Medical Archaeology and the Research Roads of Global Health in the Age of Eugenics

ABSTRACT

This article centers on an underexplored dimension of archaeology—the role of medicine and medical doctors in the ways archaeological excavations connected at times with early global health research and infrastructures. Its case studies focus on archaeology's role in the institutional networks, research routes, and racialized pathologies that foreshadowed a specific case of an egregious human medical experimentation program carried out in Guatemala by US institutional sponsors and medical professionals, examining these realities as structures as well as events. Some of the most pressing issues in archaeology today include debates about DNA biosampling and related areas of contemporary applied health implications that could be much more ethically and effectively anchored if grasped from a deeper view of how the fields of archaeology, medical science, and “race science” have long been entwined and have shifted over time. The article closes by discussing why it matters for contemporary practitioners to be familiar with these histories and their entanglements in infrastructures and networks of imperial race science. Archaeologists today have particular historical inheritances and responsibilities in need of understanding, and perhaps something important to contribute to the collective work of repair.