Archaeology of Body and Thought: From the Neolithic to the Beginning of the Middle Ages

Archaeology of Body and Thought explores what we as people can do with our bodies, what we can use them for, and how we can alter and understand them. It considers the ways in which individual human groups from the Neolithic to the Migration Period have perceived and treated the body. The analysis is based on artefacts found in graves, anthropomorphic images, and written sources, with an underlying assumption that principles of aesthetics or a canon of beauty express a way of understanding and evaluating corporality commonly adopted in a given culture. From this perspective, the human body is also an archaeological artefact and a specific kind of material culture (indeed, the most important one). The book investigates the extent to which ideology shapes our bodies and how our bodies create our world outlook. To that end, it compares bodies with other contemporary spheres of material culture and technology. Geographically, the study concentrates on central and eastern Europe, a region where various cultural trends have always intersected. Greece, Italy, Scandinavia, and Eurasian steppes are also included in the analysis.