Bioarchaeological Study of Maternal Health and Stress in Medellín, Colombia

In order to examine the embodiment of maternal stress in tandem with structural, biopolitical violence, I propose to analyze the forensic osteological reference collection at the University of Antioquia in Medellin, Colombia. This osteological reference collection is comprised of modern skeletons, most of which are associated with known age, sex, and birth region (Isaza & Vargas 2011; Monsalve & Hefner 2016; Calle 2020). Using the funding from the Tinker grant, I was able to return to Colombia and collect my first round of data for my dissertation. The previous time I visited Medellin (Fall 2024), I was able to collect preliminary data that helped to inform my sampling strategies. In addition to this, I was also able to establish initial relationships with my collaborators at the University, which I built upon this summer. As for lessons learned, It was definitely instilled in me that things don’t always go to plan. It is easy to be over ambitious, and it is both realistic and important to bake in an expected degree of lost time to unforeseen obstacles and err on the side of caution. My findings are a work in progress. This Fall, I will be analyzing this first set of preliminary data. I will return to Colombia at least two more times to finish collecting the data I started this past summer and to collect my next batch of data. Overall, biocultural approaches in bioarchaeology combine the social and biological and, in the context of this research, aim to assess how embodied biocultural stress varies throughout different stages of the lifecourse. Moreover, this work speaks to the extension of the life course across generations and emphasizes how the mother infant nexus and DOHaD perspectives are inherently multiscalar in that our bodies begin bound within another not just physically, but also in terms of inherited traces of historical violence that can radiate across generations, and be embedded into hard tissue. The use of both a multiscalar and multitemporal approach allows for a more robust contextualization of how the entanglement of historical events and different eras of sociopolitical violence and biopolitics may shape the embodiment of skeletal stress and structural vulnerability (Winburn et al. 2022).