111 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 L. A. Tremblay, S. Reedy (eds.), The Bioarchaeology of Structural Violence, Bioarchaeology and Social Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46440-0_6 Chapter 6 The Erie County Poorhouse (1828–1926) as a Heterotopia: A Bioarchaeological Perspective Jennifer L. Muller, Jennifer F. Byrnes, and David A. Ingleman Introduction Sociologist Johan Galtung (1969) introduced the concept of structural violence in his discussion of societal mechanisms that cause harm to particular groups of peo- ple via the impairment of basic human needs, including the suppression of agency (Tremblay, this volume). Galtung’s structural violence has proved to be a useful concept for bioarchaeological research (e.g., Gowland 2018; Halling and Seidemann 2017; Klaus 2012; Muller et al. 2017; Nystrom 2014; Nystrom et al. 2017; Osterholtz 2016). In this chapter, we complicate historical narratives by focusing on the enact- ment of cultural and structural violences in industrial-era Buffalo, New York, as experienced by those who sought relief at the Erie County Poorhouse (ECPH). This bioarchaeological research benefts from the integration of historical social welfare policy, the ECPH historical archive, and skeletal and archaeological analyses from an excavated portion of the ECPH cemetery. In order to interrogate the relationships between structural violence, social wel- fare transformations, and archaeological bodies from the ECPH, we employ Galtung’s concept of cultural violence and Michel Foucault’s heterotopia. Michel Foucault (1998) described heterotopias as real places that are like societal counter- sites that are not freely accessible. Foucault (1998: 179–180) described two main J. L. Muller (*) Department of Anthropology, Ithaca College, Ithaca, NY, USA e-mail: jlmuller@ithaca.edu J. F. Byrnes Department of Anthropology, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Las Vegas, NV, USA e-mail: Jennifer.byrnes@unlv.edu D. A. Ingleman Department of Anthropology, University of California Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, USA e-mail: ingleman@ucsc.edu