Should We Give Bones A Name?

“What is your name?” is not a question that archaeologists can ask a person they have excavated. Rather, the ‘human remains’ are carefully documented, numbered, identified, and archived as objects. In rare cases the archaeological context confronts us with an individual who seems to be looking at us from the past, because of his or her special preservation (e.g. as a bog or an ice corpse). In such cases, the finders sometimes feel compelled to give that individual a name – a new name due to their lack of knowledge of the original name, if there ever was one. Ultimately, however, most of the deceased are and remain objects for current researchers, depersonalised remains that are de-subjectivised even further in the context of archaeological documentation practices.

For a few years now, bioarchaeological approaches have made it possible to shed a completely new light on the lives of these anonymous bones, allowing us to learn about the lives of these individuals in an unprecedented way. A human being with individual traits begins to emerge from the bones – a human being, however, whom we continue to list under a catalogue number.

But does this do justice to the deceased? Shouldn’t the new potential for gaining knowledge about past individual lives force us to consider giving a name to these individuals? Or would that pose the danger of nostrification (i.e. of making the other from a distant past too much our own)? Where does the appreciation of the remains as human beings begin and where do we cross the thin line to appropriation?

Phillipp Stockhammer is Professor for Prehistoric Archaeology with a focus on the Eastern Mediterranean at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University and co-director of the Max Planck-Harvard Research Center for the Archaeoscience of the Ancient Mediterranean at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig. Professor Stockhammer is a proponent of archaeological sciences in humanities-based research. Specifically, his research focuses on the transformative power of intercultural encounters, social practices and the integration of archaeological and scientific data concerning social belonging, mobility, food and health. His regional emphasis spans central and southeastern Europe, the Aegean, and the eastern Mediterranean. Professor Stockhammer is the 2024 AAIA Gale Visiting Professor.

Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer is professor of English and digital linguistics at Chemnitz University of Technology. She has published on a wide variety of topics, such as the language of comics, the corpus-based English and German translation equivalents of the times of day, hybridization in language, and the question whether one can predict linguistic change.