Past as oral history: towards an archaeology of the senses

The Body' was a trendy topic of consideration in sociology and related fields during the 1990s, tied up with modern preoccupations with gender, the individual, and agency. The papers in this volume attempt to engage the body as a topic of archaeological enquiry, and as a subject influenced by cultural categories of perception, experience and practice. The papers are divided into three sections which explore the relationship between the physical body and other cultural ideas such as the 'self' and 'individual', those that take issue with the interpretive limitations of traditional methods of data analysis, those that consider the ways in which archaeologists can integrate material culture with social and symbolic constructions of human bodies, especially in art and burial rituals. This book is based on a workshop held at the University of Wales, Lampeter, in 1998. Overall the mixture of papers is somewhat bewildering, looking at case studies from Oceania, Britain, Scandinavia and the Mediterranean, from prehistory, the medieval, and post-medieval periods.Contents: Archaeology's humanism and the materiality of the body / Julian Thomas -- Body parts : personhood and materiality in the earlier Manx neolithic / Chris Fowler -- Moralities of dress and the dress of the dead in early medieval Europe / Jos Bazelmans -- Aesthetic corpse in nineteenth-century Britain / Sarah Tarlow -- Feeling through the body : gesture in Cretan Bronze Age religion / Christine Morris and Alan Peatfield -- Past as oral history : towards an archaeology of the senses / Yannis Hamilakis -- Ways of eating/ways of being in the Later Epipalaeolithic (Natufian) Levant / Brian Boyd -- Time and biography : osteobiography of the Italian Neolithic lifespan / John Robb -- (Un)masking gender-- gold foil (dis)embodiments in Late Iron Age Scandinavia / Ing-Marie Back Danielsson -- Re-arranging history : the contested bones of the Oseberg grave / Elisabeth Arwill-Nordbladh -- Art, artefact, metaphor / Mark Pluciennik -- Marking the body, marking the land : body as history, land as history : tattooing and engraving in Oceania / Paul Rainbird