Felipe Gaitan Ammann

Preliminary abstract: This project in mortuary archaeology explores an exceptional collection of archaeological and bioarchaeological data recently recovered at the San Ignacio Jesuit Church, a jewel of Spanish colonial art located in the historical district of Bogot’, Colombia. Through a rigorous, scientific examination of the skeletal remains and associated artifacts buried in different areas of the church between the 17th and the late 19th centuries, this project will reconstruct the life cycles and funerary practices of specific social segments of colonial and republican Bogota. Drawing on contemporary theorizations as to the socially constructed nature of the human body, this study will allow us to understand how different bodily perceptions of life and death grounded in the Baroque mindset of the Spanish Golden Age were implemented and gradually transformed with the rise of a modernized, bourgeois, and cosmopolitan lifestyle in late-nineteenth century Bogot’. Further, this project aims at articulating new knowledge as to the Spanish colonial treatment of the body -living or dead- with the discussion of current processes of memory construction, particularly within the socially and politically volatile post-war context of contemporary Colombia.