Archaeology often struggles in envisioning real people behind the world
of material objects it studies. Even when dealing with skeletal remains
archaeologists routinely reduce them to long lists of figures and
attributes. Such a fragmentation of past subjects and their bodies, if
analytically necessary, is hardly satisfactory. While material culture
is the main archaeological proxy to real people in the past, the absence
of past bodies has been chronic in archaeological writings. At the same
time, these past bodies in archaeology are omnipresent. Bodily matters
are tangible in the archaeological record in a way most other
theoretical centralities never appear to be. Ancient bodies surround us,
in representations, in burials, in the remains of food preparation,
cooking and consumption, in hands holding tools, in joint efforts of
many individual bodies who built architecture and monuments. This
collection of papers is a reaction to decades of the body's
invisibility. It raises the body as the central topic in the study of
past societies, researching its appearance in a wide variety of regional
contexts and across vast spans of archaeological time. Contributions in
this volume range from the deep Epi-Palaeolithic past of the Near East,
through the European Neolithic and Bronze Age, Classical Greece and Late
Medieval England, to pre-Columbian Central America, post-contact North
America, and the most recent conflicts in the Balkans. In all these case
studies, the materiality of the body is centre stage. Possibilities are
highlighted for future study: by putting the body at the forefront of
these archaeological studies an attempt is made to provoke the
imagination and map out new territories.
