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Archaeology of the BodyRosemary A. JoyceDepartment of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, California94720-3710; email: rajoyce@berkeley.edu

Annu. Rev. Anthropol.2005. 34:139–58

First published online as aReview in Advance onJune 14, 2005

The Annual Review ofAnthropology is online atanthro.annualreviews.org

doi: 10.1146/annurev.anthro.33.070203.143729

Copyright c© 2005 byAnnual Reviews. All rightsreserved

0084-6570/05/1021-0139$20.00

Key Words

embodiment, costume, representation, identity, personhood

AbstractUnder the influence of phenomenological approaches, a semioticperspective on the body is being replaced in archaeology by analysisof the production and experience of lived bodies in the past throughthe juxtaposition of traces of body practices, idealized representa-tions, and evidence of the effects of habitual gestures, postures, andconsumption practices on the corporal body. On the basis of a sharedassumption that social understandings of the body were created andreproduced through associations with material culture, archaeologyof the body has proceeded from two theoretical positions: the bodyas the scene of display and the body as artifact. Today, the body as asite of lived experience, a social body, and site of embodied agency,is replacing prior static conceptions of an archaeology of the bodyas a public, legible surface.

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Contents

CONTENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140FROM BODY ORNAMENTS TO

ORNAMENTED BODIES . . . . . . 142Inscribing the Body’s Surface . . . . . . 144

PERFORMING THEARCHAEOLOGICAL BODY . . . 145Experiencing the Archaeological

Body. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147Is “Surface” to “Interior” As

“Public” is to “Private”? . . . . . . . 149ARCHAEOLOGIES OF

EMBODIED PERSONHOOD . . 150THEORIZING THE BODY IN

ARCHAEOLOGY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150

CONTENTS

The body—as metaphor for society, as in-strument of lived experience, and as surfaceof inscription—has come to occupy a cen-tral place in contemporary social theory. Ar-chaeology, although coming late to this topic,has begun to make critical contributions towriting about the body. With its groundingin the materiality of human experience, ar-chaeology offers to scholarship on the body aunique perspective anchored in bodily phys-icality. As a discipline that emphasizes repe-tition over time as the basis for recognizingculturally intelligible practices, archaeologyoutlines ways that different forms of embodi-ment were historically produced, reproduced,and transformed. At the same time, archaeol-ogists are intensely aware of the gap that existsbetween the materiality of the traces of pasthuman experience and the interpretations ofthose traces that they propose. Archaeologi-cal inquiry into the body thus foregrounds thechallenges for wider scholarship, both withinanthropology and outside it, inherent in themove from apparently solid physical facts tosocial and cultural understandings.

Explicit archaeological discussion of em-bodiment is relatively recent, despite the fact

that archaeologists have long offered inter-pretations of material they recover that implybody practices, body ideals, and differentialexperiences of the body. Introducing a re-cent edited volume, Rautman & Talalay (2000,p. 2) identify two well-established senses ofthe archaeological body: on the one hand,the “physical or skeletal components that de-fine the human species” “seen as a record ofancient diet, health, life span, and physicalactivities,” and on the other, representationsthrough which “cultural ideas of maleness andfemaleness, masculinity and femininity, areplayed out.” Neither of these senses of the ar-chaeological body is particularly new. Classicarchaeological works regularly identified cer-tain objects as body ornaments and discussedthe potential or actual uses of other objects inbody practices. Archaeologists drew on repre-sentations of human beings to propose inter-pretations of idealized beauty; social signs ofage, status, and gender; and other aspects ofembodiment. Archaeological excavations rou-tinely brought to light human remains, whoseidentification as sexed, aged, and raced bodiesin fact dominated the archaeological literatureof the body through the 1980s.

Starting in the 1990s, and acceleratingduring the past five years, the topics of ar-chaeological publications concerned with em-bodiment have diversified. At the same time,the pace of publication on long-establishedtopics in archaeology of the body has inten-sified. Three trends are evident over time.First, a dramatic rise in the frequency of ar-chaeological articles explicitly concerned withthe body in a sample of anthropological jour-nals, from an average of one per year before1990 to almost six per year after that date,is evident (Table 1). This increase may beattributed to the development of postproces-sual critiques in archaeology that emphasizedredressing the previous lack of attention tohuman agency and aspects of identity, suchas gender, closely tied to archaeological re-search on the body (Brumfiel 1992). However,simultaneously, the frequency of articles con-cerned with the body, considered from the

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TABLE 1 Journal articles from 1965 to 2004 on archaeology of the bodya

Main thematic emphasis

Date rangePhysicalanthropology Ornament, dress Representation Body practices Total N Explicit theory

1965–1969 2 21970–1974 4 41975–1979 5 51980–1984 3 1 3 1 81985–1989 7 71990–1994 16 3 6 25 21995–1999 12 2 8 2 25 62000–2004 15 13 6 38 16Subtotals 64 6 30 9 114 24

aBased on a sample of journal articles yielded by a search of the key words “body,” “embodi∗” and “archaeolog∗” on Anthropology Plus, an indexcombining Tozzer Library’s Anthropological Literature and the Anthropological Index of the Royal Anthropological Institute. This sample wascompared with results from a similar search of Web of Science/Web of Knowledge, which resulted in the addition of two more recent articles tothe sample. Individual articles were classified according to the dominant thematic concerns, and a separate count was made of articles proposingtheoretical approaches to embodiment. Some of the latter articles did not have an obvious thematic emphasis other than theoretical discussion.Although the selection of publications that are indexed means that this is not a complete survey of the literature, it is a uniform sample of majorjournals in the field over time and so does serve to show trends over time. These data should not be used as indications of the total number ofarticles on these topics.

perspective of bioarchaeology, has sharply in-creased, and these contributions are in noobvious way postprocessual. Both positivistand interpretive archaeologists have found thebody to be an increasingly compelling subjectduring the past 15 years.

