Unearthing an Archaeology of Disability
In this post, Kyle Lewis Jordan explains the connections between archaeology and disability, and considers how the heritage sector can best represent the history of disability.

Archaeology is the study of ‘things’ that people leave behind. Whether these things were placed deliberately and with care, or we discover them where they fell and were left behind, an archaeologist strives to use these things to piece together the lived experiences of people going back hundreds of years.
Such study is rich with possibility, but we cannot achieve the full scope of that possibility without interrogating the tools and systems that have built archaeology as a discipline. Empire-building – from antiquity right to the present day – is an exercise in classification and control: of people, of land, of knowledge and the ‘things’ that fall within the interests of the imperial core. Archaeology as a discipline today is in a moment of soul-searching, reckoning with a material and intellectual legacy which directly influenced – and indeed, benefited from – these classifications, both out in the field but also in the museum and in the archive. False binaries of enlightened; savage, civilised; barbarous, order; chaos, just to name a few. Among these we should also include able; disabled.

Disability, as a medicalised categorisation of a human being’s capacity and capability to fulfil a determined list of “normal” functions, is something that began to gather steam in the 18th and 19th centuries, when states began to take a statistical interest in the lives of their citizens for the purpose of standardizing methods of work and education. Anyone who could not meet this state of “normalcy” then became a statistical anomaly that had to be rationalised and explained through pseudoscience’s like eugenics, which promoted systems of coercion and control to ensure genetic “purity”. This was legitimated in part by the abuse of ancient human remains and the aesthetic centring of classical sculpture in the museum as an institution, just as disabled people themselves were institutionalized, and colonial subjects incarcerated.
Today, as we re-evaluate the role of the museum collection and the archival record, uncovering the narratives of d/Deaf, disabled and neurodivergent people through equitable co-production has a crucial role to play. Not just to point at an object or record and say, “here is disability”, but to demonstrate how disability is an intrinsic part of the human experience. An archaeology of disability sees humankind at its most raw and most beautiful; interrogating not just the substance of our being, but also the historical and contemporary processes that have shaped what we have and can become.

Kyle Lewis Jordan is a disabled early career archaeologist and museum curator who specializes in studying disability in antiquity. He has curated for the Ashmolean Museum, Pitt Rivers Museum and Verulamium Museum.