Body matters

We are all by our very nature as people embodies, and experience and interact with the world through our bodies. BODY MATTERS aims to look at the representation of body and soul in archaeology. Papers range from prehistoric burial practices and their interpretation to bodies in art and archaeology in both prehistory and the present. Such a span of topics within an underlying theme should provide a stimulating experience.

Dismembering secondary burial

Mortuary practice in Neolithic Britain has long been a subject of debate: were bodies excarnated and selected bones interred in a tomb, whole bodies interred and later re-arranged or bones removed after a time, to be moved across the countryside? Much of the theory behind these ideas stems from texts written in the early part of this century. Recent research indicates that it may be time to think again.

Articulating disarticulation: a Maltese experience

The Maltese islands are well known for their prehistoric temples. Less well known are their funerary remains since, until recently, the prime mortuary site, Hal Saflieni, was an empty architectural framework without any knowledge of the bodies it once contained. Recent excavations at the Brochtorff Circle at Xaghra have provided insight into these bodies by uncovering a comparable site. Here, various combinations of skeletal remains, animal bones and figurative art provide intriguing evidence of the prehistoric concept of the body in these central Mediterranean islands. Early results of the computerisation of these largedeposits will be presented in a broader framework of the cultural organisation of the Maltese islands in the fourth and third millennia BC.

Dumping the dead in the late Neolithic

The paper will discuss the results of recent excavation at Langford Lowfields (near Newark, Notts), a gravel beach along an abandoned channel of the River Trent, where an accumulation of brushwood had entrapped a selection of skulls: 13 human, 3 sheep, 1 aurochs, 4 domestic cattle, 1 deer and 2 dogs; plus a small selection of post-cranial material and 5 large antlers.

It will be argued that the site is best interpreted as evidence for mortuary practice involving excarnation and a ritual emphasis on skulls, both human and animal. The site may offer a clue to the treatment of those dead who were not interred in round barrows.

Fragments of the prehistory of violence in Italy

Violence is many things: a way of constructing social relations, a cultural icon, a constraint on economy and settlement, a physical hazard. In this paper I bring together four disparate sources on violence in prehistoric Italy: (1) architecture, (2) artifacts and their contextual use, (3) iconography, and (4) skeletal evidence. Interestingly, these often do not agree. For instance, the Neolithic, which lacks weapon iconography and artifacts, has high rates of skeletal trauma and defensive architecture; in the Copper Age the situation is the reverse. As this suggests, we cannot assume that symbolisms of violence imply that violence was also practised. In the Italian case, there are varied sociological reasons why the rise of violence symbolisms coincided with the fall in violence rates.

The body as cultural symbol

This paper will be concerned with the socio-cultural context of body art, such as scarification and mutilations. It builds on ethnoarchaeological research carried out in Tanzania and Mozambique among the Maconde population. The aim is to discuss the role of body art in social and cultural reproduction and the implications for archaeological interpretations both on a general and particular level. This type of material culture has a very wide distribution in time and space and is used to express cultural specific ideas and beliefs. Even though there is no connection in the specific meaning content of these symbols, the very act of subjectifying the body, making it both an object and a subject, is a near universal tradition. This case study looks at how decoration is applied to children's bodies as they are transformed into adult members of society through elaborate initiation rituals. This transformation is manifested in a decorated body. The body is a multivocal symbol bearing messages both to living humans and spirits of long gone ancestors. The bearer of the symbolically embellished skin is protected and cured while fertility and good fortune is enhanced. The changing symbolic meaning content will be seen in relation to a social context of rapid cultural change and re-production.

Visual perception of the body in Palaeolithic and Mesolithic figural art

This talk explores the way the human body was presented by the prehistoric artist. I explore the variation in and similarities between figurines and the way the image was constructed, as well as the visual dimensions of particular figurines. I look at the shape, dynamism and movement of the figurines. I relate the prehistoric images to the figural art in the antique period, Classicism and modern art to relate the possible similarities and differences in visual perception in prehistory, historical period and contemporary age.

The Palaeolithic and Mesolithic figurines from Russia, Lithuania and Latvia are going to be discussed in this paper.

The physical self exposed: exhibiting the body as/in art and archaeology

This paper will explore the transformation of the human body from concept of a physical entity containing the self into object- exhibit in two contexts- categories: Art and Archaeology.

Attitudes, objectives and products will be analysed comparatively using theory and examples coming from specific exhibitions: Peter Greenaway's "The Physical Self", the work of specific artists and "archaeological" approaches to the human body as reflected in archaeological museums' exhibitions.

Visual representations of the prehistoric, "primitive" human, ethics of exhibiting human relics, the use of manequines and the authority-granting photographs of the archaeologists and anthropologists exhibited next to their representations-reconstructions of past humans will be juxtaposed with the body in the arts: the body as art object and the body as process (performance art).

Issues of ownership, authority, subjectivity/individuality, identity and the place of the self, as well as the physical quality of the body during the process and as a product of the exhibiting attitudes of the two categories-art and archaeology, will be discussed and evaluated in the light of the question: Which is the relationship, if any, of these bodies-products with the living and thinking individuals of the 20th century.

As dead as a dildo: drawing on the non origin of heterosexuality

Key words: dildo, heterosexuality, phallogocentric, politics, textuality, violence.

Developing from existing models for the Origin of human sexual behaviour, this paper logically erects a deconstructed psychoanalytical critique of the Self and human sexuality. In drawing through a combined weaving of personal experience and ongoing archaeographical and ethnographical field research, we attempt to demonstrate the instability of the teleological, metaphysical and phallogocentric tradition of heterosexuality and its derivatives (e.g. bi-sexuality, homosexuality) upon which [behavioural] evolution is necessarily grounded.

Offering a radicalisation of dis-engengendered sexuality, our research posits an always already political violence at the core/corpse/cause of all heterosexual activity: of which, archaeology is inseparably a part. This brief exposition attacks the all too often social ambivalence that inhabits and inhibits the above. Out-lining a libidinal textuality of pragmatic desire, we hope for a solicitation of the denial used to protect archaeology's onoristic and missionary like position.