Situating Roman Bioarchaeology Between Anthropology and Classics

When Professor Robert Myers wrote to me in 2017 asking if I would deliver the 2018 GAD Distinguished Lecture, I was incredibly honored. And to be honest, I was also very surprised. I’ve always seen myself as an outsider to anthropology, someone who found a niche in the margins of this expansive and generous discipline. I was allowed to cling to my personal, poetic, vulnerable approach to anthropology only because there were plenty of “real anthropologists” carrying out the serious theoretical, comparative, and politically committed work we were supposed to do. So I’m not sure if I’m here today because I’m no longer an outsider or if it’s precisely my condition as an outsider that might make my voice relevant at this moment when vulnerability seems to define everyday life. This is a time of acute awareness and distrust of outsiders. It is a vehemently anti-immigrant era, frightening in its hatred of those “Others” who have gone in search of a home beyond the borders of the nations they come from. Deportation is a word that has become sadly commonplace in the United States. For those undocumented immigrants from Mexico and Central America who live with the anxiety and fear of experiencing this expulsion in the flesh, theirs is a state of unspeakable terror, beyond what most of us can comprehend. And they are the “lucky ones.” A yet more dire situation confronts immigrants fleeing for their lives, trying to reach the border to seek asylum, and being greeted by hunger, thirst, and violence that bring them to the edge of death. Coming together in a (See DL, page 2) Campus Inequality Distinguished Lecture