








































Bioarchaeology International
Volume 3, Number 1: 1–15
DOI: 10.5744/bi.2019.1005

Copyright © 2019 University of Florida Press

Osteobiography: A Platform for 
Bio archae ol o gi cal Research
Lauren Hoseka* and John Robbb

aDepartment of Anthropology, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY 13244, USA
bDepartment of Archaeology, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3DZ, UK
*Correspondence to: Lauren Hosek, Syracuse University, 209 Maxwell Hall, Syracuse, NY 13244, USA 
e- mail: lrhosek@syr . edu

ABSTRACT Osteobiography provides a rich basis for understanding the past, but its conceptual framework has not been 
outlined systematically. It stands in conceptual opposition to a traditional statistical approach to bioarchaeol-
ogy modeled upon clinical studies in biomedicine, but is interdependent with it. As such, its position mirrors 
those of clinical case histories as opposed to statistical studies, participant- observation ethnography as opposed 
to quantitative sociology, and microhistory and biography as opposed to quantitative history. Such disciplinary 
comparisons provide a framework for exploring the strengths and weaknesses of osteobiography. It is not merely 
a tool for engagingly illustrating the “typical” life history as established statistically. Rather, it allows us to un-
derstand issues that population studies cannot explore. These include both analytical directions (exploring the 
complexity of deeply layered data, understanding the role of contingency in human lives, integrating osteolog-
ical and cultural evidence) and philosophical directions (the interaction of material and conceptual factors in 
the creation of human bodies, embodiment, the experience of time).

Keywords: life history; biography; theoretical approaches

 La osteobiografía ofrece una base rica para comprender el pasado, pero su marco conceptual no se ha delineado de 
manera sistemática. Se encuentra en oposición conceptual a un enfoque estadístico tradicional de la bioarqueología 
formado sobre estudios clínicos en biomedicina, pero es interdependiente de él. Su posición, como tal, refleja 
aquellos casos de historias clínicas opuestos a los estudios estadísticos, la etnografía de observación participa-
tiva opuesta a la sociología cuantitativa, y la microhistoria y la biografía opuestas a la historia cuantitativa. 
Semejantes comparaciones disciplinarias ofrecen un marco para explorar las fortalezas y debilidades de la oste-
obiografía. No es simplemente una herramienta para ilustrar de manera atractiva la historia “típica” de la vida 
según lo establecido estadísticamente. Más bien, nos permite entender las cuestiones que los estudios de población 
no pueden explorar. Estas incluyen direcciones analíticas (explorando la complejidad de datos en capas profun-
das, comprendiendo el papel de la contingencia en las vidas humanas, integrando la evidencia osteológica y cul-
tural) y direcciones filosóficas (la interacción de factores materiales y conceptuales en la creación de cuerpos 
humanos, encarnación, la experiencia del tiempo).

la historia de la vida; la biographía; los enfoques teóricos

Received 30 July 2018
Revised 4 January 2019

Accepted 5 January 2019



Introduction to the Special Issue: Bodies as Narratives2

“Osteobiography” is a concept that has become pop-
ular in recent years, but it remains poorly theorized 
and has not had systematic methodological explora-
tion. As it is currently used, it remains much as Saul 
(1972) originally formulated it: osteobiography in-
volves assembling all information available from the 
skeleton to create a life narrative for a single individ-
ual. This definition is certainly a stimulating starting 
point, but it does not do full justice to the concept’s 
potential. Why has the idea not grown and matured 
in the generation since it was coined?

The answer may lie in the dominant biomedical 
paradigm in which bioarchaeology has grown, which 
is traceable to its twin roots in skeletal biology and so-
cially oriented processual archaeology. Bioarchaeol-
ogy has broadened greatly in the last decade, exploring 
new directions such as individual variation, the life 
course, identity, embodiment, and social theory (see 
Baker and Agarwal 2017). Examples include theoriza-
tion of how social relations form the “biological” body 
(Sofaer 2006); discussion not only of how to diagnose 
pathological lesions and what their medical or epide-
miological significance was, but also of what they 
meant for ancient people’s life experiences (Baker and 
Bolhofner 2014; Fay 2006; Kieffer 2017; Marsteller et al. 
2011; C. A. Roberts et al. 2016) and social relations such 
as the “bioarchaeology of care” (Hawkey 1998; Tilley 
2015; Tilley and Oxenham 2011; Vlok et al. 2017); prob-
lematizing sex and gender as non- trivial theoretical 
problems in bioarchaeology (Geller 2016); problema-
tizing age as a social dimension rather than simply a 
chronometric indicator (Sofaer 2006, 2011); and move-
ments to integrate funerary taphonomy with the 
question of social agency after death (e.g., Cambridge 
Archaeological Journal special section 2014).

The field is broadening to encompass a new, more 
humanistic bioarchaeology. Yet there remains a meth-
odological and conceptual core that focuses mostly 
upon establishing significant relationships among 
variables such as age, sex, disease, activity, and social 
status. This research is normally done through statis-
tical analyses such as correlation. Within this tradi-
tional paradigm, the status of osteobiography is unclear. 
It may be considered a useful scholarly exploration of 
what statistical relations mean when viewed “on the 
ground” in an individual life. But it may also be dis-
missed as simply a tool for engaging the public in a 
popular book or museum exhibition through human 
interest stories; the most rigidly quantitative practi-
tioners may see it as unscientific, as a sample size of one 
cannot “prove” a general point (but see articles in this 
issue).

Our core argument here is that osteobiography is 
not simply an engaging extension tacked on to, and 
perhaps overstretching, a traditional population- level, 

quantitative bioarchaeology. Instead, it forms an indis-
pensable tool within a broader, emerging humanistic 
bioarchaeology, a tool that poses and responds to dif-
ferent kinds of research questions. These research 
questions are explored below. Moreover, we are at an 
especially propitious moment to revisit and redevelop 
the concept of osteobiography. An ensemble of new 
analytical methods, including isotopic studies of diet 
and geographical movement during life, aDNA stud-
ies of individuals’ physical characteristics, and aDNA 
studies of pathogen exposure and the human micro-
biome, are adding new layers of depth to our ability 
to reconstruct humans’ life experiences. With explicit 
theorization and methodology, we propose that oste-
obiography has greater potential as a research tool 
within socially contextualized bioarchaeology.

