ABSTRACT
The continuum of dis/ability builds on the social model of disability, which presents disability as the result of limitations related to social factors. As a continuum this model of dis/ability perceives everyone to have an aspect of their identity that relates to their own body and its ability integrated into its social identity. Thus identity is rooted within the individual person’s social environment and can vary over the course of a lifetime, as the body and/or social expectations change and interacts with other aspects of an individual’s identity such as age and gender. This model challenges the binary opposition between “disabled” and “normal” bodies that underlies the idea of “compulsory able-bodiedness” and emphasizes the possibility that status and expectations can change. The aim of this chapter is to demonstrate how the continuum of dis/ability can be applied in order to discuss the experience of and perception of dis/ability in the past, within an individual’s specific geographical and temporal context. The chapter will demonstrate the potential of skeletal remains to explain the social aspects of identity in terms of a body’s dis/ability. It focuses on Romano-British human skeletal material, read alongside historical and archaeological data, to create integrated osteobiographies.
