Embodied Essence: Anthropological, Historical, and Archaeological Perspectives on the Use of Body Parts and Bodily Substances in Religious Beliefs and Practices

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Embodied Essence: Anthropological, Historical, and Archaeological Perspectives on the Use of Body Parts and Bodily Substances in Religious Beliefs and Practices" at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Anthropological and historical research suggests that anatomical parts and bodily substances of humans and nonhuman animals (e.g., crania, mandibles, horns, blood, fat, brains, marrow) likely played an important role in the religious beliefs and practices of many past societies because they were considered to be imbued with spiritual power. That such is the case is not widely appreciated in archaeology at the moment, however. This is a problem not only because it means we are probably overlooking data that shed light on the religious beliefs and practices of a number of past societies, but also because it means we are probably misinterpreting some of the animal bones at some archaeological sites: we are interpreting the bones in terms of economic behavior when they were actually deposited in connection with religious rituals. The present symposium’s goal is to begin the process of changing this state of affairs. The symposium brings together several of the most prominent of the small group of researchers currently working on the phenomenon of the religious use of anatomical parts and bodily substances with a view to identifying commonalities and differences among the societies and archaeological cultures in which it has been documented and stimulating collaborative research.