How do osteobiographical and quantitative ap-
proaches relate to one another? The answer is straight-
forward, perhaps obvious. Neither approach is adequate 
on its own. Osteobiography allows insight into the 
structure of individual lives in a way that population- 
level study cannot. Yet we can only make sense of an 
individual life by putting it into its social context. 
What is exceptional for one group falls squarely 
within normal variation for another. Conversely, re-
lying exclusively upon biomedical- style population- 
level statistical studies has limitations, writing off 
potential information about individual variation as 
“noise.” Such an approach flattens out the complexi-
ties and contingencies of individual lives (Stodder 
and Palkovich 2012; Mays et  al. 2018). Moreover, 
population- level statistical studies structure how data 
are collected and reported. As an example, various 
landmark skeleton collections have been studied 
many times to elucidate statistical relations between 
specific variables, but in a way that makes it impossible 
to combine data from them into multi- layered data-
bases. A focus on individual lives can help population- 
level studies by revealing reasons why data may vary. 
Osteobiography and population- level studies are thus 
interdependent and complementary, and a full explo-
ration of a group and its lives may involve tacking 
back and forth between them.

The osteobiographies in this issue, as well as many 
of those reviewed below, show how a more theoreti-
cally informed osteobiographical approach can ad-
dress at least three significant research directions:

1.  Understanding how ancient people perceived, felt, 
and responded to bodily processes such as appear-
ance, health and illness, violence, aging, and death 
merits exploration. Within a humanistic bioarchae-
ology, we can, and should, ask how ancient people 
experienced their lives. We can do so without 
 being naive about either the philosophical issues 



Hosek and Robb 3

involved in understanding human experience or 
the complexity of health and the body as cultural 
constructs.

2.  We do not live within a bivariate world. Human 
lives are structured not only by deterministic, sta-
tistical relations between abstract factors but also by 
chance, historical contingency, and the interaction 
of complex networks of circumstances. Such inter-
actions unfold in a way ordered over time to create 
important outcomes not simply predictable from 
generalizations about the variables involved (as in 
the concept of the “perfect storm”). These contin-
gent outcomes are recognized within biomedicine 
by the complementary tradition of individual case 
studies alongside population- based statistical stud-
ies. Similarly, most of the social sciences provide 
methods for statistical studies of underlying regu-
larities (e.g., economic history, quantitative sociol-
ogy) and for tracing the developmental pathways of 
individual cases, whether typical or exceptional 
(e.g., microhistory, biography, ethnographic analy-
sis). Understanding how general factors and his-
torical contingencies interact to create specific 
human lives is an important topic in itself.

3.  The shape of human lives may vary socially and 
undergo historical change. This concept has been 
suggested both by historians (e.g., in debates about 
the nature of childhood in ancient society) and by 
evolutionary biologists (e.g., in studies of life his-
tory). It is also important in modern society; one 
has only to consider how events such as teenage 
pregnancy act as switches routing people onto dif-
ferent life courses. Hypotheses about the multigen-
erational consequences of maternal health (Barker 
et al. 2002; Gowland 2015) provide a current archae-
ological example. This dimension is potentially 
very important but relatively unexplored; it requires 
developing new methods for analyzing osteobiog-
raphies not only as individual life histories but also 
as comparative points of reference that reveal the 
shape of human lives.

This special issue originated as a conference sym-
posium revisiting osteobiography at the 2017 Society 
for American Archaeology meetings in Vancouver, 
British Columbia, to which many of the participants 
have contributed. Each article builds on the concept 
of osteobiography and offers novel methodological ap-
proaches, theoretical explorations, or the possibility 
of new frontiers. Contributions characterize emerging 
theoretical directions in osteobiography. These include 
the intersectionality of identity, the role of narrative 
in the presentation of data, and the ethics of osteobi-
ography. This introduction provides a systematic over-
view to the concept of osteobiography and serves as a 

platform for developing this research agenda further. 
We outline some key underlying concepts and meth-
ods as well as future directions that we hope will push 
the boundaries of osteobiography and demonstrate its 
potential as an analytic tool.

Biographical Approaches within 
Bioarchaeology

The term “osteobiography” was conceived early in the 
history of bioarchaeology as part of attempts to bring 
skeletal data out of the ghetto of appendixes of archae-
ological reports (Baadsgaard et  al. 2012; Buikstra 
2006; Buikstra et al. 2011). The concept was initially de-
veloped by Frank and Julie Saul as a methodological 
framework for reconstructing the lives of Maya indi-
viduals, developing life histories from human remains 
(Saul and Saul 1989). Frank Saul (1972:8) first coined 
the term in the early 1970s, explaining that osteobiog-
raphy “has been used to indicate in a single word that 
this study is concerned with all of the foregoing as-
pects of skeletal analysis.” Saul applied this approach 
to skeletal remains from the Mayan site Altar de 
Sacrificios, intending for these skeletal life histories 
to encompass contextualized analyses of age, sex, pa-
thology, trauma, and activity. Saul and Saul (1989) 
developed osteobiography further by using individual 
life histories to make projections about the wider skel-
etal sample. They acknowledged the origins of osteo-
biography in forensic anthropology and the work of 
archaeologists including E. A. Hooton and biological 
anthropologists including W. M. Krogman and J. L. 
Angel (Buikstra 2006). This original conception of os-
teobiography has been critiqued for lacking serious 
consideration of the archaeological context of skeletal 
remains and for approaching population- based ques-
tions with data specific to individuals (Buikstra and 
Scott 2009; Geller 2014), but it has provided a founda-
tion for bio archae ol o gi cal approaches to individual 
lives.

