Neolithic Bodies

Penny Bickle, Emilie Sibbesson

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781785709029
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

As a result of recent methodological and theoretical developments in approaches to the human body in archaeological contexts, the theme has recently become a particularly dynamic research area. This volume, building on the Neolithic Studies Group conference 2014, captures the variety of debates developing across research into the Neolithic bodies of the Near East and Europe. Papers are divided into three themes: living bodies, the body in death, and the representation of the body. In the first section, papers present new research assessing skeletal evidence alongside new interpretations of the body in the Southern British Neolithic to examine the lived experience of the body in the Neolithic. The second theme illustrates the variety of approaches arising from the study of death and burial, focusing on the many different ways the dead were treated during the Neolithic. The third theme examines the body as it is represented in Neolithic art, through artifacts and the stone stele found in Western and Mediterranean Europe. The volume begins with an introduction to the recent developments in the field and concludes with a discussion chapter from Julian Thomas, which sets an agenda for future studies on this theme. The approaches taken in the papers presented here bridge many different methodologies, ranging from theoretical treatises to methodological debates. Overall, the volume presents the study of the body in the Neolithic as a contested site, at which overlapping research themes meet, and addresses the insights provided by thinking about past bodies.

Chapter 1

Bodies, old and new

Penny Bickle and Emilie Sibbesson

The body has become a major concern for post-modern archaeologies (Rautman 2000; Hamilakis et al. 2002; Meskell & Joyce 2003; Joyce 2005; Sofaer 2006; Borić & Robb 2008; Robb & Harris 2013). Social theory, gender archaeology (e.g. Rautman 2000; Meskell 2000) and phenomenology (e.g. Hamilakis et al. 2002; Joyce 2005) have expanded definitions of the body, while the growth in bioarchaeological methods that target the skeleton capture past lifeways at ever higher resolutions (Sofaer 2006; Borić & Robb 2008; Whittle & Bickle 2013). Neolithic studies have been no exception to the growing archaeological interest in the human body and have taken, at times, the lead in opening up new research directions. This volume, building on the Neolithic Studies Group conference 2014, aims to survey some of the diversity of approaches to Neolithic bodies currently being debated.

The human body has been at the centre of many debates pertinent to studying the Neolithic, from the impact of the transition to farming on diet and health, to the ever present human remains both at settlements and associated with the funerary architecture of the period (Borić & Robb 2008; Hofmann & Whittle 2008). We wanted to acknowledge the rich array of research being carried out, and compare the conclusions from different regions and strands of evidence. The papers presented here bridge many different approaches, ranging from theoretical treatises to methodological debates and arise from those presented at the conference, representing new research stretching from the Near East to UK. We have shaped the volume around the three major themes we see among the papers published here, as well as those presented at the conference: Living bodies, the body in death, and representations of the body. The volume concludes with a discussion chapter from Julian Thomas, which sets an agenda for future studies on this theme. Overall, the papers here address the insights provided by thinking about past bodies and present the study of the body in the Neolithic as a contested site, at which overlapping research themes meet. In this short introduction, we reflect on where bodies currently sit within our debates about the Neolithic and look forward to possible future directions for research.

LIVING BODIES

The first group of papers in the volume take the lived experience of the human body in the Neolithic as their focus, asking how bodies can inform on the character of Neolithic frontiers and worldviews. We recognise interest with the ‘lived experience’ of Neolithic bodies first in the arrival of post-processual archaeology during the 1980s and 1990s. Perhaps best encapsulated by the applications of phenomenological philosophy in archaeology in the 1990s, these approaches focused on how landscapes, sites and technologies would have been experienced through the body, often asking how the individual would have encountered and moved around particular landscapes or taken up and learnt different technologies (Barrett 1994; Tilley 1994; Thomas 1996; Edmonds 1999). Phenomenology was by no means the only theoretical approach to have adopted the body as a matter of concern, but some discussion of where these archaeologies focused attention is informative. Although the move towards considering the embodied approach was also captured by other contemporary works, the most prominent example of the phenomenological approach remains Tilley’s (1994) A Phenomenology of Landscape. With this work, Tilley (1994) promoted moving away from two-dimensional plans as a means of interpreting Neolithic sites and landscapes towards considering the experience of them in three-dimensions, with the human body as the starting point. The senses, dominated by vision, were thus used to explore how past bodies met the material world. Ultimately this approach was rooted in challenging Cartesian dualism, in which the knowledge of the mind is learnt separately from bodily engagement in the world, as a specific Western and Enlightenment understanding of the body (Thomas 1996).

