The Human Body in Early Iron Age Central Europe: Burial Practices and Images of the Hallstatt World

Description

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. Cover Title Copyright Contents List of figures List of plates Preface 1 Introduction 2 Theoretical framework 2.1 Approaching the Iron Age body 2.2 Networks 2.3 Identity and/as communication 3 The Iron Age setting 3.1 Unity and diversity: the regions 3.2 Chronology and temporality 3.3 Lifeways 3.4 The physical anthropology of early Iron Age people 4 Funerary practices and the body 4.1 The treatment of the body 4.2 Cremation and inhumation 4.3 The body and objects 4.4 Bodies and/as vessels 4.5 The internal geography of graves and the body 4.6 From grave architecture to burial communities 5 The representation of the body: images and imagined worlds 5.1 The multi-layered nature of art objects 5.2 Art as sign language and in communication 5.3 Art as agency 6 The image and the object 6.1 The image database 6.2 Objects 6.3 Materials and technologies 6.4 The chaîne opératoire: contexts of production, use and deposition 6.5 Translating images: cross-craft interaction 7 The Hallstatt body in life and death 7.1 Reading faces 7.2 Gestalt: perspective, body form, proportions and bodily ideals 7.3 Body parts and hybridity 7.4 Nudity, sex and gender 7.5 Sexuality 7.6 Age, ageing and stages of life 7.7 Femininity: of marriage and motherhood 7.8 Masculinity: war and everyday life 7.9 Postures, gestures and movement 7.10 Actions, activities and practices 8 Motif networks 9 Conclusion 10 List of sites included in the analysis Bibliography Index