Bioarchaeological Analyses and Bodies ― New Ways of Knowing Anatomical and Archaeological Skeletal Collections

Pamela K. Stone is the Director of the Foundation for Psychocultural Research-Hampshire College, Culture, Brain, and Development Program, and a senior faculty associate in the School of Critical Social Inquiry at Hampshire College, in Amherst, MA. She received her B.A. from Hampshire College (1990), and her M.A. (1995) and Ph.D. (2000) from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She would characterize herself as a broadly trained biocultural-bioarchaeologist. She began her anthropological career exploring evolutionary anthropology, and participating in research at Koobi Fora, Kenya. She then shifted to examining the ethics of skeletal analysis in the wake of the Native American Graves Repatriation and Protection legislation. She has worked at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History in the department of anthropology, and at the American Museum on Natural History. Her graduate research has included work on mortuary sites on the Arabian Peninsula, focusing on arid lands, paleopathology, and world-systems analysis. Her PhD on paleoobstetrics explored questions of interpretations and cultural bias in reading females in the past. Within this focus she examined skeletal remains from the American Southwest to consider the complex roles that women played in the past, beyond reproduction. She now focuses her work on understanding how biology is negotiated by culture at birth, and how life histories are explored through biology in death, offering ways to consider how culture narrates these stories. This type of research has shaped much of her work as she aims to illuminate patterns of morbidity and mortality for people on the margins through biological, cultural, and ethnographic information. She has applied her skeletal analysis skills to help in forensic investigations, and is a qualified expert witness. Her current work grapples with the ethical questions in the biological sciences and anthropological inquiry, with a particular focus on how inequality impacts women, children, and indigenous communities.