However, the type of bodies implicitly envisaged in this research were often oddly devoid of their own material substance, and in some ways the senses were prioritised over the body from which they arose. It was argued that such situated experiences were being interpreted through the lens of the able-bodied, in which bodily practices such as walking were considered neutral rather than arising from particular contextual social and political settings (Brück 2005). Age, sex, gender, skill, disability, temporary injury, social standing, and appropriate gesture (amongst other factors), began to be recognised as forming the variety of human bodies populating Neolithic landscapes. This led in turn to the concept of the individual as a bound whole limited only to the physical, biological body being challenged, recognising that personhood could be configured in multiple and contrasting ways, drawing in objects, places and landscapes (Fowler 2004; McFadyen 2007). These criticisms shared a growing concern with the fluidity that can be found in different forms of identity and over the life-course, and in the material of the body itself, seeing the body as lifelong project (Hamilakis et al. 2002). These new ideas are explored in different ways in the three papers that make up this section.

In the opening paper, Harris explores how the concept of body worlds can add new perspectives to the Early Neolithic of southern Britain. The concept of ‘body worlds’ was coined by Robb and Harris (2013) to express how the human body can flow beyond the biological entity into historically contextualised relationships between bodies and materials. Harris argues that this approach highlights the two bodily ontologies of flow and separation in the Neolithic. These differing but interdependent ontologies made sense of the movement of substances in food consumption, technological processes, and burial on the one hand, and the fragmentation and distinction of objects and places on the other.

The second paper, by Ash and Pinhasi, also researches the beginning of the Neolithic, but here it is ‘frontier’ Linearbandkeramik (LBK) groups in central Europe that are in focus. The notion of the LBK as a relatively homogenous phenomenon has begun to disintegrate as recent studies highlight significant diversity in both space and time, and the study by Ash and Pinhasi is contributing to the increasingly fine-grained understanding of these Early Neolithic communities. They compare osteological stress indicators of some of the first LBK settlers in western Europe with those of more established farming groups further east. They find that even though individuals in the frontier communities were more exposed to stress than their farming neighbours in the east, they adapted better to the new economic, environmental, and social conditions that they encountered. Their paper demonstrates the significance of considering osteobiographies, examining the skeleton as remodelled over life and responding to environmental and cultural contexts, rather than a static picture at time of death.

In the final paper in this section, Sibbesson utilises the human body as a central interpretive device capable of bringing together diverse, and sometimes conflicting, lines of evidence from the British Early Neolithic. She considers how a body-centred approach to food technologies can address cooking and eating, which remain poorly understood aspects of Neolithic life. Looking at how ceramic bowls were designed to interact with the human body, the food itself, and with heat provides the details that make up broader measures of diet, such as those obtained from isotopic analysis of bone.

THE BODY IN DEATH

The second group of papers explore the contexts in which we find human remains and how they inform on Neolithic approaches to the body in death. As the most recognisable context in which the human body appears in archaeology – the skeleton – funerary practices offer a rich vein for research into Neolithic bodies. The treatment of the body after death in the Neolithic is extremely varied both across Europe and within individual regions and cultures, and rarely were human remains simply buried without further intervention or being subjected to secondary burial rites. Even in the seemingly familiar inhumation cemeteries of the LBK, evidence is found for graves being left open and the movement or removal of particular bones (Boës 2003; Thévenet 2009). Manipulating the fleshed or skeletal body was therefore a familiar practice for many Neolithic groups, and the skeletal remains of bodies may be interpreted as a form of material culture (Nilsson Stutz 2003) that participated in the shaping of Neolithic society. This line of analysis is taken by the papers in this section as they explore how the treatment of the body in death provides insight into broader social changes at the time. They argue that engagement with the corpse was transformative of social worlds, with the funerary rites magnifying concerns with particular body worlds local to the region or community under study. Thus for Brophy, MacGregor and Noble, it is group identities that were brought to the fore, while for Walsh and Matthews it is sedentism and associated Neolithic ways of life that are negotiated through the treatment of human remains. Lefranc, Denaire, Jeunesse and Boulestin investigate the possibility that sacrifice was practiced in the fourth millennium cal BC, with victims accompanying those of higher social status.

Walsh and Matthews consider one of the earliest transitions to farming in their study of Early Neolithic human remains from the eastern Fertile Crescent. One facet of the Neolithic transition across the Middle East is intensification of burial practices, and this rich funerary record provides ample opportunity for social interpretation. Walsh and Matthews draw on fresh theoretical perspectives in their discussion of recently excavated skeletal remains from two sites in the Zagros mountains of Iran and Iraq. They suggest that the transition from life to death was a staged, participatory, and highly charged process, which in turn was crucial in the development of sedentarisation and thus the establishment of Neolithic ways of life.

The British Neolithic is in focus in the paper by Brophy, MacGregor and Noble, specifically the Late Neolithic in Scotland. Their study of cremation draws on both excavated and experimental evidence, and they highlight not only the body on the pyre but also the impact that the event would have had on living participants. They suggest that cremation pyres created ‘flashbulb memories’ that reinforced group identities, and that these powerful experiences contributed to the gradual establishment of cremation as a key way of disposing the dead. Seen on a larger scale, such bodily experiences ushered in the social changes that we associate with the development of the Grooved Ware complex.