Within theoretical bioarchaeology, two key lines 
of thought have influenced later manifestations of os-
teobiography. The first is an acknowledgment of the 
biosocial nature of the body as a material object influ-
enced by both biological and cultural forces (Sofaer 
2006). Joanna Sofaer’s initial call to reevaluate the ar-
chaeological body has since been advanced to under-
stand how traces of the life course are embodied in 
the skeleton itself (e.g., Buikstra et al. 2011). Bioarchae-
ologies of childhood (Beauchesne and Agarwal 2018; 
Lewis 2007; Thompson et al. 2014) and old age (Ap-
pleby 2011; Cave and Oxenham 2016) have grappled 
with the material and social outcomes of bodily plas-
ticity in these age spectrums. In her own work, Sofaer 



Introduction to the Special Issue: Bodies as Narratives4

attempts to reconcile biological age estimations with 
culturally contextual understandings of age as social 
process (Sofaer 2011; Sofaer Derevenski 2000) as well 
as categories of biological sex with the diverse lived ex-
periences of gender (Sofaer 2006; Sofaer and Sørensen 
2013). The second theoretical focus within bioarchae-
ology has been a concern with the life course, typified 
by Sabrina Agarwal’s (2012, 2016) exploration of age- 
related biological development sequences occurring 
within social contexts. An emphasis on social bioar-
chaeology has emerged from these interests in iden-
tity and the life course, prioritizing human social 
contexts in the study of skeletal remains (Agarwal and 
Glencross 2011; Gowland and Knusel 2006; Knudson 
and Stojanowski 2009).

As part of these trends in theoretical bioarchaeol-
ogy, osteobiography gained new attention through 
Robb’s (2002:160) expansion of the concept as “the 
study through human skeletons of the biography as a 
cultural narrative” with the intent to discern “cultural 
understandings of life events and to encompass the 
history of human remains after death.” In this concep-
tion, the life history of an individual is structured by 
cultural categories including age, gender, and socio-
economic statuses that define various stages of life. An 
individual life is entangled within social and cosmo-
logical temporalities that inform the different paths a 
life may take. Robb’s example of a Neolithic female’s 
life history from the Italian Catignano site demon-
strates how a contextualized skeletal biography can 
shed light on the embodied experiences of biological 
processes such as illness, injury, and cultural modifi-
cation of the body. Importantly, Robb and others 
(Geller 2012) have added death histories to the osteo-
biographical project, acknowledging that people often 
continue to be social actors in some form after biolog-
ical death. Such postmortem agency might be ac-
cessed through careful contextualization of skeletal 
remains within archaeological contexts.

Alongside the revitalization of osteobiography came 
a renewed interest in the life experiences of individu-
als as a counter to epidemiological approaches to past 
populations. A number of works, including many of 
those in Stodder and Palkovich’s (2012) The Bioarchae-
ology of Individuals, began to address agency, struc-
ture, and the relationships between individuals and 
populations through a biography of skeletal remains. 
Osteobiography was invoked in some of these projects 
as a humanistic means of bringing individual people 
back to life, both for ourselves and as a way of helping 
non- archaeologists imagine the past (Boutin 2011, 
2012, 2016; Stojanowski and Duncan 2015). These os-
teobiographies tended to illustrate ordinary lives, 
acting as case studies introducing an individual to 
exemplify a site or population. A contrasting theme 

emerges in other works: the use of osteobiography, 
or at least the concept of individual life history, to 
 describe distinctive individuals or mortuary contexts.

A few notable examples are “Skrydstrup Woman” 
from Denmark (Frei et  al. 2017), the Bronze Age 
“Egtved Girl” (Frei et al. 2015) and “Gristhorpe Man” 
(Melton et  al. 2013), the Iron Age “Princess of Vix” 
(Knüsel 2002), the Mesolithic shaman burial of Bad 
Dürrenberg (Porr and Alt 2006), and a seventeenth- 
century Finnish clergyman (Väre 2017). Other osteo-
biographies involve multiple individuals, as in the 
case of the sailors of the Mary Rose (Stirland 2000), a 
Corded Ware burial group (Meyer et al. 2009), three 
medieval individuals from Trondheim (Hamre et al. 
2017), and four individuals from Stonehenge (Mays 
et al. 2018). New World examples include Buikstra’s 
Hopewell mound burial (1976), elite burial contexts 
in Oaxaca (Mayes and Barber 2008) and Palenque 
(Couoh 2015), a Paleoindian individual from Brazil 
(Lessa and Guidon 2002), and the Moatfield Ossuary 
in Ontario (Williamson and Pfeiffer 2003). Interest-
ingly, there is at least one osteobiography of a non- 
human animal: Tourigny et al. (2016) describe the life 
history of a nineteenth- century dog from Canada.

Overall, these osteobiographies show three com-
mon features: (a) a principal, though not exclusive, 
focus on European cases; (b) accelerating tempo in 
rate of publication, in part related to increasing pub-
lic engagement and academic publishing pressures, 
but also to new methods that allow us to reconstruct 
more complex and interesting life stories; (c) common 
methods, including osteology, palaeopathology, isoto-
pic analysis, and detailed articulation with archaeo-
logical contexts. We have noticed divergences in 
approach in different areas; for instance, our impres-
sion is that osteobiographies of prehistoric people tend 
to focus more upon lives as expressions of general so-
cial conditions, while a strong tradition in text- aided 
osteobiographies has been identification of specific in-
dividuals and exploration of social differences within 
society. There are also common presentational meth-
ods, especially facial reconstruction and creation of a 
name for these unknown individuals. Museum exhi-
bitions, in particular, use the latter methods of repre-
sentation, often based on extensive scientific work but 
also uniformly involving faces and names. Notable ex-
amples include Vasa Museum (Stockholm), the Mary 
Rose Museum (Portsmouth), the Yorkshire Museum 
(York), and the African Burial Ground National Mon-
ument (New York).

