The Materiality of Death - mikroarkeologi.se

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changed. Archaeologists are becoming increasingly interested in the human body, and a steady stream of books and articles on the subject has had a considerable influence on the field (Kus 1992, Meskell 1996, Rautman 2000, Hamilakis et al 2002, Joyce 2005, to only mention a few). This interest in the body does not mainly stem from an increasing collaboration with physical anthropologists, but from inspiration drawn from body theory, developed mainly in the social sciences and humanities (Scheper-Hughes & Lock 1987, Featherstone et al 1991, Lock 1993, Shilling 1993, Csordas 1994, Oudshoorn 1994, Strathern 1996, Hillman & Mazzio 1997, Turner 1996, 1997, Asad 1997, Coakley 1997, Crossley 2001, Franklin 2002, Faircloth 2003, Berdayes et al. 2004, Shahshahani 2004, Cregan 2006, etc). These writings orbit around the deconstruction of the Cartesian divide between the body and the soul, a division established already in the classical Greek philosophy of Plato and Aristotle (Manning Stevens 1997:265) and that can be found more generally in throughout Western thought, as a divide between mind and nature and culture and nature (Franklin 2002:180). To this was often added a more or less explicitly imposed hierarchy where mind and culture dominate and control body and nature, a paradigm that was used to justify among other things the oppression of women, the strategies of colonialism, even genocide. The problematization of these relationships, as well as the increasing interest in the body in social theory today, can probably be linked to multiple factors, including the effects of postmodern critique of modernity in social theory, the reaction against minimalism in art, the preponderant place of the body in popular culture and the increasing place the body “as a project” takes in our individual lives in our culture (see for example Shilling 1993, Franklin 2002). Body theory has become a vibrant and creative subfield for the social sciences for the reflection on the relationships between nature and culture, but also of body politics, experience and the notion of self and identity. In the 1990s, these thoughts started to penetrate into archaeological thought through the subfields of gender archaeology and through the more general reflections on structuration, agency and practice. The central message in these studies was the recognition of the fact that the body does not have an a priori nature but is created and experienced through culture and language which reveal it (see Thomas 2002:33). Our understanding of the body is already an interpretation and we have no direct access to the thing in itself (ibid.). This understanding of the body fits comfortably into the understanding of the past in more general terms within the postprocessual framework of the 1990s, and as a consequence, this approach to the body easily found a place within contemporary archaeological theory. The reaction against previous understanding of the body as pure biological entity also inspired archaeologists to react against the stressing of “sameness” in the past (Fowler 2002:47), and rapidly became a part of an archaeology that combined with theories of agency focused on individual experience in the past as a reaction against previous focus on collectives of people. Archaeology, which not only is a discipline grounded in materiality, but also encompasses long time perspectives and transgresses the disciplinary boundaries between the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences, lends itself well to be part of the theorizing of the body and is well positioned to contribute with a unique perspective. However, it is interesting to note that despite this disciplinary connection to materiality and natural science, the dominating writings on the body within archaeology long remained limited to the important yet abstract notions of the body, such as performance and identity expressed in dress, art or paraphanalia (Lee 2000, Shaffer et al 2000 etc) or produced through activities (Crass 2000, Peterson 2000, Hollimon 2000 etc), and the symbolism and objectification of the body and body parts (Thomas 2000). Even when the archaeological context for these reflections were burials, the physical reality of death and the changes of the body ensued by it, are almost completely absent. In archaeology the focus tends to remain on the individual and her or his relationships, identity, experience etc, not on his or her body per se. A movement toward the actual body could be seen in the introduction of the notion of embodiment and corporeality, which in archaeology came to encompass notions such as embodied knowledge, consumption (Boyd 2002) and sensory experience (Kus 1992, Hamilakis 2002, Morris & Peatfield 2002). This effort goes a long way to meet the demands of an interest in the “lived bodies” in a corporeal sense, as called for by Lynn Meskell (Meskell 2000:15). But nevertheless, with some notable exceptions – many present in the important volume Thinking through the Body (Hamilakis et al 2002, but see also Fahlander N. D.) – the reflections on the body produced within archaeology have retained a tendency to remain abstract (see also Hamilakis 2002:122), and while they have contributed to breaking down the mind-body split, they have nevertheless reproduced a focus on the mind at the expense of the body. This tendency of “mind over body” is by no means exclusive to archaeology, but it can be seen in many places within the critical theory from which archaeology has gathered much of its inspiration (see for example Shilling and Mellor’s critique of Giddens in Shilling and Mellor 1996, see also Franklin 2002:184). Most surprising might be that even in the subfield of mortuary archaeology, possibly the one area where the physicality of the body might seem to be unavoidable, archaeologists have insisted on their position of sublimation. An example of this can be seen in Julian Thomas’ article Death, identity and the body in Neolithic Britain (Thomas 2000). When introducing his program for an archaeology of the human body, Thomas persists in focusing exclusively on the socially constructed body and makes the argument that we cannot project what he sees as modern notions of identity onto a Neolithic body (Thomas 2000:658). The purpose of the article is to 20