In the final paper of this section, Lefranc, Denaire, Jeunesse and Boulestin present the burial practices from Michelsburg and Munzingen cultures from the earlier fourth millennium cal BC in Alsace, France. They explore different interpretations for the individuals found in unconventional or irregular body positions, raising the possibility that they had been subjected to violence, war or ritualised sacrifice. Six different ways of treating the body are death are identified, from conventional inhumation to disarticulated remains deposited without apparent ceremony. Drawing on historical and anthropological accounts of such practices, the body of a victim is argued to have been a powerful symbol and actant in displays of power and social dominance.

REPRESENTING THE BODY

The final theme of the volume focuses on the ways in which the body was depicted and represented in Neolithic and Chalcolithic Europe. The images made of human bodies in the Neolithic, such as portable clay figurines and the statue-menhirs which form the focus of the paper in this section, were part of the visual culture of the Neolithic (Bailey 2005). They formed ways of producing, engaging with and looking at representations of the body. At times these could be localised, individual and intimate to the immediate context of production and deposition, at others depictions of the body appear to abstract its forms as well as concepts related to the body, such as gender, sex or age (Knapp & Meskell 1999; Bailey 2005). In form, they range from figurative to more abstract designs that may have focused on or emphasised certain elements of the body (Robin 2012). A strong element of research into depictions of the human form in the Neolithic has been through the lens of determining experience of gender and sex. Research questions have centred on whether bodies were inherently gendered or sexed, or – as in other contexts – were the boundaries more fluid?

The paper on this theme by Defrasne focuses on the well-known Copper Age statuemenhirs from the UNESCO world heritage site of Valcamonica in the central Alps. These statues or stele suggest the human form through their shape and where engraved images of objects usually worn, such as necklaces and belts, are placed on the surface (such as at the neck and waist). This paper explores how bodies may have been figuratively and symbolically embedded in relationships, challenging the presence of a simple male-female duality in the Copper Age. Rather, bodies were symbolised through the inclusion of material culture, particular animals, and their location in the landscape. Defranse argues against viewing these stone bodies as static representations, instead they were active and potent features of the landscape, possibly even ‘microcosms’ of Copper Age ontologies of the body.

CONCLUSION

This above discussion can only briefly survey the history and myriad approaches to the body in Neolithic studies, and focuses on those represented in this volume. However, by way of summary we offer three key directions of research into the human body that we see emerging from the papers here. First, there is the analysis of the physical body itself, investigating the impact of changing diets, health and activity on the human skeleton at the onset of farming (e.g. Spencer Larsen 1995; Pinhasi & Stock 2011). Here the body, represented by the skeleton, is not considered a static record of life at death, but the product of biologically, historically and socially-situated practice. Second, starting from the position that the biological entity of the human body is enmeshed within worldviews, shaped and informed in culturally specific ways, researchers are taking on the task of determining Neolithic views on and experiences of the body (e.g. Hofmann & Whittle 2008), or ‘embodying’ the study of Neolithic landscapes and sites. Third, the categorical definition of the body as arising from the individual flesh and bones of a human has been called into question, and researchers have been challenged to expand the definition of the body beyond its corporeal presence into material culture, architecture and animals (e.g. Bailey 2005; Miracle & Borić 2008). Harris and Robb (2013, 45–60), going further, have placed the body as central to understanding historical change and argued that during the Neolithic specific, heterogeneous and fluid ‘body worlds’ emerged. Above all, however, the Neolithic body continues to be a productive site of research interest.

REFERENCES

Bailey, D. (2005) Prehistoric Figurines: Representation and Corporeality in the Neolithic. London, Routledge.

Barrett, J. (1994) Fragments from Antiquity: An Archaeology of Social Life in Britain, 2900–1200 BC. Oxford, Blackwell....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Foreword by Timothy Darvill and Kenneth Brophy
• Contents
• Preface and acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• 1. Bodies, old and new: Penny Bickle and Emilie Sibbesson
• 2. Both permeable and partible: Exploring the body world of Early Neolithic southern Britain: Oliver J. T. Harris
• 3. Life on the frontier: Stress in early farming communities: Abigail Ash and Ron Pinhasi
• 4. Consuming bodies: Bowls, bones, food and fire in Early Neolithic Britain: Emilie Sibbesson
• 5. Articulating the disarticulated: Human remains f rom the Early Neolithic of the eastern Fertile Crescent (eastern Iraq and western Iran): Sam Walsh and Roger Matthews
• 6. Warm air and glowing pyres: Cremating bodies in the Late Neolithic of mainland Scotland: Kenneth Brophy, Gavin MacGregor and Gordon Noble
• 7. Dismembering bodies and atypical human deposits of the 4th millennium cal BC in the Upper-Rhine valley: Part of sacrificial practices?: Philippe Lefranc, Anthony Denaire, Christian Jeunesse and Bruno Boulestin
• 8. Stone bodies between social constructions and ontology: The Copper Age statues-menhirs from the central Alps: Claudia Defrasne
• 9. The Neolithic body: Julian Thomas