What is most distinctive about the most re-cent archaeological literature concerning thebody is the degree to which interpretations arebeing grounded in social theory, both fromwithin anthropology and outside it. Articlesthat explicitly theorize archaeological engage-ment with embodiment become common af-ter 1990 (Table 1). Phenomenology, femi-nist theory, and the work of Foucault have allbeen influential in archaeology of the body(Fisher & Loren 2003, Golden & Toohey2003, Hamilakis et al. 2002, Meskell & Joyce2003, Montserrat 1998, Rautman 2000). In-creasingly, as is the case with other anthropo-logical work on embodiment, archaeologistsare finding it necessary to clarify the assump-tions they make in moving from theorizingperception to attempting to understand expe-rience. Archaeology, which approaches both

perception and experience through those ma-terial traces that survive over time, contributesa unique dimension to anthropologies ofembodiment.

This review connects the contemporary ar-chaeology of the body to earlier archaeologi-cal concern with the symbolic communicationof identity through body ornaments and cos-tume. Following Grosz (1995, p. 104), I viewthe body as a “concrete, material, animateorganization of flesh, organs, nerves, skele-tal structure and substances, which are givena unity and cohesiveness through psychicaland social inscription of the body’s surface.”Archaeological interest in the surface of thebody was closely linked to the rise of archae-ologies of sex and gender, seen as inscribedin dress, ornamentation, and body modifi-cation (Marcus 1993, 1996; Sørensen 1991,2000). The demonstration that constructionsof sexed/gendered bodies are always simul-taneously constructions of age, class, ethnic-ity, race, and social status has shifted the at-tention of archaeologists to a wider gamutof practices shaping embodied personhood

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(Joyce 2004, Meskell 2001). Some archaeo-logical analyses reflexively relate bodily prac-tices to representational practices throughwhich images were produced that served bothas models for embodiment and as commemo-ration of selected experiences of embodiment(Clark 2003, Hill 2000, Joyce 1998). Somearchaeological analyses argue that represen-tational practices literally expanded the siteof the embodied person, incorporating rep-resentations, spaces, and items of costume inthe person, even when these items were re-moved from direct bodily contact (Gillespie2001, 2002; Houston & Stuart 1998; Looper2003a,b).

Contemporary archaeological considera-tion of the complex relationships betweenbody practices and practices of representationshows that the concept of an easily definedbody “surface” at the boundary between aninteriorized person and exteriorized societyis problematic (Looper 2003a). Archaeologi-cal exploration, using bioarchaeological tech-niques, of the ways in which habitual practicesand dispositions literally shape flesh and bones(Boyd 1996) further questions the isolationof a public, inscriptional body surface cover-ing an uninterpreted physical interior becausethe biological person is both the medium andproduct of social action. Today, to invoke anarchaeology of the body’s surface is to placein question automatically the body, the per-son, and relations between embodied personsin society.

FROM BODY ORNAMENTS TOORNAMENTED BODIES

Costume, body ornaments, and representa-tions of costume in artworks have long beenused by archaeologists as evidence of distinctstatuses on the basis of an implicit understand-ing of the surface of the body as public. AsRobb (1998, p. 332) notes, under the “in-formation transmission” view of the symbolicfunctions of artifacts (Wobst 1977), archae-ologists assumed that objects conveyed rel-atively clear meanings within their cultures

of origin. Many of those assumed meaningswere concerned with identity. This assump-tion continues to be part of contemporaryresearch in archaeology. For example, Lee(2000, pp. 114–15) explicitly bases her discus-sion of Minoan representations of masculineand feminine bodies on the assumption that“dress functions as a primary means of non-verbal communication” emitting “constant,complex social messages that would have beenintended by the wearer and understandable bythe viewer” (p. 114).

From this perspective body ornaments areunderstood as marking already-given aspectsof social status of the individual person, oras media for the communication of givensocial identities. The assumption that spe-cific costumes corresponded to different cat-egories of persons in the past meant that aperson’s social status and history could be“read off” the body. There is a strong con-nection between discussions of costume andidentity and the archaeology of economicallyand socially stratified societies (Anawalt 1981,Kuttruff 1993). As a result, some of the mostsignificant discussions in archaeology of themarking of the body surface originated instudies of political economy, tracing links be-tween the relations of production and the ef-fectiveness of costume in marking differentialstatus.

Peregrine (1991) reviewed the history ofarchaeological arguments for the significanceof costume ornaments as indications of spe-cific social statuses in societies with “prestigegoods economies.” Noting that costume or-naments were commonly employed in cer-emonies of social reproduction, Peregrinestated an interpretation shared by other ar-chaeologists interested in pursuing the con-nection between social reproduction and theproduction of embodied persons. Hayden(1998) suggested that such objects were par-ticularly important in societies at this levelof integration because of the significance ofsocial displays in building individualized sta-tus for “aggrandizers,” the minority of peo-ple in a society who seek to distinguish

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themselves from others for their own eco-nomic benefit. A recent analysis of Hohokamshell body ornaments thus concludes thatthese were “material symbols of group mem-bership and identity” and “insignia of office,”simultaneously signifying identification witha group and distinctions within it (Bayman2002, p. 70).