discuss death and the treatment of the dead bodies in Neolithic Britain, but in addressing bodily transformations, Thomas discusses architectural features in more detail than the actual bodies and the processes they went through (658pp). The article has many other merits, and the point of this critique is to underline a more general problem: that the actual bodies have remained conspicuously absent also in the archaeology explicitly devoted to them. A similar tendency can be seen in a recent review article on the topic of the archaeology of the body by Rosemary Joyce (Joyce 2005). While the author argues that a more abstract and semiotic perspective on the body currently is being replaced by a more concrete notion of the experience of embodiment, a perspective that gives a more central role for an active body in the past, the review limits itself to areas of inquiry such as ornaments, performance, experience, personhood and identity. And again, while these concepts engage the body, the physical and biological aspects of it are nowhere to be found. More than anything, this probably reflects a general tendency within archaeology today: we are more than willing to discuss bodies, but we prefer to do so in an abstract way. It is also interesting to notice that the majority of the body theory oriented papers in archaeology that engage with the physical body focus on embodiment, while very few (e.g., Robb 2002) treat the human body as a biological entity in combination with their theoretical approach. Thus, many authors have eagerly pointed out that the body is physical, corporeal and sensual, but few have taken that notion further by making it a focus for the analysis. The body as such remains conspicuously rare within the archaeology of the body. The reasons for this may be many. One explanation might be that the physicality of the body does not interest many archaeologists, despite our disciplinary focus on materiality. Many archaeologists are not trained in physical anthropology and do not see it as their task to reflect over the biological side of the human body. It is also possible that the debates concerning the more abstract concepts described above are more rewarding professionally, since they align with a now established disciplinary canon and appear to be intellectually more sophisticated. Maybe this also reflects a divide within contemporary archaeology, where those working on the development of theories on the side of social sciences and humanities and those who are more focused on the natural science side, do not communicate as effectively with each other, or share the same interests, to a degree that would really benefit the field as a whole. Finally, it is probably important to recognize the structuring power of taboos surrounding the dead and decomposing body in our society that only recently seem to be confronted in mass media culture that has pushed post mortem biological change in cadavers into the realm of general knowledge, through the success of TV series and books devoted to crime scene investigators and forensic work. A Critical Suggestion I do not argue with the insight that bodies are generated through practice and are culturally and socially (re-) produced. This is basic to theorizing about human experience. However, I want to stress the importance of complementing that understanding with a clear recognition of the biological and physical body within the archaeology of the body in general, and within the archaeology of death in particular. The body as embodied and biological reality has been undertheorized in archaeology, and I believe that synchronization of the different subfields within archaeology - encompassing the social science and humanities approaches to the body, as well as the natural science approaches to the body - would be beneficial for the field. In her review article, Joyce (2005) makes the interesting observation that simultaneous to the interest in the body within archaeology described above, the frequency of articles devoted to the body from a bioarchaeological perspective has increased considerably as well. However, she notes that “these contributions are in no obvious way postprocessual” (Joyce 2005:141), which I interpret to mean that they are not concerned with the recent developments in archaeological theory devoted to the body and remain essentially positivist. This illustrates the current divide within archaeology today. Since the critique against processual archaeology in the 1980s, archaeological theory has moved away from the natural sciences. This move has contributed to an enrichment of archaeology, since it has instead included a range of important fields in the theorization of the discipline. Yet, it has also led to creating an unfortunate distance from the natural sciences, closing off some venues for interesting transdisciplinary developments, including those dealing with the body. In this article I want to make the critical suggestion that the archaeology of the body could benefit tremendously from an integration of these different perspectives. The focus on materiality in archaeology, which remains our cornerstone, suggests a notion of balance that in many ways defines our discipline. If we could approach the body with the complexity of recognizing the social and biological aspect of it within an all-encompassing transdisciplinary perspective, then archaeology could really contribute to the development of the understanding of the body over a long term perspective. The archaeology of death and burial constitutes a field within archaeology where this combined approach can be successfully applied. Burial archaeology is a field that traditionally has interested both archaeologists and biological anthropologists. While the cooperation might not always have qualified as truly transdisciplinary, the field is rich with examples of successful collaborations around the shared interest in understanding the features, the bodies buried there and the societies that left them behind. To take this approach that combines archaeology and physical anthropology even further can be extremely 21