Famous bodies are particularly prone to this kind 
of reconstructive treatment, in part because of their 
ability to capture the public’s imagination and further 
inform on well- known histories (Stojanowski and 
Duncan 2015). These “celebrity bodies” include King 



Hosek and Robb 5

Tutankhamun (Rühli and Ikram 2014), “Ötzi,” the 
Neolithic Alpine Iceman (Robb 2009), the recently re-
covered body of Richard III (Appleby et al. 2015; Toon 
and Stone 2016), the prehistoric Paleoamerican known 
as Kennewick Man or the Ancient One (Owsley and 
Jantz 2014), and bog mummies such as Lindow Man 
(Stead et al. 1986). Even as powerful tools for public en-
gagement, these osteobiographies and the bells and 
whistles of facial reconstruction and documentary re-
enactments that often accompany them cannot be 
viewed uncritically. Reconstruction of these archaeo-
logical bodies in text and media, for both academic 
and popular audiences, results in an ancient person 
with a “biography and bodily constitution mirroring 
those familiar to modern Western Europeans” (Robb 
2009:123). While bringing the past “to life,” what nar-
ratives are we reinforcing, and what might we lose in 
(re)constructing these faces and names? And what can 
we learn that is not already known from their histor-
ical biographies? Appleby (this issue) provides an ex-
citing example of how Richard III’s osteobiography 
gives insights not only into Richard’s life but into me-
dieval habitus.

Similar questions arise in the related tradition of 
biohistory (Komar and Buikstra 2008; Stojanowski 
and Duncan 2017). The intellectual agenda of biohis-
tory is closely linked with forensic anthropology— the 
identification of unidentified bodies. Specifically, bio-
historians are concerned with reconstructing life his-
tories of famous individuals or individuals associated 
with well- known historical events. For example, the 
exhumation and analysis of Tycho Brahe’s remains 
was at least in part to determine if the sixteenth- 
century astronomer had been murdered (Rasmussen 
et al. 2013). Other recent examples include identifying 
the body of St. Paul (Mihanović et al. 2017) and exam-
ining the life history of famous castrato singer Fari-
nelli (Belcastro et al. 2011). Whether or not all such 
studies have a scientific rationale, this avenue of in-
quiry can provide important methods drawn from 
forensic anthropology as well as powerful examples of 
life histories reconstructed from physical evidence in 
skeletal remains.

Human Lives and Biographies as a Research 
Subject in Other Fields

The narrative study of a life is a qualitative method 
with many forms, including life writing, biographies, 
life histories, case studies, autobiographies, and mem-
oirs (Harrison 2008; Smith 1994). Disciplines across 
the social sciences, humanities, and biomedicine ap-
proach individual lives and the lived experience to 
understand how individuals engage in and perceive 

their social worlds. Disciplinary boundaries are some-
what fuzzy, and definitions of methods and terminol-
ogy are not always discrete. The fields and research 
areas that explore narrative and biography are briefly 
addressed here with an eye to how they approach and 
represent individual lives.

Biography as a historical method or research per-
spective has seen renewed interest in recent decades 
(Renders et al. 2017). In fact, many historians argue 
that a “biographical turn” commenced in the early 
2000s as a reaction to statistical and analytical meth-
ods of historiography and as a critique of “grand nar-
ratives” (Caine 2010; Possing 2015, 2017) in a way that 
parallels transformations within bioarchaeology. Im-
portantly, biography plays a significant role in popu-
lar history, engaging with the public in an accessible, 
narrative form. However, the place of biographical 
studies has long been a debate among historians. Crit-
ics of historical biography argue that investigating 
individuals’ lives adds little to understandings of his-
tory (Kessler- Harris 2009; Possing 2015). Additionally, 
the textual record is strongly biased toward famous or 
extraordinary people, making biographies of ordinary 
people difficult to write (Salvatore 2004). Historians 
approach biographies in two main ways: as a lens 
through which to access larger events and processes, 
or with a focus on a particular life, with limited larger 
context. Recent proponents of historical biography ar-
gue that, in using a critical narrative approach, biog-
raphies can move between individual lives and broader 
historical questions (Kessler- Harris 2009; Meister 
2017; Renders et al. 2017). The narrative approach of 
microhistory has offered some insights for historical 
biographers seeking to bridge these scales of analy-
sis. Microhistorians argue that examining objects on 
a small, intimate scale will reveal previously over-
looked phenomena and provide connections to wider 
historical processes (Ginzburg 2014; Levi 2001; Meis-
ter 2017).

Anthropology has a long history of engaging with 
life histories and narratives, although with a less ex-
plicit reliance on biographical methods. Anthropolo-
gists have explored the concept of life histories through 
oral narratives (Angrosino 2007; Langness and Frank 
1981) as well as the cultural lives of things (Appadurai 
1986; Hoskins 1996; Kopytoff 1986). This tradition also 
includes the biography of individuals from an anthro-
pological perspective, involving an ethnographic focus 
on the hyper- local (Herzfeld 1998; Kristmundsdottir 
2006) as well as the anthropologist as autobiogra-
pher (Okely and Callaway 1992). Life- course and life- 
history perspectives, emerging from behavioral studies, 
biology, and evolutionary theory, have also influenced 
how biological anthropologists approach composite 
life narratives in terms of the timing of life events, 



Introduction to the Special Issue: Bodies as Narratives6

fertility, and mortality (Elder et  al. 2003; Hill and 
Kaplan 1999).

Biographical methods have been used more explic-
itly in archaeology as a way to approach people 
through their material worlds (Gilchrist 2012; Meskell 
and Joyce 2003; Mytum 2010) and to examine the “life” 
of artifacts (Beaudry 2011; Gosden and Marshall 1999; 
Joy 2009; Meskell 2004). Indeed, Mytum (2010:242) 
explains that archaeological biographies are typically 
“not life- long biographies of individuals, but insights 
into particular places, associations and events for 
which the data is rich enough to allow such a con-
struction.” Artifact biographies are necessarily rela-
tional, tacking between humans, things, spaces, and 
technologies to examine use- lives or the relationships 
between people and objects. These small- scale biog-
raphies might be contrasted with life- history ap-
proaches concerned with larger- scale and long- term 
changes in artifacts and technologies (Joy 2009). His-
torical archaeologists, in particular, have explored mi-
crohistorical representations of site histories, artifact 
biographies, and individual lives (Brooks et al. 2008; 
Huppertz 2010; Janowitz and Dallal 2013).

