Culturing the Body: Prehistoric Perspectives on Identity and Sociality

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Culturing the Body: Prehistoric Perspectives on Identity and Sociality," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The human body lives at the intersection between constructed identities and the construction of identities; it is both the site of lived experiences and a means of communicating those experiences to a diverse audience. In this session, we present archaeological evidence for practices of adornment of the body by late Pleistocene and early Holocene hominins, including personal ornaments, clothing, hairstyles, body painting, and tattoos. These practices have been variously interpreted as a means to reflect differences such as gender, status, and ethnicity, to attract or intimidate others, and as indices of a symbolically mediated self and personal identity. The papers in this session present recent archaeological evidence of culturing the body and address the possible evolutionary contexts and social ramifications for the selection of these behaviors at different points in the past.