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International Conference "Every Bone Has a Story"

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About the Conference

Overview

Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington DC, and in Greece, with the support of the University of Cincinnati, organize an international conference on the topic: "Every Bone Has a Story."

"Every Bone Has a Story" centers bones as objects which convey profound messages about the past, from its lived experiences to its manifold expressions of cultural identity, religious belief, and technical expertise (as well as their various intersections). From increasingly fine-grained paleopathological methods and tools, osteological remains yield sharper insights into what it was like to live, suffer, or thrive in the ancient world. Tracing the DNA extracted from bones has helped and continues to help us to rewrite the evolutionary history of endemic disease and epidemic events as they unfolded across the Mediterranean. Isotopic analysis of minerals lodged in bones tells us stories about the environment, diet, and patterns of mobility. Similarly, faunal remains disclose not only the alimentary programs of peoples but their sacrificial ones, as well. Bones can tell us as much about human communication with the gods as statuary, song, or temple. Astragaloi or knucklebones, were popular as dice and used for various kinds of games. But they also provided the material basis for a widespread form of divination, astragalomancy. More than yielding binary yes or no answers, a simple toss of the knucklebones yielded sophisticated responses to questions about the future, depending on complex numerical combinations. But religious – and by extension political – life itself could be "articulated" through bones – from the foundational bones of hero cult to the reliquaries of the saints.

Moreover, bones form a core arena of therapeutics, speculation, and contestation within the medical, scientific, and paradoxographical traditions. The Hippocratic's "Longheads" foreground bones in the recursive dynamic of nomos and physis in the shaping of the body, while we find Galen gleefully wading into the debate – stretching from the Presocratics to Aristotle – over the essential nature of bony matter. Wondrous bones (and the animals they construct) not only mark out the "ends" of the world, but they also reify and justify cultural and imperial logics of the normative center defined against its aberrant peripheries. Gaming pieces, divinatory devices, votive dedications, magical amulets, wondrous items, a piece of heroic, religious, or human identity: bones, whether human or animal, sacred or profane, real, or artificial – are never one thing but rather richly polysemous, full of stories.

Yet even though sharing a common object, these kinds of studies on bones and bone matter are often siloed off from one another. Thus, in this conference, we invite interest from experts working with or thinking about bones from a variety of methodological and material perspectives: from paleopathology to personal identity markers, sacrificial remains to magical objects, religious reliquaries to museum pieces, bones signify and mobilize a wide variety of distinct but interconnected meanings. Our hope, then, is that bones will not only act as a provocation to facilitate a truly cross-disciplinary conversation but to open new channels of dialogue and scholarly collaboration within the ancient world.

See the full program of the conference "Every Bone has a Story" and the abstracts of the presentations.