Qualitative inquiries in sociology, in the form of 
case studies and life histories, underscore the impor-
tance of subjective experience and how the life course 
is shaped by interrelated social factors (Heinz and 
Krüger 2001; Possing 2015). A life- course perspective 
in sociology refers to changes in human lives across 
time and through social and institutional structures. 
This approach emphasizes how conditions of early life 
affect outcomes later in life and the conjunctions of bi-
ological, family, cultural, and institutional factors 
that shape the life course (Gilleard and Higgs 2015; 
Harrison 2008; Heinz and Krüger 2001; Mayer 2009). 
Despite a disciplinary emphasis on structures over the 
individual to form generalizations about society, more 
recent scholarship has taken seriously how individual 
cases can be representative and theoretically meaning-
ful (B. Roberts 2002; Rustin 2008). Two currently rel-
evant examples are understanding how men and 
women follow different career trajectories in spite of 
attempts to create gender equality and understanding 
the social consequences of lengthening the human life 
span. Life- course studies require longitudinal research 
establishing social structures integrated with individ-
ual life histories based on interviews and case studies 
(Heinz and Krüger 2001). This interplay of micro-  and 
macro- analyses, using both quantitative and qualita-
tive data, is what gives a life- course perspective par-
ticular significance across the social sciences.

The case study approach in biomedicine is a re-
search method that allows for “an in- depth, multi- 
faceted understanding of a complex issue in its real- life 
context” (Crowe et al. 2011:2). A deeply contextualized 

clinical case provides insights into causality, com-
pounding factors, and the course of intervention. 
While being criticized for a diminished ability to 
generalize, case studies are contrasted with (or com-
plement) large- scale research designs that may be 
unfeasible or unable to account for the complexities of 
a clinical setting (Crowe et al. 2011). Biography and 
narrative have been explored in other areas of biomed-
ical research, education, and ethics in the form of ill-
ness narratives (Bishop and Sunderland 2013) and 
narrative medicine (Charon 2001; Morris 2008). Ac-
cording to Charon (2001), the storytelling inherent in 
clinical medicine links patients, physicians, and stu-
dents and requires a narrative competence among 
medical professionals. Narratives of biomedicine can 
even involve object biographies, as in Nunes et al.’s 
(2013) depiction of the bacterium Helicobacter pylori 
as a biomedical entity with a life history. While we 
have only touched on the many narrative approaches 
to individual lives, this summary has shown the effi-
cacy of such a perspective across disciplines.

Central Concepts and Methods  
of Osteobiography

Approaching life histories from skeletal remains re-
quires attention to several key concepts that shape 
how we “do” osteobiographies. The first is the central-
ity of the body as the locus of experience and biocul-
tural change. As noted above, the body is constantly 
in a process of becoming, a “work in progress” of both 
biological and social origin (Ingold 2011; Joyce 2005; 
Sofaer 2006). Bioarchaeologists rely on the concept of 
skeletal plasticity to address ways in which social and 
material worlds shape and inform the biological body 
(Agarwal 2016; Sofaer 2006). “Plasticity” refers to the 
capability of the human body to change in response 
to damage, stress, disease, or degenerative changes. Bi-
ological processes unfold in a social environment, in-
fluenced by learned action, labor, habits, and events 
throughout the life course. As the focal point of these 
transformations, the body itself is an intersection of 
multiple processes, materials, and histories (Novak 
2017a, 2017b). In fact, one might argue that the body 
“embodies” history. We see differences in skeletal bod-
ies from different time periods and geographies that 
reflect how social and environmental histories are 
enacted on and through the body (Robb and Harris 
2013)

Characteristics of the body, such as age, sex/gender, 
and health, are based on a lifetime of culturally nego-
tiated activities. Osteobiography must attend to 
the biosocial changes of the body over time, recon-
ciling biological age estimations with the culturally 



Hosek and Robb 7

contextualized understandings of age as social process 
(Agarwal 2016; Appleby 2011; Gilchrist 2012; Sofaer 
2011) as well as integrating categories of biological sex 
with the diverse lived experiences of gender (Geller 
2016; Sofaer 2006; Sofaer and Sørensen 2013). The in-
tersections between these aspects of identity are par-
ticularly rich analytical nodes for bioarchaeology. By 
“shifting the focus from identity to identities” (Byrnes 
2017:204), we begin to see how multiple components of 
social identity become embodied. Dynamics of class, 
power, age, disability, gender, and ancestry gather 
together at the site of the body, creating particular 
configurations and possibilities (Boutin 2016; Byrnes 
2017; Byrnes and Muller 2017; Geller 2016).

At the heart of osteobiography, as with all forms of 
narrative, are the concepts of time, scale, and se-
quence. As bioarchaeologists, we often give primacy 
to chronometric time in our quest to estimate age at 
death from skeletal indicators. However, it is arguable 
that social temporalities are of greater import when 
considering narrative life histories. The life- course 
model “situates the human life span within social 
measures of time” (Gilchrist 2004:156). Such a concep-
tualization provides the body with a cultural biogra-
phy of normative (and alternative) stages (Robb 2002). 
This social temporality is entangled with other tem-
poral scales from individual to cosmological measures 
that link generations and other intersections of iden-
tity. Thinking about time as multi- scalar allows us to 
move analytically between individuals and popula-
tions, building narratives through this dialogue and 
developing sequences of individual life histories. What 
ultimately differentiates osteobiography from other 
ways of interpreting bio archae ol o gi cal data are (a) the 
focus upon the individual life span as the unit of anal-
ysis and (b) arranging data within the life span to 
form a temporally integrated sequence, in which ear-
lier processes or events cause or form a context for 
later ones. These factors translate into several specific 
approaches. Some are straightforward and well devel-
oped; others are at the frontiers of current methods 
and need further development.

Working from samples to individuals and 
back again

Bioarchaeology traditionally regards individuals sim-
ply as constituents of samples; what matters is the ag-
gregate characteristics of the whole group, often 
expressed in terms of a graph showing general trends, 
a correlation coefficient, or summary statistics such as 
averages and standard deviations. It is assumed that 
all samples inherently vary, and the variation dis-
played by a single point will be of minimal analytical 
purchase or interest. There has been little attention to 

asking why a specific data point falls where it does, and 
how this position can be understood in terms of its 
other characteristics. Indeed, given that most studies 
reduce the available data to only a handful of variables, 
it is often actually impossible to pose such questions.

