Skeleton 472 is the remains of Ann Purvis, excavated from a small trench in the graveyard of St. Hilda's Church, Coronation Street, South Shields, on the south bank of the River Tyne in the northeast of England (Figure 1). The remains of 204 individuals were recovered from this part of the graveyard, which was in use between 1816 and 1855. Purvis was one of fifty-two skeletons identified as adult female (alongside fifty-one adult men; the others were mainly children or young infants) but one of only two female skeletons for whom a full name was recoverable from the site. A rare coffin plate bears her full name with the year of her burial, barely legible.Footnote ¹ Ann Purvis died on 14 October 1849 and was buried on 17 October 1849, aged fifty-six.Footnote ²

Figure 1

Skeletal remains of Ann Purvis. Photograph courtesy of Sophie Newman, University of Sheffield.

The extent of the survival of Purvis's skeleton is limited.Footnote ³ Her spine, ribs, and pelvis are entirely absent apart from two vertebrae at the base of her skull (cervical 1 and 2) and sections from the protruding edges of her hip bones (the ilium). The parts of her skeleton that survive are largely incomplete or in fragments; the exceptions are her lower jaw, pieces from her collarbone and shoulder bones, the uppermost sections of her left and right arms (the proximal humerus), and her kneecaps. Three of her teeth were also found, two from her upper jaw and one from her bottom jaw. The infilling of the sockets of her lost teeth with new bone shows that most tooth loss occurred some considerable time prior to her death. Both femurs and one tibia display periosteal reaction (evidence of inflammation of the tissue surrounding the bone), caused either by stress placed on the bones through the overuse of muscles or by infection; this damage had largely healed at the time of death and so was related to her earlier life. The degenerative joint disease found at the top of her spine is also indicated in her upper arm. Osteoarchaeological analysis shows evidence of poor dental hygiene, consumption of sugary foods, and childhood disease or malnutrition, excessive use of the lower limbs or disease in early life, and the process of aging. Thus, embedded in Ann Purvis's skeleton are traces of the compromised health, wear, and degeneration of her body that occurred during her lifetime.

What does it mean to describe Purvis's skeletal remains as an example of “one British thing”? Beginning with the body as a material thing is the starting point for osteo- or bio-archaeologists, but scholars in other disciplines may balk at applying material culture approaches to the human body. We certainly should be cautious. Norms surrounding the treatment of human remains are highly variable, and ethical practices are rightly the subject of considerable scrutiny. Since at least the 1980s, debates in the United Kingdom and elsewhere concerning the repatriation of Indigenous human remains from museums and galleries to their original (invariably colonized) communities demonstrate the quite disparate attitudes toward historic collections of human remains. Archaeologists are cognizant of their own place in the long history of these practices, acknowledging that once human remains are classed as curated objects, they can lose the wider emotional, social, and cultural values attached to them as individuals.Footnote ⁴ These questions about the relationship between persons and their body take us directly to a principal ethical and methodological issue concerning “embodiment.”

In underlining objecthood rather than personhood, we risk skating over individuals’ agency and their capacity for advanced cognition; in emphasizing the material, we might reduce the person to mere matter. Yet while bodies have long been understood to be animated by immaterial spirit and soul, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century legal theories of coverture, changing attitudes to the criminal corpse, slavery, or indentured labor indicate that during those centuries bodies could also be treated as a form of property or a kind of “thing.” A “material culture” approach points to the study of both the physical and the socially constructed aspects of a given thing; the body is precisely such a thing. In discussing skeleton 472 as a woman, for example, archaeologists recognize that the category of sex is constructed from the interplay between the social and biological.Footnote ⁵ Indeed, one of the foundational precepts of osteoarchaeology is that skeletons are, in the words of Clark Spencer Larsen, “a kind of a memory of the environment,” not least because diet and nutrition leave long-lasting traces in the size and composition of bones.Footnote ⁶ Yet bodies and minds in their entirety are created from an active engagement with the material environment through the “distributed cognitive ecologies” in which humans, objects, and practices are interconnected influences on one another.Footnote ⁷ Purvis's missing teeth would have affected her diet; their impact on her appearance may have altered attitudes toward her. Her damaged legs may have caused her pain and perhaps restricted her ability to work. As “one British thing,” Purvis's skeleton foregrounds the socio-materiality of the body and brings our attention to experiences of that socio-material body.

If embodiment has an archive, then the physical body is a principal component of it. Yet this perspective poses a significant challenge to methods of understanding the past in the arts and humanities and in particular to an approach that examines how discourse produces experience. In the words of Joan Scott, “It is not individuals who have experience, but subjects who are constituted through experience.”Footnote ⁸ The human body is a material archive of experience that—unlike the written, visual, and material object sources that typically inform our studies of the past—cannot be read with literary approaches to discourse alone. Purvis's body was never a fixed, essential physical thing, but neither was it a contingent thing created through representation. It is a special kind of thing that requires us to sharpen our tools for examining how the physical works its way into experience.

As an archive of experience, remains of the human body can allow access to the lived lives of those difficult to trace in other records. The historical documentary record for Ann Purvis is patchy, limited to the 1841 census, the parish register of her burial in 1849, and a newspaper notice of her death. Together, these sources suggest that at the time of her death she was the widow of a respectable man with one son, surrounded by a large extended family.Footnote ⁹ Yet these records tell us little about her life as she lived and felt it. In cases of both the material/skeletal and documentary record, the archive for Ann Purvis is partial. Nonetheless, in bringing together the material and documentary records, we can begin to explore the complex interaction between social categories and the physical body in the making of experience.