All these authors replicate, and several ex-plicitly cite, the logic of Earle’s (1987) ground-breaking work on specialization and wealthin Hawaiian and Inka societies, which con-sidered the links between precious materialsincorporated in distinctive costume items likeHawaiian feather cloaks and the social statusesand roles signified by such costume. Earle ar-gued that Hawaiian cloaks were in fact mate-rial signs of status. Commenting on Inka useof cloth and of metal and shell ornaments incostume, he argued that different costumes vi-sually distinguished different ranks within thiscomplex society.

Discussions of costume and identity basedon the information transmission model arenot limited to studies of chiefdoms and earlystates. White (1992, p. 539) explicitly consid-ered why objects like body ornaments wereproducts of the Upper Palaeolithic in Europe,a period of innovation in “the material con-struction and representation of meaning” (seealso White 1989). White (1992), like Wobst(1977), argued that highly visible marks in-corporated in costume would be widely in-terpretable within a community. In his view,“personal ornaments, perhaps more than anyother aspect of the archaeological record, area point of access for archaeologists into thesocial world of the past” (White 1992, p.539). Following Weiner (1992), White (1992,p. 541) drew attention to the potential for or-naments made of durable materials to persistbeyond a single human life span, creating in-tergenerational continuity in identities andsocial distinctions, and to exteriorize asser-tions about social identity that might be morecontroversial or contested as verbal state-ments, like the claims of power and veiledthreats of military might that Earle (1987)

suggested were made by wearing Hawaiianfeather cloaks.

These long-established assumptions aboutthe relation of body ornament and identitycontinue to be influential in archaeological re-search. More recent work considers these re-lationships as products of active constructionof identity, not simply as signaling of inde-pendently existing identities (Fisher & Loren2003). Attention is focused on the degree ofintentionality that can be assumed in the useof costume and the way that costume serves toperpetuate embodied identities. Stone (2003)notes that archaeologists today are dividedabout the degree of consciousness required forthe use of material culture as symbols of eth-nic identity. Personal ornaments or distinc-tive costume can be understood as desirablemedia of identity when self-consciousness isassumed because they could be displayed ornot as situations warranted. Taking a sim-ilar perspective, intergenerational transmis-sion of body ornaments in Mesoamerica hasbeen interpreted as a means of recreatingembodied personhood within a line of re-lated persons (Joyce 1998, 2003a; Meskell &Joyce 2003). Exemplifying such recent work,Bazelmans (2002) argues that differences indress represented in medieval burials index acomplex interplay of religious and class-basedintentions and understandings. Treating thebody as a “cultural project,” Bazelmans (2002,p. 73) attends closely to the use in burial ritu-als of “items which feed, intoxicate, and dressthe body” not simply as reflections of a co-herent “identity,” but as informative aboutthe enactment of embodiment in mortuarycontexts.

The assumption that the visibility of itemsof dress contributes to the public legibilityof a personal history remains a productivepart of contemporary archaeological analy-sis (Isaza Aizpurua & McAnany 1999; Joyce1999, 2002a; Loren 2003). The textualizationof the body’s surface is increasingly viewed as amore or less deliberate social strategy throughwhich embodied identities were shaped, notsimply signaled.

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Inscribing the Body’s Surface

Citing Turner’s (1980) concept of “the so-cial skin,” White (1992) identified archaeo-logical body ornaments as demarcating andinscribing the body’s surface as the point ofarticulation between an interior self and anexterior society, between a physical body andits symbolically transformed social presenta-tion. Turner’s work was influential on manyarchaeologists who began in the early 1990sto explore the way that artifacts preserved inarchaeological sites could be used to constructan understanding of the social processes ofembodiment in past human societies (Fisher& Loren 2003, Joyce 1998, Loren 2001).Work on the social inscription of the body’ssurface eventually led to archaeological cri-tiques of an easy assumption of a distinctionbetween skin and what lies “beneath,” of thecollapse of “the body” into surface represen-tation in place of concern with the experienceof embodiment (compare Csordas 1994, pp.9–12; Grosz 1994, pp. 115–121). One reasonfor the early dominance of studies of the ar-chaeological body as an inscribed surface wasthe dependence on visual images, literally in-scribed surfaces, as a proxy for living bodies(Joyce 1996, Shanks 1995). As analyses pro-gressed, researchers identified difficulties withthe original model that equated stable and sin-gular identities with categorical sets of mark-ings of the body’s surface.

Sørensen (1991) exemplifies the initial ap-proach to archaeological understanding of thebody as a product of costuming acts. In herinfluential analysis, she proposed that gen-der difference was signaled through standard-ized forms of dress. The implication that gen-der identity was preexisting, expressed in, butnot formed by, acts of dressing, was unset-tled by the framing of the argument as aboutthe “construction” of gender. An assumed sta-bility of bodily identity, broadly endorsed inarchaeology at the time, also supported dis-cussions of cross-dressing or impersonationacross lines of gender-specific costuming thatproduced a contradictory implication of a dis-

junction between the body surface and in-teriority (Arnold 1991, Stone 1991). Thus,although framed initially in terms of the sig-naling of a stable, preexisting, essential iden-tity, work published and presented at confer-ences during this period quickly raised keyissues that required archaeologists interestedin embodied identity to rethink their analyticframeworks.

