In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

1 Contextualizing the Human Head An Introduction Michelle Bonogofsky This book is the product of an emerging concern in bioarchaeology: the conceptual status of the human body and its parts in the past—notably, whose heads and skulls were given special treatment and why, whether as ancestor or enemy, as insider or outsider, as adult or child, or as male or female. Ancient human groups collected, buried, enshrined, disinterred, modified, and decorated entire bodies as well as selected portions, paying special attention to the human head (e.g., see Bonogofsky 2006c; Chacon and Dye 2007; Knudson and Stojanowski 2009; Rakita et al. 2005). After over a century of research, we now understand that treatment of the body was dependent upon a network of political, social, economic, and religious concerns. These concerns intersected with the biological characteristics and constraints of the body in diverse but finite ways. For archaeologists, evidence of these complex networks comes primarily in the form of cemeteries, tombs, burials, and human skeletal remains . However, as the authors in this volume demonstrate, documentary sources, iconography, and ethnographic analogy, along with bioarchaeological and biochemical analyses conducted on human remains, help us to contextualize the treatment of the body and provide more nuanced interpretations, such as whether the individuals are local or nonlocal residents (e.g., see Forgey this volume; Montgomery, Knüsel, and Tucker this volume). Our understanding of the body is significantly informed by the now firmly established approach of bioarchaeology, which integrates biological data and archaeological context, stressing the interaction between biology and behavior of modern populations from archaeological sites (Larsen 1997, 2007). Twentyfirst -century researchers are increasingly recognizing the advantages of such an integrated approach and putting it into practice in a variety of temporal and spatial contexts. Such endeavors present significant challenges for researchers, however, because they demand the study and synthesis of the evidence on 2 Michelle Bonogofsky several conceptual levels—that of the individual body and associated artifacts; that of the tomb, mound, or cemetery context; that of the regional landscape; and that of the larger sociocultural context. The advantage of dealing with the human body on several levels is that it provides us with the most complete picture of ancient life—from the embodied experience of the individual to the culturally mediated context of deposition and finally to the physical, cultural, and historical contexts in which individuals lived; negotiated their ages, statuses , roles, and sexualities; ritualized their beliefs and actions; and ultimately died, with their body parts collected, curated, and brought back into the community . Contributors to this volume approach the study of a specific body part—the human head—and its context through analyses based in skeletal, DNA, radiographic, isotopic, documentary, and iconographic evidence as well as in the more traditional study of material culture. In some contributions, the head itself is viewed simultaneously as a biological object—the product of physical processes—and as an object of material culture (Sofaer 2006) to be manipulated in various ways. Implicit in this approach is the recognition that body parts (the head or skull in particular) are objects vested with immense symbolic, social, religious, and political value. Ethnographers at the forefront of the postmodern focus on gender, identity, ethnicity, and personhood, have produced compelling research that situates elements of the human body within both indigenous cultural contexts and colonialist discourses (e.g., Hoskins 1986; Rosaldo 1980; Taylor 1993). Bodies and their parts function within political economies of power and prestige and serve as social markers for family and ethnic groups. The consumption of the body, for example, can consolidate distinctions between kin groups, as among the Wari of Amazonia (Conklin 1995, 2001). Their postmortem treatment provides an arena for the display of resources and the negotiation of social relationships . However, archaeology reveals that consumption of the body can occur for completely different reasons, as among the Anasazi in the American Southwest, who butchered and cooked nearly thirty men, women, and children for their bone marrow around AD 1100 (White 1992) before abandoning their Colorado location. Bodies and their parts also take their places within mythological and ideological systems—in the reenactment of origin stories, in the dramatization of cosmological events, and in the materialization of the divine. Individual body parts, notably the head or skull, may take on the role of the body entire, as in the symbolic phenomenon of pars pro toto (e.g., Bienert 1991) or may be imbued with an altogether different sort of meaning. The head (Hoskins 1986; Rosaldo...

Share