Episode 25

It's Made of People!

Never heard of anthropodermic bibliopegy? That's about to change, friends! This week, Anna and Amber look at some unexpected objects made out of people, and discuss the effect of such objects on the living. Content note: We discuss modification of human remains, so please exercise discretion in listening.

Our content warning goes double for this week’s show notes! As your editor (Amber) realized herself, discussing these places and objects is one thing, but looking at images of them is another entirely. We’ve noted where images of the materials in question are unavoidable, and we encourage you to remain mindful of the people involved in their production and exercise discretion.  

For the brave and curious among you, learn more by checking out:

A Book by Its Cover (Lapham’s Quarterly)

Digitized version of Narrative of the life of James Allen : alias George Walton, alias Jonas Pierce, alias James H. York, alias Burley Grove, the highwayman : being his death-bed confession, to the warden of the Massachusetts State Prison (Boston Athenaeum, CW: images of modified human remains)

Anthropodermic book, 1789 (Mütter Museum, CW: images of modified human remains)

Analyzing Alleged Human Skin Books Via Peptide Mass Fingerprinting (Anthropodermicbooks.org)

Here Are the 8 Creepiest Churches Made of Bones (Ecophiles, CW: images of modified human remains)

The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine (Smithsonian Magazine)

Mummy as a Drug (Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine)

Ancient Human-Bone Sculptors Turned Relatives Into Tools? (National Geographic News)

The Gruesome History of Making Human Skeletons (Atlas Obscura)

The Secret Lives of Cadavers (National Geographic, CW: anonymized images of human cadavers)

Body Worlds: Philosophy (Body World Exhibition)

Body Worlds: Plastination Technique (Body Worlds Exhibition)

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The Dirt Podcast
Archaeology, Anthropology, and our shared human past.

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The Dirt Podcast

As science communicators in anthropology and archaeology, we hosts of The Dirt acknowledge that we hold a position of considerable privilege and opportunity, and commit ourselves to continuous learning, unlearning and reflection. We recognize that our disciplines, as well as our own lives, are rooted in and propped up by settler colonialism, white supremacy, and dispossession.

We now reside on the stolen ancestral territory of the Shawnee and Haudenosaunee and on the lands of the Muscogee and Cherokee Nations, but over its lifetime, The Dirt has also been produced on the unceded traditional territory of the Piscataway Conoy and Cedarville Band of Piscataway Indians, as well as that of the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation, Patwin and Miwok peoples and all those dispossessed by Cession 296. We offer our show as a platform for Indigenous scholarship, history, and cultural expression, through citation and conversation, and we welcome the opportunity to host and compensate Indigenous scholars of archaeology and anthropology as interview guests.

Likewise, we encourage all listeners who reside in settler-colonial states to learn about on whose land they reside, their place in the ongoing process of colonization, and how to contribute materially to reparations and Indigenous sovereignty.