Body Histories, Historical Bodies: Adornment, Culture and Identity through Time

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Culturing the Body: Prehistoric Perspectives on Identity and Sociality" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The body is so many things simultaneously. It is an historical object, a site of experience and violence, a set of behaviors, and is both material and metaphysical. We cannot conceive of history without bodies. Bodily adornments add further nuances that are personal, symbolic, political, situational, and multifaceted; tied to taste, emulation, production, and consumption. Current research on bodies and their adornments draw out details of how sexuality, health, status, gender, desire, and identity were situated on and in the body, even in deep history. Recognizing that the body is constituted through history, in this paper I draw out broad themes of clothing, personal adornment, and embodiment over time, especially regarding relationships among bodies, experiences, representation and history.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Culturing the Body: Prehistoric Perspectives on Identity and Sociality

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24476