Embodied Inequality in Life and Death: Marginalization in Bogotá, Colombia

Historical narratives tend to minimize the lives of people who struggled with poverty. Bioarchaeological analyses can illuminate those lives and, critically, the marginalization they endured by evaluating aspects of structural inequality that are embodied in skeletal remains and situating them within the context of institutionally produced and normalized inequality. In Western contexts, the remains of people from the recent past who struggled with poverty are often recovered from defunct public burial sites specifically for those who could not afford private burial. In the 1800s, urban expansion drove the establishment of formal cemeteries outside of the city throughout the West. Likewise, the same forces cause the redevelopment of burial grounds, and often disproportionately affect public rather than private ones. People buried on public grounds reflect diverse lived experiences of marginalization during urbanization, and of further marginalization during their deaths, expressed through mortuary treatment and the collective forgetting that permits land redevelopment. The aims of this dissertation were first to characterize insights from bioarchaeological analysis of public burial grounds and then to use those insights to explore heterogeneous experiences of inequality in life and death in a skeletal assemblage from a public burial site in Bogotá, Colombia. A systematic review of bioarchaeological literature from public burial sites synthesizes the major themes and insights. Then, a study of a skeletal assemblage from Cementerio Central explores heterogeneous experiences of inequality across the life course and death course in urbanizing Bogotá during the late 1800s to mid-1900s. First, variability in lived experiences of marginalization during urbanization is explored by comparing skeletal stress and oral health between isotopically determined locals and nonlocals and between skeletal males and females. Results show little difference between groups, suggesting disparate experiences of inequality may be embodied similarly. Then, marginalization in death is examined through correspondence analysis of variables reflecting taphonomic damage and the observability of variables associated with identity and lived experience. This analysis suggests that mortuary treatment and excavation and storage had a direct effect on remains that contributed to the erasure of their identities.