Ritualità emergenti nella prossimità tra antropologia e archeologia. Nominare i reperti ossei di scavo

The article explores a situated practice that emerges in the space of proximity between cultural anthropology and archaeology, through a micro-ethnography of a recurrent informal practice in a specific excavation context: the renaming of human skeletal remains by Italian archaeologists during fieldwork. Grounded in an unusual interdisciplinary research experience conducted in co-presence, the contribution shows how the daily sharing of excavation practices makes visible dimensions of scientific work that are usually opaque, located in a liminal zone between technical objectification and human involvement. Renaming is analysed as an informal ritual act through which human remains are temporarily removed from the anonymity of numerical codes and reinscribed into contemporary networks of meaning, allowing practitioners to inhabit the ambiguity between person and artifact. The article argues that this form of disciplinary proximity, precisely because it is non-institutionalized and contingent, far from producing a peaceful synthesis, takes shape as an epistemic condition traversed by productive tensions, capable of expanding the boundaries of what can be thought and of rendering intelligible the implicit ritual practices embedded in work on the past.