Some activists and anthropologists are pushing those within the field to stop identifying human remains as male or female.
One Canadian student, Emma Palladino, made the case earlier this month, arguing that labeling human remains as one gender is “rarely the end goal of any excavation,” joining others calling for reform in their field of work.
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“Labelling remains ‘male’ or ‘female’ is rarely the end goal of any excavation, anyway,” tweeted Palladino on July 4, according to the College Fix. “The ‘bioarchaeology of the individual’ is what we aim for, factoring in absolutely everything we discover about a person into a nuanced and open-ended biography of their life.”
The series of tweets from Palladino, a master’s student in archaeology at McGill University, has since garnered over 10,000 retweets and 59,000 likes.
Others within and outside the anthropology field have made similar arguments in the past, suggesting scientists might not know how people identified themselves while alive. University of Kansas assistant anthropology professor Jennifer Raff argued in her book Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas that there were “no neat divisions between physically or genetically ‘male’ or ‘female’ individuals.”
As human remains are discovered, archaeologists typically determine certain characteristics about them, such as biological sex, race, age, etc. Anthropologists study the origin, development, and behavior of humans, examining cultures, archaeological remains, and more.
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Last year, Finnish and German researchers raised the possibility that remains uncovered at Suontaka Vesitorninmaki, Hattula, Finland, dated A.D.1050-1300 could belong to a nonbinary person. Items around the bones, such as a sword, suggested the person was male, while jewelry suggested the remains belonged to a woman, according to the Washington Post.
