Marginalisation in life and death: Moving towards re-humanisation of archaeological bodies.

In recent decades, pressure has grown for bioarchaeologists to recognize the roles archaeology has played, and may continue to play, in leveraging power inequalities against marginalized people. Conversely, where applied thoughtfully and ethically—with the engagement and consent of stakeholder communities—bioarchaeology has great potential as a tool of restorative justice. Through reconstruction of life histories, new narratives may be produced. These may address past stigmatization and discursive violence or offer representation to forgotten people whose legacy was obscured by structural violence. Most essentially, we propose that bioarchaeology has the potential to symbolically re-humanize individuals or populations in death who were subject to narrative obscurity or dehumanization in life. In this chapter, we present two examples of injustice in historical communities: one, a case study considering the intertwining of landscape embodiment, poverty, and stigma in the English Fens over nearly 2,000 years; and another, examining marginalization of mothers and infants in the Irish laundries of the 20th century. We further discuss past, present, and future research with potential to address injuries caused by structural and discursive violence in these areas.