Page 1 and 2: The Materiality of Death Bodies, bu
Page 3: Contents Chapter 1. The Materiality
Page 6 and 7: Fig. 1. Pieter Bruegel, The Triumph
Page 8 and 9: ather one has to emphasise the mate
Page 10 and 11: dead are often regarded as unfriend
Page 12 and 13: Fig 3. The old man Tei Tetuna by hi
Page 14 and 15: The Materiality of Social Change: H
Page 16 and 17: The Materiality of Eternity - The A
Page 18 and 19: FAHLANDER, F. & OESTIGAARD, T. 2004
Page 20 and 21: Susanne Kuechler-Fogden, Webb Keane
Page 23: Chapter 2 More than Metaphor: Appro
Page 27 and 28: had to deal with. This is not to sa
Page 29 and 30: hide that could be removed to expos
Page 31 and 32: pp111-123. Philadelphia: University
Page 33 and 34: Chapter 3 A Piece of the Mesolithic
Page 35 and 36: The main point is that the division
Page 37 and 38: A Piece of the Mesolithic: Skatehol
Page 39 and 40: question we need to construct some
Page 41 and 42: Fig. 4. Skateholm I (above) and Ska
Page 43 and 44: visible many years after the origin
Page 45 and 46: Phase Area Properties Interpretatio
Page 47 and 48: phase of one site with a contempora
Page 49: MILNER, N. & WOODMAN, P. 2005. Meso
Page 52 and 53: with dead people belonging to other
Page 54 and 55: Fig. 2. Due to the extraordinaire c
Page 56 and 57: As with all cremations in Hinduism,
Page 58 and 59: Based on the amount of scattered bo
Page 60 and 61: To have an ethical approach involve
Page 63 and 64: Chapter 5 From Corpse to Ancestor:
Page 65 and 66: Figure 2. Isola Sacra, Tomb 100. Ph
Page 67 and 68: Figure 4. Isola Sacra, Tomb 87. Pho
Page 73: 69 Burials
Page 76 and 77:
through careful recording of the or
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Figure 4: Pencraig Hill: Distributi
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focussed on use of partial sets of
Page 83 and 84:
Chapter 7 Ritual and Remembrance at
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urial (tomba a doppio loculo tipo M
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‘original’ walls of the tomb. L
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chambers cut into two earlier trenc
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Madison: Prehistory Press, Monograp
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Well-organized cemeteries or messy
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influenced who was buried inside th
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it was quite short, which could ind
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References ARTELIUS, TORE 2004. Min
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Chapter 9 Life and Death in the Bro
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Fig. 5.1. Cremation necropolis at P
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place. These burials were very simp
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Chapter 10 Norwegian Face-Urns: Loc
Page 111 and 112:
The recurring themes in the debate
Page 113 and 114:
The local context of the Norwegian
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Death is the inevitable conclusion
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OESTIGAARD, T. 1999. Cremations as
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Chapter 11 The Use of Ochre in Ston
Page 121 and 122:
Ochre was used so intensively that
Page 123 and 124:
Fig. 5. Zvejnieki burial ground. Th
Page 125 and 126:
grave has been dated to 5690±45 BP
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Khanty of northern Siberia, the col
Page 129 and 130:
125 Beliefs
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Chapter 12 ”Death Myths”: Perfo
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Variation within the same cist Bø,
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Variation within the same mound Lyd
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Figures 6 and 7. Modvo, Luster muni
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To what extent there have been corr
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when they die, a probable explanati
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fragmented spindles, iron weaving s
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Chapter 13 Reproduction and Relocat
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may be questioned, and analysed mor
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References Andersson, G. 1997: A st
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Chapter 14 A Road for the Viking’
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Figure 2. The Jarlabanke Bridge tha
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Chapter 15 A Road to the Other Side
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Fig. 4. Clearing the bridge on an e
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Chapter 16 Stones and Bones: The My
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Fig. 4. An Iron Age scene at Sylta
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Fig. 7. The resemblance between cru
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