Accumulating and Negotiating Meaning(s) of Two Egyptian Women

Abstract

Legacy skeletal collections reflect the shifting historical meanings attributed by researchers to these collections and the individuals that comprise them. This article employs osteobiography and object itinerary as a methodological approach to combine the lived and posthumous experiences of two Egyptian women. This research exposes the meaning(s) accumulated over two individuals’ lives but also those following their death, highlighting the role researchers play in interpretations and understandings of the past. The two Egyptian individuals studied here were excavated by archaeologists funded by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met) in 1907 from the site of Lisht but ultimately traded to and curated by Earnest A. Hooten, the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University. Osteobiographies and object itineraries produced for these two individuals outline the ways in which their lived experiences influenced posthumous experiences for these women, including counteracting their abstraction in representations, where their material culture alone has dominated narratives. Of note, the differences uncovered for these two individuals, who did not live during the same time and would never have encountered one another except in death, have been tied to one another through their posthumous experiences.