Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Histories of Post-Mortem ContagionThe Burial Pit as Bio-historical Archive

Histories of Post-Mortem Contagion: The Burial Pit as Bio-historical Archive [Recent historical research on the bubonic plague has been heavily impacted by historical biological data. Ancient DNA, the technology to trace bacteria in human remains, has turned burial grounds from places reminiscent of epidemic disasters into resourceful biohistorical archives. Mobilizing the tools of retrospective diagnostics, the burial pit has become a popular site to apply scientific methods and standards to the writing of the historical narratives of plague over the centuries. This chapter will interrogate the methodological underpinnings of the hereby intended ‘validation’ of history through science. Addressing the burial pit as a bio-historical archive allows us to critically evaluate the making of plague history and plague biology as an entangled endeavor. To this end, this chapter seeks to connect existing controversies regarding plague’s historiography to long-established debates over presentism and historical epistemology in the history of science to argue for a renewed understanding of biohistory.] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

Histories of Post-Mortem ContagionThe Burial Pit as Bio-historical Archive

Part of the Medicine and Biomedical Sciences in Modern History Book Series
Editors: Lynteris, Christos; Evans, Nicholas H A
Engelmann, Lukas
Histories of Post-Mortem Contagion — Dec 16, 2017
Download PDF
22 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/springer-journals/histories-of-post-mortem-contagion-the-burial-pit-as-bio-historical-zFrk6GM71n

References (0)

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
Springer International Publishing
Copyright
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
ISBN
978-3-319-62928-5
Pages
189 –211
DOI
10.1007/978-3-319-62929-2_8
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

[Recent historical research on the bubonic plague has been heavily impacted by historical biological data. Ancient DNA, the technology to trace bacteria in human remains, has turned burial grounds from places reminiscent of epidemic disasters into resourceful biohistorical archives. Mobilizing the tools of retrospective diagnostics, the burial pit has become a popular site to apply scientific methods and standards to the writing of the historical narratives of plague over the centuries. This chapter will interrogate the methodological underpinnings of the hereby intended ‘validation’ of history through science. Addressing the burial pit as a bio-historical archive allows us to critically evaluate the making of plague history and plague biology as an entangled endeavor. To this end, this chapter seeks to connect existing controversies regarding plague’s historiography to long-established debates over presentism and historical epistemology in the history of science to argue for a renewed understanding of biohistory.]

Published: Dec 16, 2017

There are no references for this article.