Uncovering Identity in Mortuary Analysis: Community-Sensitive Methods for Identifying Group Affiliation in Historical Cemeteries by Michael P. Heilen (review)

Uncovering Identity in Mortuary Analysis is an edited volume that details the recovery and analysis of 1,200 individuals from the Alameda Stone Cemetery in downtown Tucson, used by the residents of that growing town from around 1860 to 1880. The cemetery, which was almost completely excavated as a cultural-resource-management project, is unique in content (a cemetery of this size from this time period with a large Hispanic population) and in the degree to which the investigators collaborated with diverse stakeholder communities in the planning, implementation, and analysis phases of the project. The project was a success from multiple viewpoints largely due to the incorporation of community members from the outset.

As the title suggests, the focus of this volume is more specific than one might expect of a monograph (these details were published elsewhere). Indeed, anyone looking for large appendixes of raw data from the archaeological and osteological analyses will be disappointed. But this criterion misses the point of the book. The point is about community engagement and the complex interplay between biological and social identity in historical archaeological research in which the stakeholders are real and the history not too ancient. Most useful and interesting about the book is the authors' direct presentation of their approach to uncovering identity based on biological affinity, grave goods, manner of burial, spatial relationships among graves, and osteological signatures of lifestyle—all interpreted with respect to historical research documenting the range of possible cultural identities present within late nineteenth-century Tucson. The book is primarily concerned with how a project of this type should be done; it provides a valuable roadmap for it.

The seven chapters demonstrate the variety of methods and data sources used. The documentary record anchors the research and establishes a number of "givens" or parameters of interpretation. The work is also grounded within the social-identities literature, emphasizing community engagement in the overall success of the project. The contributors—archaeologists, osteologists, and forensic anthropologists- place a heavy emphasis on materials: bioarchaeological (skeletal) in Chapters 3 and 5 and cultural (mortuary) in Chapters 3 and 6. Nonetheless, they interweave historical and archival data seamlessly throughout the text. Chapter 3 functions as the core of the book, focusing on assessing cultural identity using multiple, independent lines of evidence.

The book tends to give all of the data sources equal weight rather than to offer independent critiques of them. Methods involve basic description and inventory, as well as more complex multivariate statistical approaches for defining commonalities among cultural and artifact classes—surely a response to the massive sample recovered and the complexity of the resulting database. The authors make use of a variety of textual sources as well, which they incorporate into the overall flow of topics. For example, Chapter 5 is concerned with who (culturally) might have been buried at the Alameda Stone Cemetery, employing a historically generated range of possibilities to define normative burial practices for Hispanic Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Military, Apache, O'odham, and Yaqui segments of the community. Each is linked to specific archaeological signatures such that mortuary beliefs and practices are relatable to what is actually found in the ground. Data from other North American historical cemetery investigations are included for comparative purposes.

The concluding chapter re-emphasizes the meaning imbued in such a project and closes on a humanistic note about the importance of community, both past and present, and the role of archaeologists in creating meaning, affirming why they do what they do, although archaeologists all too often can get lost in the minutiae and details along the way. As an exposition on why historical archaeology (and bioarchaeology) matters, this book is a great success.