Clearly, we can only understand an individual data 
point by starting from an understanding of the whole 
sample and its general characteristics. What is normal 
or exceptional, local or exotic, coherent or discordant 
can only be assessed against a wider context. This ob-
servation is true not only in terms of biological varia-
tion but in social variation as well; individual identities 
conform to and work against normatively constituted 
identities such as gender and age, and all societies also 
understand the life span in terms of a normative bi-
ography. Such a biography is divided into stages, each 
of which has its own characteristics. Methodologically, 
this means that osteobiography is interdependent with 
traditional bioarchaeology: to construct osteobiogra-
phies, we have to continually work back and forth 
from the general characteristics of the whole sample 
to the individuating variation of a specific person.

Layering different kinds of data

To build an osteobiography, we need to layer as many 
kinds of data as possible to include a critical density 
of information about our “person of interest.” This 
process allows us to juxtapose aspects of someone’s life 
and ask new questions about them. For instance, did 
early health episodes have an effect upon their work-
ing lives? Does their burial treatment relate to their 
health status or appearance? Is an anomalous age es-
timate related to signs of pathology or intense physi-
cal activity? As the osteobiographies to date (see 
literature review above) and the articles in this collec-
tion suggest, there is a core of common elements that 
often recur.

• Context: the skeleton’s broader archaeological con-
text, including mortuary environment and other 
relevant information (as well as historical or textual 
information, where it is available).

• Demography: the individual’s age at death, and bi-
ological sex.

• Genetic variation: as available from metric and 
nonmetric variation, biodistance data, and analy-
sis of aDNA, providing not only an idea of affini-
ties within a local gene pool but much other 
information besides (e.g., SNPs revealing probable 
eye and hair color).

• Health: the individual’s health, as inferred from pa-
laeopathology and, increasingly, analysis of pathogen 
aDNA. This assessment includes not only the pos-
sible health conditions the individual experienced 



Introduction to the Special Issue: Bodies as Narratives8

but also their experiential consequences (pain, 
suffering, disability, changes to appearance or so-
cial categorization).

• Diet: as revealed from skeletal and dental data such 
as dental disease, and from isotopic (C, N) enrich-
ment ratios. A comparison of isotopes from tissues 
forming in childhood (particularly teeth), in adult-
hood (such as slow turn- over cortical bone), and rela-
tively soon before death (such as ribs, tissue, or hair) 
may reveal changes in diet throughout the life span.

• Mobility: accessible through isotopic ratios (e.g., Sr, 
O and Pb) that may reveal the individual’s environ-
mental context at moments when specific tissues 
were forming. Comparison with others in the sam-
ple and between samples may suggest how much a 
person moved during his or her life.

• Signs of activity, use, and degeneration: an amor-
phous category of data that always needs careful 
contextualization within a particular sample, sex, 
and age range. However, characteristics such as 
size, body shape and robusticity, laterality, local or 
general wear and tear, and idiosyncratic develop-
ment of particular complexes of muscles may re-
veal habitual activities or socially salient aspects of 
the individual’s appearance, identity, or life course.

• Bodily modification: including cranial shaping, 
trepanation, and dental ablation or modification.

• Deathways and postmortem history: including how 
the remains were processed, curated, circulated, 
and/or deposited. These characteristics may relate 
not only to the person’s identity or circumstances of 
death but also to what extent the person was regarded 
as an active social agent following biological death.

This list of data is long. In our experience, for any 
given individual, most of these data will fall more or less 
within the “unremarkable” range, and it will only be a 
few points, or combinations of points, that will high-
light the most salient individuating aspects of an oste-
obiographical life narrative (see Robb et al., this issue).

One consequence of this array of data is that osteo-
biography may involve different working practices 
than standard bioarchaeology (as in the traditional 
model of a lone researcher collecting one or two kinds 
of data for a specialized study). There can be no stan-
dard “package” of data constituting the raw materials 
for an osteobiography; the available data depend upon 
many factors, such as how well preserved the skeletal 
remains are, the state of documentation (particularly 
if one is using published “legacy” data or old collec-
tions that may lack contextual information), the avail-
able expertise and funding, and so on. Even so, it is 
clear that composing an osteobiography requires 
many different areas of expertise. It may also require 
considerable funding; while obtaining isotopic data or 

aDNA data for one individual may not be too costly, 
obtaining enough comparative data to put that person 
in context may cost a lot more. While a lot of the data 
above could be gathered by an experienced osteologist 
working alone, the most detailed osteobiographies will 
typically be generated by a well- funded, relatively large 
interdisciplinary team.

Sequence

With the systematic analysis of sequence, we move 
from things bioarchaeologists largely are doing al-
ready to frontiers that need further development. Ar-
ranging data in temporal sequence is essential to 
biography. Earlier events and conditions channel later 
ones and influence the possible outcomes the body can 
take. This configuration has a number of distinct ram-
ifications. Bodily processes such as growth, health, 
and aging create contexts for what happens next. A 
well- known example is childhood stress contributing 
to poorer health later in life. Some studies have shown 
that individuals with enamel defects occurring in early 
childhood are more likely to die at earlier ages, sug-
gesting that health issues in childhood can affect mor-
tality rates throughout the life course (Armelagos et al. 
2009; Boldsen 2007; Miszkiewicz 2015). The best pio-
neered approach is understanding biological sequence 
by comparing data from tissues that form at different 
points in life, typically childhood (from dental data, 
but also potentially by stature and other evidence of 
childhood health), adulthood (from slowly replaced 
bone tissue such as long bone cortical bone) and the 
last decade or so before death (from quickly replaced 
bone tissue such as ribs). The same principle can be 
used to reconstruct micro- sequences of isotopic data 
during childhood by micro- sampling dental enamel 
formed throughout various moments of growth.

Such concepts could be developed further. For in-
stance, many pathological lesions, such as trauma and 
periosteal bone growth, can be classified as active or 
healed at the time of death, giving information on 
health changes within an interval of a year or more be-
fore death. We can also classify health conditions as 
having episodic effects, ongoing effects, or permanent 
effects. For instance, a well- preserved dentition may 
show evidence of complex sequences (a set of molars 
on one side wears and decays within the interval be-
tween full eruption and some years before death, their 
alveoli resorb, and we can see accelerated or idiosyn-
cratic wear on the remaining antimeres). It may be 
possible to build quite a complex internal chronology 
from a well- aged and “busy” skeleton.