Yates (1993) used a detailed study of an-thropomorphic images in Scandinavian rockart as a platform for an early attempt to the-orize the body. The norm then (and eventoday) was to identify as masculine figureswith apparent phallic features, and as femininethose that lacked such marks. Yates under-scored that this view of sexual identity as basedon having or lacking a phallus was rooted incontemporary western European understand-ings of sexed subjectivity. Wanting to under-stand how other understandings of gendermight be represented in schematic anthro-pomorphic figures, he found it necessary toreconsider the ontology of the subject of rep-resentation. His resolution of the challengehe faced was to view the body as “a plainover which the grid is laid in order to markcertain points of focus and intensity. . . .thebody. . . begins life as a featureless plateau—aplane of consistency or ‘body without organs’to use Deleuze and Guattari’s terms—ontowhich signs are written by culture. . ..The or-gans and their associated meanings are appliedonto this plain by a process of cultural inscrip-tion” (Yates 1993, p. 59). This proposal neatlymade the data available (inscribed rock sur-faces) homologous with the theorized body.It exposed the inadequacy of archaeologicalviews shaped by engagement with inert im-ages and dead bodies, of the body as a pas-sive thing waiting to be marked with signs ofmeaning.

In contrast with approaches that assumeda uniform, transhistorical role of body mark-ings, ornament, and dress as signal, morerecent archaeological work seeks to situatebody practices and representational practiceshistorically in relation to the production of

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different embodied experiences. Rainbird(2002) argues that tattooing needs to be un-derstood as the inscription of a history onthe body, a “wrapping in images” that doesnot just mark but actually forms the skin ofthe person. Tattooing, an irreversible mod-ification of the skin identified archaeologi-cally both directly (Alvrus et al. 2001, Barber1999) and indirectly (Green 1979, Rainbird2002, Thompson 1946), raises interestingquestions about the archaeological interpre-tation of marks on the body’s surface. Literallydemarcating the skin, tattoos and related bodypractices (such as scarification or body pierc-ing) create permanent marks, unlike the use ofclothing or ornaments, which can be adoptedor changed more easily. Practices like tattoo-ing require explicit consideration of the sig-nificance to bodily identity of the interplay ofpermanence and impermanence (Grosz 1994,pp. 138–44). The fluidity of embodiment hasbeen addressed in recent archaeological dis-cussions of bodily performance and expe-rience that consider the substantive impactthat archaeologically invisible body practices,such as habitual patterns of dress and orna-ment, would have had on the experience ofembodiment.

Boyd (2002, p. 142) has critically sum-marized the implications of much traditionalarchaeological research on body ornamenta-tion: “[B]ody decoration is seen as part ofa representational formulation of the body.Decorative elements symbolically representparticular ideas, particular subjective mean-ings, which are materially ‘inscribed’ on thebody in order to convey those ideas and mean-ings. However, the body itself remains an ob-ject, only given meaning through the use ofdecoration.” As he notes, the limited view ofinscription here ignores the already-existinghistory of the embodied person. Acknowledg-ing this prior history, he suggests that the ar-raying of the dead body in Natufian burialsin the Levant be viewed as “a practice relatingto perceptions of the body. . .bodily action bythe living on the bodies of the dead” (Boyd2002, p. 142).

In a similarly critical study of standardpractices in burial analysis, Gilchrist (1997,pp. 47–50) noted that in a sample of me-dieval cemeteries in England “weapons wereassociated with men with the tallest statureand strongest physique” (p. 49). She suggestedthat weapons here make less sense as signalsof male gender than as traces of the embod-ied experience of certain men as warriors,experience whose effects penetrated to thebone. Archaeological analysis, as it is increas-ingly evident, can tell us about the embod-ied life of deceased persons, but only throughan understanding of the reflexive relationsbetween body practices, perceptions, and ex-perience among persons. Contemporary ar-chaeologists move beyond the textualizationof the body’s surface and call attention to thediscernable effects of the use of ornaments orstyles of dress on the experience of the personwhose body is literally shaped by a manner ofdress.

PERFORMING THEARCHAEOLOGICAL BODY

Archaeologists interested in linking materialmedia, including representations, to embod-ied experience have built on Butler’s analy-ses (1990, 1993) of the ways that the physicalcharacteristics of the body are given so-cial meaning through repetitive performance(Perry & Joyce 2001). Contrasting fundamen-tally with the beginning point of the informa-tion signaling model of dress, analyses draw-ing on Butler’s work begin from the positionthat “there is no atemporal, fixed ‘core’ to aperson’s identity. . .outside the acts and ges-tures that constitute it” (Alberti 2001, p. 190).From this perspective representations of thebody can be seen as records of stereotyped em-bodied performances that served as models, orin Butler’s terms citational precedents, for theembodied gestures of living people (Bachandet al. 2003; Joyce 1993, 1998, 2001b,c, 2002a,2003a,b; Joyce & Hendon 2000).

