More Than Bones: Rethinking the Material Traces of Human Lives

For a discipline fundamentally concerned with people, archaeology has long relied on a surprisingly narrow definition of what constitutes the human body in the past. Human remains, in most archaeological and heritage contexts, effectively mean bones. Occasionally teeth and cremated material. But much of what bodies actually produce, shed, and leave behind falls outside these dominant categories and, as a result, outside many of our analytical priorities and ethical frameworks. My recent paper in World Archaeology, More than bones: rethinking ethics and epistemologies of bodily exuviae in archaeology, reflects on this imbalance. It brings together a range of what can be termed bodily exuviae, coprolites, dental calculus, material traces of bodily processes, and suggests that we take them seriously, both analytically and ethically. It has been encouraging to see that the paper is already among the journal’s most-read articles over the past 12 months, which hopefully indicates that people are interested in this perspective.

At one level, the argument is straightforward, bodies are not just skeletons. They are dynamic, and entangled with their environments in ways that produce a wide array of material traces. Coprolites offer direct insights into diet, parasites, microbiomes, and health; dental calculus preserves micro-remains reflecting everyday activities and exposures; residues on artefacts capture bodily presence in spaces long after visible remains are gone. In many ways, these materials are closer to lived experience than the skeleton itself. Exuviae are also excellent examples of the importance of multiproxy approaches – they are capsules that capture lots of different evidence categories from physical to molecular, and that evidence is often unique.

And yet, despite decades of methodological development, archaeology still often orients itself around traditional evidence categories. We continue to structure research designs, publications, teaching, around what are, ultimately, inherited classifications. If we are interested in diet and subsistence, why do we study animals, plants, ceramics, skeletal isotopes, separately? And why do we not take coprolites seriously, when they provide some of the most detailed evidence relating to diet and heath in the past? If we want a complete picture, we need to consider all the evidence together. Even where multiproxy approaches are widely advocated (and I have argued for their importance extensively) the integration is not always as transformative as it should be. Some types of data are seen as an add on, in frameworks that still privilege certain kinds of evidence as primary (looking at you, genetics). As a discipline we have expanded what we can analyse without fully rethinking how we value different kinds of evidence.

Part of what I try to do in the paper is push back against that hierarchy. But in doing so, I also found myself confronting something slightly uncomfortable about my own position. Earlier in my career, I have made the argument that coprolites and similar materials posed fewer ethical concerns than skeletal remains. At the time, this felt like a pragmatic and reasonable stance. It reflected how these materials were generally perceived and treated within the discipline; bones were sensitive, human, requiring care and consultation; faeces, even when clearly human in origin, were not. Looking back, I think that position says more about disciplinary culture than about the materials themselves. If the concern is a material connection to a person, then it is not immediately obvious why bones should occupy a fundamentally different category. The distinction rests, to a large extent, on cultural emphasis, on the fact that we are conditioned to see bones as human in a way that mineralised or transformed exuviae are not. I am not convinced that this is a universal way of thinking, either in the present, or in the past, and the paper gives several examples where exuviae have strong cultural importance.

That said, my own thinking has not simply flipped from one position to another. It has become more complicated, and more personal. Two experiences in particular have shifted how I think about these issues. The first was having children. The depth of emotional connection that comes with parenthood is something I don’t think I could fully comprehend beforehand. It makes the idea that a body, or parts of it, could persist and be handled, studied, or curated by others feel very different. The second was the death of my dad. Going through the processes surrounding death, funeral arrangements, decisions about burial, brought into focus how strongly people connect memory to physical remains. There is something about the skeleton, about the bounded physical presence, that acts as a powerful anchor for grief and remembrance. If anything, these experiences have strengthened my conviction that we need to think more carefully about our assumptions. If we are concerned with material connections to past persons, then it is difficult to justify why some forms of those connections are treated as ethically significant and others largely ignored. We cannot ignore the fact that different materials carry profoundly different meanings for people, both in the past and the present.

This is, I think, where the discussion becomes most productive. Rather than flattening everything into a single category or maintaining the current inconsistencies, we need to be explicit about why distinctions are made. At present, there is often a disconnect between what we know, scientifically and analytically, about these materials, and how we treat them in practice. Coprolites, dental calculus, and other exuviae are frequently analysed, destructively sampled, with relatively little ethical reflection, even as they yield increasingly intimate information about individuals and communities through advancing techniques. Skeletal remains are afforded a level of ethical consideration that is absolutely justified, but not always critically examined in relation to other materials. Bringing these strands together means confronting both the limits of our existing frameworks and the depth of human attachment to certain forms of material remains.

More broadly, this connects to ongoing questions about how archaeology defines its object of study. If we are serious about multiproxy approaches then that commitment needs to extend beyond method into epistemology and ethics. It is not enough to add more lines of evidence; we need to rethink how evidence is valued and integrated. Bodily exuviae sit right at the centre of this challenge. They force us to think relationally, to confront ambiguity, and to recognise that the boundaries between body, material, and environment are less clear-cut than our disciplinary categories suggest. Exuviae also prompt more uncomfortable questions about why we care about some materials more than others, and what those hierarchies reveal about archaeology itself. If nothing else, I hope this encourages a degree of productive discomfort with the categories we continue to rely on, not to discard them entirely, but to recognise them as historically contingent ways of organising a much more complex reality, and to ask more honestly what it means to study the material traces of human lives.