Bioarchaeology of the Near East, 18:3-24 (2024)

Theorising disAbility in Egyptian bioarchaeology

Sonia Ruth Zakrzewski*, Stephanie Evelyn-Wright
Department of Archaeology, University of Southampton,
Highfield, Southampton, SO17 1BF, UK
email: srz@soton.ac.uk (corresponding author)

Abstract: What is disability, and how do we identify it in a bioarchaeological context? Within palaeopathology and bioarchaeology, disability has often been viewed from a modern medicalised model standpoint, with focus placed on skeletal changes and impairments, but the field of bioarchaeology is intrinsically social in nature. People experience physical impairments but are not necessarily disabled by those impairments. In ancient Egyptian contexts, the medical papyri provide a view of the emic understanding and treatment of bodily difference in the Egyptian past, but this concept of difference does not map directly onto modern etic understandings of physical bodily difference, and may not map to skeletal impairment identifiable from bioarchaeological study. All potential impairments should be understood in contextual terms as putative disorders that are contingent on the local situation in which the affected individual lived and in which the surrounding community operated. For example, dyslexia is only a difference within literate societies. Even when considering disability as enabling a focus to be placed on the ability to undertake actions (disAbility), there is still a fluid boundary between disabled and able-bodied, with shading and gradations along the continuum of disAbility depending on the actions and activities of the individuals involved. The temporal aspects and duration of impairment must also be considered as disAbility is not static, but rather changes along the life course. DisAbility in past populations must be viewed using an emic lens.

Key words: disability; dwarfism; life course; representation

https://doi.org/10.47888/bne-1801 | Received 17 February 2023; accepted 7 July 2023; published online 19 October 2025.

Return to Volume 18:2024