The fleeting performativity of living bod-ies can be traced archaeologically through

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reflexivity between representations and theuse in body practices of objects like thoserepresented (Joyce 1993, 1998, 2001b). An ex-tended analysis of stereotyped human repre-sentations in small, hand-modeled figurinesof the Honduran Playa de los Muertos cul-ture culminated in the proposal that thesehighly detailed, individualized images wouldhave served as intimate sources of bodilyprecedents for the young women who are themajority of identified subjects (Joyce 2002a,2003b). By relating ornaments depicted atparticular bodily sites (the hair, ears, neck,wrists, and ankles) to durable objects recov-ered archaeologically, including from burials,it was possible to argue that specific figuralimages were likely idealized representationsof persons of different ages. What could notbe discerned from the durable traces in ar-chaeological sites were the stereotyped pos-tures associated with different ages, standingor dancing with young women, seated pos-tures with older individuals. Nor did the ar-chaeological remains include any way to ob-serve the diversity of treatment of hair withineach age-related group of figures. By tackingback and forth between the representationsand the archaeologically recovered durableobjects, this study argued for both citation-ality of age-specific bodily postures and prac-tices of dress, and for individuality within eventhe highly stereotyped representations. Bas-ing this analysis on the framework provided byButler (1993), it was argued that both the fig-urines and the living bodies that surroundedchildren were sources of bodily ideals againstwhich they would have measured their ownembodied performances. The greater dura-bility of the figural representations, and thedifferential durability of some body practices,would have made these more effective in thelong-term reproduction of specific forms ofembodiment, even over multiple generations(Joyce 2000a, 2001c, 2003a).

Other archaeological analyses similarlyjuxtapose bodily performance and representa-tion, now seen not simply as documentary butas disciplinary or normative. German (2000,

pp. 102–4) asks how representations of thehuman form on seals from the late BronzeAge Aegean could inform us about the cor-poral bodies of human subjects. Noting thatdespite the inclusion of highly specific details,the bodies depicted are ultimately not real-istic in proportion, and are selective in theirpresentation of bodily architecture, she un-derlines the homogeneity of classes of bodiesin representation. Citing Butler (1990), shesuggests that these seals present specific em-bodied actions as conventional gender per-formances seen in details of differential bodypositioning as much as in the specific ac-tivities each gender was presumed to carryout (German 2000, pp. 104–5). Palka (2002)builds on a scrupulously detailed analysis ofvisual representations of human figures to ar-gue for both experiential and symbolic di-mensions of handedness among the ClassicMaya.

Emphasis on performativity contributesto more critical examination of items ofdress that previously have been viewed sim-ply as reflections of categories of people. ThusDanielsson (2002) denaturalizes the singlingout of the head in Scandinavian traditions ofthe use of helmets and head ornaments, re-lating the use of these items to the isolationof the face as a figural motif in art. Arguingthat the use of helmets and head ornamentsand the representation of isolated faces needto be understood in terms of “masking” as acultural practice, Danielsson (2002, p. 181)suggests that “masks enable embodiment ofdisembodied states,” transformative perfor-mances during the life course. Work on Cen-tral American societies also identified a rela-tionship between emphasis on the head as thesite of identity in representational images andactual practices of dress and ornamentation,including masking, through which the headwas shaped and inflected in life (Joyce 1998).Explicitly grounding the analysis in the the-oretical work of Butler (1990, 1993), thesestudies argued that specific body practiceswere part of a repertoire of charged perfor-mances that marked transitions during the life

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course in prehispanic Central America (Joyce2000a).

Beginning with concern with the body asa site of representation and a representedobject, archaeologists working on the rela-tions of costume, body ornament, and bodypractices have been led to engage with morephenomenological approaches to the experi-ence of the persons whose bodies were liter-ally shaped by these practices (Joyce 2003a,Meskell & Joyce 2003). Under the influenceof approaches to archaeology that emphasizethe importance of cross-cutting dimensions ofsocial identity and the active negotiation of so-cial positions, scholars interested in embodi-ment have begun to draw on other lines of evi-dence to flesh out flat and stereotypic views ofbodies in past societies derived from norma-tive representations. Through examination oftraces of body modification that would haveaffected the exteriority of the body, evident inhuman skeletal remains, archaeologists havebegun to raise questions about varied embod-ied experiences. Moving away from discus-sions of normative bodies, archaeologists havebegun to include consideration of sensory ex-periences once considered impossible to de-tect archaeologically.

Experiencing the ArchaeologicalBody

Kus (1992) issued an early call for the neces-sity of including sensory experience as part ofany archaeology of embodiment. Building onher ethnographic experiences, she argued thatarchaeological interpretations that did not di-rectly address the senses would miss signifi-cant aspects of human experience in the past,experiences that motivated people to act inparticular ways.

Archaeological research on sensory expe-rience since then has taken varied forms.Drawing on European texts recording Cen-tral Mexican concepts in the sixteenthcentury, Lopez Austin (1988), Ortiz deMontellano (1989), and Furst (1995) detailedindigenous models of physiology and embod-

iment. Houston & Taube (2000) presented anoverview of epigraphic and iconographic evi-dence for sensory perception among the Clas-sic Maya nobility, and Houston (2001) drewon human representation to propose codes ofdecorum typical of the same group. Sweely(1998) considered in detail the possible im-plications for intervisibility, and thus differ-ential knowledge, of persons who might havebeen at work in one sector of ancient Ceren,El Salvador, a site whose burial by volcaniceruption allows a finer-grained modeling ofeveryday interaction than is ordinarily possi-ble in archaeology. Dornan (2004) draws onneuro-phenomenology to propose interpre-tations of individual religious experience inClassic Maya society.

Models of embodied experience havesometimes relied on assuming universals, andhere archaeological research has been criti-cal in reinforcing the historicity of specificperceptual, sensory, and experiential regimes(Meskell & Joyce 2003). Constructing cred-ible models of past experiences of embod-iment becomes more difficult once univer-sality is questioned because the archaeologistcannot begin by assuming the position of atypical person. Where iconographic or lit-erary sources are available, as for the clas-sical Mediterranean, Classic Maya, ancientEgyptians, and many of the societies studiedby historic archaeologists, approaches to suchmodels have been productive, although notwithout points of disagreement (Houston &Taube 2000, Meskell 2000a, Meskell & Joyce2003).

