The Archaeology of the Body and Representation

Any discussion on object value has to start with Marcel Mauss's famous dictum: " To give something is to give part of oneself. To give away is to give part of one's nature and substance , to receive something is to receive a part of someone's spiritual essence. " A large bibliography deals with the fusion between subjects and objects in gift exchange or with the simultaneous and mutual definition of the value of things and the prestige of persons. I have argued previously that the conspicuous consumption of objects establishes a different relation between persons and things. While gift exchange brings about a dispersal of personal identity beyond bodily boundaries, through time and across space, consumption allows one to absorb and appropriate transitory gifts, with all their associations of distant places, famous previous owners, and exotic value systems. In this paper I would like to elaborate this point further by discussing the (re)definition of personhood in mortuary ritual and by examining the use of (valuable) objects in bodily practices (such as body modification, adornment, anointment, grooming, arraying, and disarticulating). While conspicuous consumption at death is often discussed as a purely social strategy of display and aggrandizement, or at best as symbolic exchange with the ancestors, I argue that it has a much deeper cultural significance: it is a crucial attempt to contain the drift of meaning and value and to counteract the disintegration of personal identities—during the very process that dissolves persons into ancestors. These ideas will be applied to a specific case study: the grave circles of Mycenae.

Identities and social relations are fundamental elements of societies. To approach these topics from a new and different angle, this study takes the human body as the focal point of investigation. It tracks changing identities of early Iron Age people in central Europe through body‐related practices: the treatment of the body after death and human representations in art. The human remains themselves provide information on biological parameters of life, such as sex, biological age, and health status. Objects associated with the body in the grave and funerary practices give further insights on how people of the early Iron Age understood life and death, themselves, and their place in the world. Representations of the human body appear in a variety of different materials, forms, and contexts, ranging from ceramic figurines to images on bronze buckets. Rather than focussing on their narrative content, human images are here interpreted as visualising and mediating identity. The analysis of how image elements were connected reveals networks of social relations that connect central Europe to the Mediterranean. Body ideals, nudity, sex and gender, aging, and many other aspects of women's and men's lives feature in this book. Archaeological evidence for marriage and motherhood, war, and everyday life is brought together to paint a vivid picture of the past.

Sealers were the first people to visit Antarctica; particularly, the South Shetland Islands. One of the most important goals of the international project “Landscapes in White” is to discuss the early history of the archipelago. In this way, the members of the project want to learn more about the people who were silenced by the official narratives of the region. For years, we have taken for granted what it was like to be a sealer. In this chapter, I would like to question this idea, considering the process by which somebody became a particular kind of sailor and hunter. This challenge makes me focus on the figure of the “green hands” (those who entered the trade). Furthermore, it makes me go beyond the South Shetlands, including some other scenarios which were also part of the sealing voyages. The analysis considers the ways in which the green hands acquired new habits as part of their sensory-motor engagement with different material contexts. It also considers the ways in which these habits could have shaped specific subjectivities.

""The Dupljaja Cart and Bodies that Matter

One of the most frequently quoted Bronze Age artifacts in reconstructing cult and religion in European Bronze Age is certainly the Dupljaja Cart found in southern Banat, western Serbia. Previous interpretations of the figurine in the cart, and the whole cart group itself, are based on uncritical engendering of the figurine with de facto male genitals under a dress. Sex and gender of the figurine were never explicitly studied and as a consequence several interpretations emerged, some considering the figurine as male in female dress, some neglecting male genitals under the dress of the figurine and still considering it female. This work is based on the comparative contemporary Bronze Age figurine finds and dress ornaments and intends to more critically study sex/gender of the figurine in the cart using multiple sex/gender paradigm. It is discussed how different views of sex/gender of the figurine formed completely different, but in some ways similar narratives of the past. This work calls for a radical cross-dressing of this artifact and more explicitly formed theories of its embodied identity and queerness.

Key words: The Dupljaja cart, Bronze Age, hybridism, queer theory, multiple sex/gender paradigm""

Modern heteronormative views of sex and gender largely influenced examination and interpretation of sex/gender on the Early Bronze Age Mokrin necropolis in previous studies. The “normative“ burial treatment on Mokrin necropolis was defined on the basis of heteronormative views of biological sex and gender: male individuals were oriented north-south and females were oriented in the opposite direction, with appropriate grave goods. However, when the orientation was not the one expected for the osteological sex of the deceased, several explanations were given (wrong sex determination, gender not matching sex, not a community member, special status in the community etc.). It is clear that biological genital sex, read from the osteological sexing, was considered a primary category in engendering buried individuals, naturalizing a binary division of their bodies. This approach by default queers the body of an older osteologicaly male individual buried in grave no. 10, who was oriented south-north and buried with dress ornaments usually associated with adult osteological females: a pair of “Cypriote“ knot-headed pins, a neck-ring, four copper bracelets and two gold spiral hair-rings. Given the “reversed“ orientation and specific grave goods, some have even labelled this individual as “hyperfemale“. Why should we queer the body as non-normative if the osteological sex is different in comparison to other burials with the same body treatment? This paper provides a critical history of research of sex/gender on Mokrin necropolis based on queer theory. The number of sexes/genders cannot be assumed before the analyses are conducted; therefore this paper suggests multiple sexes/genders paradigm in approaching mortuary data in order to avoid a priori made conclusions about sex/gender system in Mokrin society. How materiality of the body and context of dress ornaments can be of great importance in approaching sex/gender on Mokrin necropolis is in this paper primarily discussed in the case of grave no. 10.