With reference to skeletal, archaeological, and historical data, this thesis aims to develop a multimethod bioarchaeological approach to ancient identities at the Greek polis (city-state) of Corinth, ca. 1050-300 BCE.
Guided by new materialist and critical posthumanist principles, multifaceted identities are conceptualised as figurations arising in and through skeletal bodies, while skeletal bodies are understood as assemblages emerging from the onto-epistemological entanglements of bioarchaeological analysis. Bridging the gap between theory and data are concepts of the life course, emotional community, and osteobiography, which roughly correspond to the analytical scales employed (population, small group, and individual). Bioarchaeological data is worked/reworked within these frames, and, lastly, fictive narrative is also employed as a way to ‘write into’ gaps in the hegemonic classical archive.
The study period encompasses Corinth’s development into an urbanised and powerful polis (Early Polis), as well as its political and economic decline against a backdrop of regional conflict (Late Polis). Data on physiological stress, oral pathology, mechanical stress, trauma, and biological distance was recorded from a skeletal sample (151 individuals). Analysis of these data focused on how patterns relating to age (age-at-death) and gender (skeletal sex) changed through time, as these principles underpinned the naturalised ‘ancient Greek life course’ throughout the study period.
Idealised, binary gender roles only tangibly affected the experiential materialisation of identities during the Late Polis; multiple lines of evidence suggested their increasing rigidity in response to broader geopolitical unrest. Using osteobiographies and emotional communities to explore difference allowed for the sensitive consideration of intangible aspects of identity, such as disability, emotion, kinship, hardship and aesthetic response. Lastly, the fictive ‘history’ of Corinth constituted an explicit exploration of processes of archaeological meaning-making. It drew on information gleaned from all the preceding analyses, sitting within the creative space between ontological understandings and psychosocial experiences of identity.