Representational media, whether texts orimages, bring with them an additional set ofinterpretive challenges. They must be viewednot simply as reflections of existing conceptsof embodiment, but as part of the mate-rial apparatus through which such conceptswere naturalized. Analysis of less discur-sive archaeological materials, even in situa-tions where extensive textual or iconographicsources are available, provides a valuable wayto tack from acknowledged bodily ideals tobodily experiences that sometimes were in

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conflict with expressed ideals. For example,examining medieval British society, Gilchrist(1999, pp. 109–45) adopts a phenomenolog-ical perspective, considering the spatial or-ganization of castles and the experiences ofpersons in them as the bases for understand-ing gendered experiences of embodiment.Morris & Peatfield (2002) use representationsof bodily gestures inscribed in figurines recov-ered from hilltop sanctuaries in Crete to ex-plore the “feeling body” experiencing ritual,entering into altered states of conscious-ness. Explicitly grounded in comparisonwith ethnographic research, particularly onshamanic experiences using controlled pos-ture to induce trance states, their argumentessentially assumes that the figurines theystudy iconically represent actual postures as-sumed by ritual participants at the sanctu-ary sites (compare Tate 1996). Tarlow (2002,p. 87) explores how the physicality of the bodyin nineteenth century England was experi-enced by those who survived the deceased per-son, simultaneously illuminating the sensoryaffect of the dead body for the living (com-pare Kus 1992) and the existence of a philoso-phy of incorruptibility of the body that shapedthe lives of survivors and their now-deceasedloved one.

For archaeologists working in areas lack-ing documentary sources, phenomenologicalapproaches may be one of the only ways toeven begin to explore embodiment. In a seriesof publications juxtaposing excavated contextsin Neolithic Britain and Europe, in whichdisarticulated human remains were deposited,with analyses of formal constructed spaces inwhich human body parts were sometimes de-picted in visual images, a number of archae-ologists have suggested lines of approach toboth an experiencing body and the body asexperienced by others (Fowler 2002; Richards1993; Thomas 1993, 2000, 2002; Thomas &Tilley 1993). Emphasizing the fragmentationof the remains of human bodies across dif-ferent contexts, these researchers have arguedvigorously for an experience of embodimentthat was partible and collective. Thus, in sites

in Brittany “the physical body. . . has gonefrom a living whole of flesh and bone, to achaotic mass of bone and sinew, partly articu-lated, to a rearranged whole as stacks of ribs.The new figure. . . is the social whole, the bodyof the social collectivity, into which individualegos have merged. . .one can be part of soci-ety or one can die alone. . .. One can imaginethat as well as the artwork, the message wasconveyed through the use of actual human re-mains” (Thomas & Tilley 1993, pp. 269–70).

In a particularly striking study of materialfrom Neolithic Scotland, MacGregor (1999)challenges the visual bias of much archaeo-logical analysis and demonstrates how objectsthat in no way can be directly linked to bod-ies (either as body parts or representations)may provide a basis to conceptualize em-bodiment. He considers in detail the sensoryexperience of decorated stone balls, which oc-cupants of these sites may have enjoyed, as analternative to functionalist explanations of theproduction and use of these objects, explicitlyrelating these bodily experiences to the cre-ation and re-creation of social identities. Heargues that most archaeological analysis priv-ileges visual experience over the use of othersenses (compare Hamilakis 2002). Instead, heemphasizes the tactile qualities of the artifactshe is examining (compare Ouzman 2001).MacGregor advocates that archaeologists em-ploy “haptic analysis” in addition to the morecommon visual analyses of material culture toremain attentive to the likelihood that othercultures in the past elaborated distinctive sen-sory regimes. As Csordas (1994, p. 61) notes,“work on haptic touch is useful in develop-ing a sense of the agency of the body in bothindividual and social existence, and may thuscontribute to the elaboration of the model ofembodied feeling.”

Other routes for archaeological under-standing of embodied experience come fromthe application of biological techniques toreconstruct health, work patterns, and bodymodifications throughout the life course(Boyd 1996, Cohen & Bennett 1993, Cox& Sealy 1997). Differential access to dietary

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resources can provide information aboutstatus identities reflected in living bodies asdifferences in stature and body size. Re-construction of repetitive activity constitutesevidence of habitual adoption of postures,sometimes specific to gender or other iden-tities. Far more than skin deep, the biologi-cal experiences of people in the past, similarto their experiences of identity and person-hood, defy any attempt to separate surface andinterior.

Is “Surface” to “Interior” As“Public” is to “Private”?

Following Grosz (1995), Gilchrist (2000,p. 91) argues for “a more materialist consider-ation of the body, one which would examinehow the processes of social inscription on theexterior surface coalesce to construct a psychi-cal interior” through “the inclusion of the di-mensions of time and space.” Peterson (2000)exemplifies the work of bioarchaeologistswhose studies of human skeletal remains chal-lenge the dichotomy of surface and interior inprecisely the way predicated by social analysessuch as those by Grosz (1994, 1995). Bioar-chaeologists trace the evidence in the moredurable parts of the human body of habitualpatterns of movement and action and of dif-ferential life experiences (Agarwal et al. 2004,Becker 2000, Boyd 2002, Cohen & Bennett1993, Robb 2002). In traditional physical an-thropology, such traces of individual embod-ied experience were abstracted to character-ize categories of people (sexes, races, or agegroups, for example). Today, the same obser-vations are open to more idiographic inter-pretation as evidence of diverse experiencesof embodied persons (Robb 2002). Particu-larly interesting from such an osteobiograph-ical perspective are studies of the dramaticmanipulation of the living body, reflected inskeletal remains as well as in artistic canons.In many times and places, human populationshave shaped the still malleable head of infantsand young children (Boyd 2002, pp. 145–46;Joyce 2001a,c). Dentition is another bodily

site where traces of practices during life arepreserved. Extraction of teeth, filing, inset-ting materials, and supplementing teeth withdental “appliances” are specific practices thathave begun to be viewed as evidence of bod-ily experience and the cultural shaping of em-bodied personhood (Becker 2000; Boyd 2002,pp. 145–46; Joyce 2001c; Robb 1997, 2002).

