations based on religion, social status, occupation, ancestry, gender, origin, or political identity.

The researchers are asking how reliably identity can be reconstructed from material remains. Archaeological evidence is incomplete, and historical sources are often fragmentary and shaped by elite perspectives. Whose identity becomes visible, and who is forgotten or deliberately erased? “Archaeology can recover evidence of enslaved people, migrants, religious minorities, social outsiders, and communities that are absent from written history,” says Toso, who is also a member of the Cluster of Excellence “Bonn Center for Dependency & Slavery Studies” as well as the transdisciplinary research areas “Life & Health” and “Present Pasts.” “Reconstructing identity is therefore also an ethical responsibility.”

Drawing on case studies from Europe, America, Africa and Australia, the book illustrates how people and communities expressed, negotiated, and preserved their identities in various historical contexts. It is surprising how relevant these archaeological questions are today. Many of the chapters address migration, displacement, religious persecution, colonialism, and the suppression of cultural diversity. “The past reveals both the long history of these processes and the resilience of communities whose identities were preserved despite the pressure to conform”, says Marcu-Istrate.

Publication: “Human Identities in the Archaeological Record: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from Late Antiquity to the Modern Period,” Bloomsbury Academic, 288 pp., 46 black-and-white illustrations, 120 US-Dollar