A different aspect of sequence concerns how our 
“person of interest” relates to historical context. Tra-
ditionally, archaeologists have been satisfied with 



Hosek and Robb 9

relatively loose chronological bracketing; a radiocar-
bon date with a margin of error of 50– 100 years al-
lows us to place a burial within most archaeological 
periods, so that we can regard someone as a generic 
representative of, say, the Neolithic, the Early Mis-
sissippian, and so forth. But a combination of careful 
use of archaeological context and Bayesian calibra-
tion can get chronological resolution down to the 
generational level, allowing us to compose nearly 
real- time “histories” (Bayliss and Whittle 2007). In 
some cases, particularly in historical bioarchaeology, 
we can tease out a community of people who were 
alive contemporaneously (Novak 2017a). Knowing a 
date of death and an approximate life span, can we 
understand what events someone may have lived 
through and how they may have affected their life 
story? Sequences can also be extended intergenera-
tionally, highlighting the relational nature of the life 
course. For example, Gowland (2015) points out the 
heritability of poor health and the impact of the ma-
ternal environment on early (and later) life in a bio-
archae ol o gi cal context.

Data analysis

Perhaps the least- developed methodological aspect of 
osteobiography concerns how we use data, and here 
we only mention some possibilities for development. 
Standard statistical methods can be used to establish 
correlations between different skeletal data, and if 
these data can also be put into sequence we may be 
able to build causal narratives. For instance, such a se-
quence may show how early life experiences relate to 
a priori social categorizations on one hand and to sub-
sequent life events on the other. Techniques such as 
risk analysis may provide additional ways to express 
such relationships that focus less upon aggregate sam-
ples and more upon the probabilities of individual 
life contingencies. Finally, we need to develop new 
ways of representing data to help us spot patterns and 
important variations. Sociologists studying variation 
in the life course use techniques such as network anal-
ysis and cluster analysis to show how individual lives 
conform to or depart from normative patterns and are 
channeled by important life events. Even at the level 
of simple graphs and diagrams, finding ways to con-
vey information such as how skeletal data relate to how 
long someone lived would transform our ability to vi-
sualize patterns in human lives (see Robb, this issue).

Some Frontiers for Osteobiography

In thinking about new frontiers for osteobiography, we 
put forward some theoretical issues to consider. For 

example, what is a life? As the unit of our analysis in 
an osteobiography, what do we mean by a “life” his-
tory? A key consideration is the social agency of the 
dead. When bioarchaeology is brought into conversa-
tion with taphonomy, it is possible to extend biography 
from (before the) cradle to (after the) grave. Addition-
ally, a common assumption in osteobiography is that 
“individuals” are equated with skeletons. This identi-
fication creates an inherent assumption of a bounded 
entity, rather than one that is relational, material, and 
contingent. We must ask ourselves, what is the entity? 
Are they living/dead, human/ non- human, prehuman, 
posthuman? Bodies can also be subject to fragmenta-
tion, made partible or even aggregate. Obvious exam-
ples emerge from burial taphonomy such as permeable 
Maya bodies (Duncan and Schwarz 2013; Geller 2012) 
and medieval saints’ relics (Robb 2013), as well as mod-
ern examples such as organ transplants and body do-
nation systems.

Another important consideration is the relationship 
between material things and the body. If we take the 
body to be material culture, how should osteobiogra-
phy include things? Other materials might come into 
articulation with the body— many with their own ma-
terial biographies— such as prosthetic devices, dental 
fillings, tattoo ink, and so forth. The question of what 
things is also significant: the fact that skeletal remains 
are often found in deliberate burial contexts means 
that we create an implicit hierarchy with grave goods 
because of their proximity to the skeleton. But what 
other objects are important in creating an osteobiog-
raphy, and how do we bring these into a conversation? 
The materiality of things is particularly emergent 
when considering weak- agency people, such as chil-
dren and the elderly, leading to a focus on material 
culture as part of the construction of identity for these 
individuals as well as the limitations of the body itself.

Recent bio archae ol o gi cal projects have pushed 
boundaries of sex and gender and have examined how 
these aspects of identity develop in the course of so-
cial life (Geller 2016). How do we relate evidence of bi-
ological and social variation, particularly when it is 
discrepant? When we find a Viking- period woman 
buried with weapons (Hedenstierna- Jonson et  al. 
2017), do we assume (perhaps influenced by today’s 
gender attitudes) that binary gender based on biolog-
ical sex was normal in the past, so that there must be 
some sexing error and “she” must really be male? Or 
that being a warrior was not a gendered activity? Or 
that Viking- period gender was not in fact binary? 
Other frontiers include challenging the concept of a 
skeletal “population” as representing synchronous 
lives in temporal continuity (Novak 2017a). Is it pos-
sible to identify individuals who were alive at the same 
time through probability- based analysis or through 



Introduction to the Special Issue: Bodies as Narratives10

the integration of other types of evidence (including 
cemetery records and other historical sources)? We 
may also consider new approaches to data analysis and 
aggregating lives, such as developing comparative 
shapes of life courses using multivariate analyses.

Osteobiography and Archaeological Ethics

Osteobiography, like all methods of conceptualization, 
has an ethical and political dimension rooted in our 
own situatedness in social relations. Geller (this issue) 
raises some classic ethical dilemmas, particularly in 
formerly colonial settings and arenas in which knowl-
edge is depersonalized and commercialized. But os-
teobiography raises much broader ethical dilemmas as 
well, as it provides a powerful tool for mobilizing the 
imagination and engaging with our publics.