Just as bioarchaeological studies of bod-ily interiority yield understandings of embod-ied experience and public appearance, so alsodo reexaminations of costume and represen-tation challenge the equation of the body witha public surface. Rissman (1988), in a contex-tual analysis comparing the contents of buriedhoards to human interments in the Harappancivilization, argued that costume ornamentsworn by the dead, traditionally viewed by ar-chaeologists as evidence of the internalized,private, uncontestable “identity” of the per-son, were viewed by a wider public duringmortuary rituals as part of contestation of thestatus of dead persons and the groups to whichthey belonged. Sweely (1998), citing Joyce(1996), suggests that experiences of the in-habitants of ancient Ceren in more and lessintimate spatial settings served to naturalizetheir sense of their own position and rela-tions to others as they grew from childhood toadulthood. Gilchrist (2000, p. 91) proposed toexamine the “interior, experiential qualities ofsexuality, as it was expressed through the ma-teriality of space and visual imagery” amongcelibate medieval women (see also Gilchrist1994). In these and similar studies, the bound-aries of “the body” and of the spatial context“around” it are shown to be inextricably re-lated (Potter 2004).

The products of such new approaches inarchaeology are no longer categorical expres-sions of preexisting identities. Instead, con-temporary archaeology of the body, movingbeyond the dichotomy of surface and interior,considers the ways that body practices andrepresentations of bodies worked together toproduce experiences of embodied personhooddifferentiated along lines of sex, age, power,etc.

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ARCHAEOLOGIES OFEMBODIED PERSONHOOD

Meskell (1996), noting that “the body” dis-cussed in then-current archaeological writingwas almost always the female body, urged ex-plicit archaeological attention to masculinity,a theme addressed most directly by Knapp(1998). Scott (1997, p. 8) noted the irony thatcritiques of the common archaeological use ofa masculine subject position had done little toexplicitly theorize masculinity itself, insteadfocusing on delineating feminine experience.Although she suggested that “preoccupationwith the body as a defining force is a peculiarlylate modern social development” (p. 8), andargued from ancient Roman and Greek datathat masculinity in the past was “not in factmeasured by levels of direct sexual activity orpaternity. . .nor bodily prowess, nor dress” (p.9), a number of archaeological analyses haveproductively traced discourses through whichembodied masculinities were shaped.

Gilchrist (1997, pp. 47–50) is among thearchaeologists who have, in different ways,underscored the production of masculinitiesexpressed as differential strength as often adifference among male subjects as betweenmale and female. Relating a suite of objectsplaced in burials of males in Bronze AgeEurope to cultivation of the body and par-ticipation in warfare, Treherne (1995) pro-posed that an exemplary warrior masculin-ity was a product of circumstances of thistime and place. Yates (1993, pp. 35–36, 41–48), in his analysis of human images in Scan-dinavian rock art, identified representationalschema depicting distinct masculinities, con-trasting in their degree of phallicism and ag-gression, with prominent calf muscles act-ing as a marker of a particular kind of malebody. Winter (1989) pursued an analysis ofthe way that the able body in texts describinga Mesopotamian ruler was referenced throughvisual emphasis on musculature in portraits ofthe seated ruler. She further proposed that thebody of another ruler was sexualized for thevisual consumption of viewers as a production

of a kind of hyperbolic masculinity (Winter1996). Analyses of Classic Maya images inwhich young men’s active, vigorous bodies arepresented as objects for the admiring gaze ofolder males and women alike offer an analysisof these images simultaneously as precedentsfor the embodied performances of cohorts ofyoung men and as inscriptions of an idealizedyoung male body (Joyce 2000b, 2002b).

Broadening the scope of embodied per-sonhood beyond the feminized body has alsoinvolved radically questioning the indivisi-bility of embodied persons. Thomas (2002)suggests that the archaeology of NeolithicBritain can best be understood as evidence ofa form of personhood distinct from contem-porary Western individuality. His argument,based on careful examination of contexts inwhich human skeletal elements and artifactswere split and rearranged, is that in NeolithicBritain the embodied person may not havebeen bounded by the skin, but extended sub-stantively by objects of various kinds (Thomas2002, p. 41). “Both artefacts and bodies weregoverned by the principles of partibility andcirculation. Both formed elements in a moregeneral ‘economy of substances’ which in-volved other materials. Both artefacts andbodies could be broken down into parts, andartefacts at least were made by putting differ-ent substances together” (Thomas 2002, p. 42;compare Fowler 2002). Understandings ofpersonhood as partible and dividual have beenemployed by other archaeologists in analysesof the extension of material culture of the bodyin a number of ancient societies (Fowler 2003,Looper 2003a, Meskell & Joyce 2003). To un-derstand the body in the past, archaeologistsare increasingly engaging broader theories ofembodiment and materiality.

