The unwritten history of medical treatment: Evidence for ritual-healers and their activities in the pre-literate past.

Healers in past societies can be identified through funerary contexts by combining human remains, grave goods, and burial practices. Cross-culturally, healers are socially diverse individuals who also fulfill roles tied to transcendent ideologies and religion. They are ambivalent figures, capable of both defending community health and causing harm using the same knowledge. This ambivalence, along with their lack of formal organization, makes their archaeological identification controversial but possible. Healers' practices disproportionately influence archaeological records and complement historical sources for understanding medical knowledge development. However, published literature varies in detail, leading to under-appreciation of healing practices in reconstructions of past societies. Applying archaeothanatological approaches to funerary contexts can reveal objects and practices later superseded by scientific medicine.

Study at a glance

Abstract

To reveal the presence and activities of healers from funerary contexts. Ethnohistoric and ethnographic textual descriptions and the bioarchaeological record. A synthesis of human remains, grave contexts, and funerary objects. The capacity to act as a "healer" forms part of the social identity of a diverse range of uniquely specialized individuals cross-culturally who also perform a variety of other roles associated with transcendent ideologies, beliefs, and religion. They are ambivalent, capable of doing both good and ill. They defend the health and well-being of the individual and the community but, using the same knowledge, are also implicated in attacks on individuals and groups within and outside their communities. This ambivalence, combined with a lack of defined institutional organization and the great diversity of medico-religious healers in the recent ethnographic past and historically, makes the identification of such individuals in the archaeological record controversial, but they are present. Not only are healers identifiable in the archaeological record, but their practices disproportionately influence it, acting as a powerful complement to historical sources for the development of medicine and medical knowledge. Published literature is of variable detail, which means that healing practices and healers are under-appreciated and under-represented in reconstructions of past societies. Application of archaeothanatological approaches to recording and synthesis of the funerary context with the remains of the deceased can be used to identify objects and practices used in healing that have been more recently superseded by scientific approaches to health.