The most obvious ethical dimension concerns the 
politics of osteobiography. In creating osteobiogra-
phies, we may effectively be deputizing a few individ-
uals to stand for an entire place or period in our and 
the public’s imaginations. As feminist critics since 
Conkey and Spector (1984) have noted, peopling the 
past is a politically loaded act. How do we choose the 
subjects for osteobiography? Do we seek to represent 
“typical” lives? “Interesting” lives (and what makes a 
life “interesting”)? “Invisible” lives? “Alternative” lives? 
Do we choose the 99 slaves who conformed and were 
worked to death, or the one who resisted? The Roman 
“Bangle Lady” originated in North Africa and was 
buried in York, underlining the multicultural and mo-
bile nature of Roman society (Leach et al. 2010). But 
most of her cohort were much more local. Should we 
aim the osteobiographical spotlight at her or at one of 
them? At an even deeper layer of ontological assump-
tions, how do our life narratives impose our own con-
cepts of animacy and humanness on past societies? 
Should osteobiographies make the past comprehensi-
bly familiar or challengingly alien? How familiar is too 
familiar, taking the easy way out?

The other ethical dimension concerns the respon-
sibilities of knowledge. Take the question of naming 
anonymous skeletons— something on which there is 
a surprising level of deeply felt difference of opinion. 
On one hand, names humanize skeletons; both we and 
the public understand and relate to “Jonathan” or “Fla-
via” differently than to “Individual 247” or “Context 
958.” But in giving people names of our own invention, 
are we humanizing them in a space all parties under-
stand as imaginatively constituted, or are we claiming 
knowledge we cannot actually discern? Does human-
izing concreteness trump literal facticity in some con-
texts? Or can we find ways of finessing the issue— giving 
people generic names such as “the ship’s carpenter” 

(as in the Mary Rose and Vasa museums), or using 
typography to highlight the different bases of imagi-
nation and fact? Our ethical obligations extend not 
only toward our professional responsibilities to create 
knowledge and our duty toward the public who trust 
our authority, but also to the ancient people we study.

Conclusions

Human lives are not disconnected facts and data 
points; they have a structure, and they also have a cul-
tural interpretation of that structure. Bioarchaeology 
allows us to glimpse the human experience of living 
in past societies, and osteobiography offers a particu-
larly compelling way to approach the forms these lives 
can take. The narrative of a life can be understood as 
a building block of social history, allowing our scales 
of analysis to shift between big questions of popula-
tions and social change, on the one hand, and the 
events and contingencies at work across a single life, 
on the other. Indeed, osteobiography has raised im-
portant questions in some areas of archaeology; for 
example, it is biographies such as the Egtved Girl (Frei 
et al. 2015) that have directed attention to the role of 
high- status women in Bronze Age Europe.

The articles in this issue draw on a range of topics 
at the forefront of bioarchaeology, bringing new the-
oretical and methodological approaches to bear on os-
teobiography. Robb et  al. compare the analytical 
possibilities of textual biography and skeletal biogra-
phy through two individuals from thirteenth- century 
Cambridge, England. The archival traces of ordinary 
people are more biased by socioeconomics and gender 
than the full suite of osteological, molecular, and re-
constructive techniques afforded by osteobiography. 
Appleby incorporates theories of local biologies and 
relational personhood in forming an osteobiography 
of Richard III. She argues that Richard’s bone chem-
istry reflects the biosocial consequences of his negoti-
ation of kingship through particular consumption 
practices. Hosek marries osteobiography with a mi-
crohistorical approach to address issues of scale and 
relationality in individual life histories. She presents 
two osteobiographies from early medieval Bohemia 
and shows how these lives articulate with large- scale 
historical processes. Robb uses aggregate osteobiogra-
phies to outline the courses an individual life might 
take. The ensuing life- course maps show how path-
ways might diverge or intertwine based on biological 
and social differences such as gender and age. Boutin 
and Callahan use social psychology to explore how 
osteobiography might be used in public outreach. 
They show how different types of osteobiographical 
narratives play a role in humanizing people from the 



Hosek and Robb 11

past and affect how they are viewed by modern audi-
ences. Finally, Geller proposes a “bioethos” that in-
corporates ethical questions into osteobiographical 
research design. Through the examples of Kennewick 
Man/Ancient One and HeLa/Henrietta Lacks, she 
explores how naming, facial reconstruction, and issues 
of ownership complicate the narratives we develop 
about human remains.

A criticism of osteobiography (and case studies 
more broadly) that we raised earlier is that one case 
cannot prove anything. While this statement might be 
true, both previous osteobiographies and the articles 
in this issue demonstrate that upholding generaliza-
tions is not the real goal of such an approach. Osteo-
biography allows for an understanding of variability 
in past lives that would otherwise be lost in the search 
for p- values. In contrast to the tyranny of the average, 
but also in conjunction with it, osteobiography can 
reveal exceptional people or unusual lives that risk 
being smoothed out in a population analysis. Alter-
natively, in illustrating the life of a typical individual, 
osteobiography might better humanize population 
statistics. Perhaps even more significantly, osteobi-
ography provides a way to sequence and layer skeletal 
data into richly contextualized life histories, drawing 
attention the role of pathway and contingency in the 
development of a life. We hope that this overview and 
the following contributions expand the possibilities 
of osteobiography as a conceptual tool for bioarchae-
ology, opening new directions for telling stories with 
skeletal remains.

Postscript

Few scholars discuss osteobiography without a nod to 
Frank Saul and his foundational work on the concept 
with his wife, Julie Mather Saul. Indeed, when we first 
conceptualized a conference symposium we asked 
ourselves, where has osteobiography gone since Saul 
and Saul (1989), and where does it go next? The pass-
ing of Frank Saul in June  2018 coincided with the 
submission of these articles. We would like to ac-
knowledge here his many contributions to Maya ar-
chaeology, forensic anthropology, and bioarchaeology. 
We hope that this special issue serves as a recognition 
of his lasting impact on how we approach life histo-
ries through the skeletal body.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the editors of Bioar-
chaeology International for their guidance and for the 
opportunity to put together this special issue. We 

would also like to thank the participants of the Bod-
ies as Narratives symposium at the 2017 Society for 
American Archaeology meeting in Vancouver, British 
Columbia, for their lively discussion and insights into 
the future of osteobiography. We are grateful to Brenda 
Baker and to three anonymous reviewers for thought-
ful comments that have improved this paper.

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