THEORIZING THE BODY INARCHAEOLOGY

A central assumption, often left inexplicit inarchaeological work on embodiment, is thatsocial understandings were “created, ordered,and perpetuated in respect to associations

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with material culture” (Lesick 1997, p. 38).These associations shape experience through-out childhood, contributing to the productionof adult social positions (Joyce 2000a). Sofaer-Derevenski (1997, pp. 196–97) argues that“the developing child imports, transfers, andascribes gendered meanings to objects andactively transforms them into the genderedworld in which s/he lives.” Although her anal-ysis is based on studies of Western childhood,she assumes that children in other societies,with other gender constructs, would nonethe-less have passed through similar stages ofdevelopment, albeit processing distinct cul-tural content. Archaeologists sharing suchunderstandings call for analysis of “materialculture which work[s] to structure cultural ex-perience” (Lesick 1997, p. 38). Archaeolog-ical explorations of embodiment, distinct asthey may be in other respects, share an un-derstanding of the material environment thatarchaeology delineates as shaping past experi-ence, and consequently, as potentially a pointof connection with such past experiences.

Meskell (2000b) has argued that archaeo-logical writing on the body needs to be morerigorously theorized. She describes archae-ology of the body as proceeding from twotheoretical positions. In the first position sheidentifies the body as “the scene of display,” aperspective she traces to reliance on the workof Foucault (see also Meskell 1998b). Meskellsees this line of work as primarily concernedwith “posture, gesture, costume, sexuality, andrepresentation” (p. 15). The second project,which she calls “the body as artifact,” she as-sociates with Anthony Giddens’ structurationtheory. She sees “the body as artifact” as con-cerned with “sets of bodies” as “normativerepresentatives of larger social entities fulfill-ing their negotiated roles, circumscribed bypowerful social forces,” passive bodies “de-scribed in relationship to [the] landscape oras spatially experiencing the phenomenon ofmonuments” (p. 16). She was strongly criti-cal of both archaeological approaches, seeingthem, as practiced to that date, as lacking con-cern with the body as a site of lived experience.

Related arguments have become morecommon since Meskell formulated her discus-sion, which although published in 2000 com-ments on a conference held in 1996. Boyd(2002, p. 137) criticizes archaeologists work-ing on sites in the Levant for a lack of attentionto “the social body and embodied agency,”noting that, as is generally the case in archae-ology, the body is mainly approached as “anobjectified entity in physical/biological an-thropological studies” or, as the dead body ofmortuary studies, as an index of social organi-zation, or as a focus of symbolism. His com-ments characterize much contemporary ar-chaeological practice. To move forward, Boyd(2002, p. 138) proposes a shift to examinetogether “food consumption, treatment ofthe dead body, treatment of the living bodyand body representation.” Hamilakis and col-leagues (2002, p. 13) propose that such dis-tinct strands of archaeological research onthe body may begin to be integrated in anemerging emphasis on what they call “the ex-periencing body,” “in which critically-awaresensory and phenomenological archaeologiesmay be used to enrich existing traditions suchas physical anthropology, gender studies, andmortuary archaeology.” They include in theirappraisal such developments as archaeologicalattention to the incorporation into the body offood and drugs (Boyd 2002, Hamilakis 1999,2002, Wilkie 2000) and concern with materialtechnologies as shaping the body [in the man-ner captured by Mauss’s (1992) elucidation of“techniques of the body”] and as bodily exten-sions, or what Hayles (1999) calls prostheses.

An archaeology of the body as site of livedexperience—as the site of “the articulationof agency and structure, causality and mean-ing, rationality and imagination, physical de-terminations and symbolic resonances”—is aproject Meskell (2000b, p. 18) aligns with thephenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and withfeminist theory. Meskell is careful to separateher call for attention to lived experience froman equation of an archaeology of the body withthe reconstruction of biography of named,historical individuals, something that is

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possible where archaeological data are suffi-ciently rich and particularistic (Meskell 1998a,1999, 2000a). Instead her proposal, illus-trated by her own work on Egyptian per-sonhood drawing on a range of data fromburials, houses, and documentary sources, isthat archaeologists take up the challenge of “asearch for the construction of identity or self”(Meskell 2000b, p. 20) that would include butnot be restricted to embodiment.

There are points of intersection betweenstudies of embodiment and subjectivity in thesocial sciences at large and archaeology inparticular (Joyce 2004). Grosz (1995, p. 33)discerns two lines of discussion of the bodyin contemporary social theory, one “inscrip-tive” and one dealing with the phenomeno-logical “lived body”: “[T]he first conceives thebody as a surface on which social law, moral-ity, and values are inscribed, the second referslargely to the lived experience of the body, thebody’s internal or psychic inscription. Wherethe first analyzes a social, public body, thesecond takes the body-schema or imaginaryanatomy as its object(s).” Most archaeology,until recently, has treated the body solely asinscriptive.

Archaeology developed from the Westerntradition that separated mind, the nonmate-

rial site of identity, from body and tradition-ally understood itself to be limited to address-ing the body as a public site or object ofsocial action (Grosz 1994, pp. 3–10; Knapp& Meskell 1997, pp. 183–87; Meskell 1996,1998b, 2000b, 2001; Turner 1984, pp. 30–59).Phenomenological approaches adopted by ar-chaeologists offer instead a perspective on thebody as “the instrument by which all infor-mation and knowledge is received and mean-ing is generated” (Grosz 1994, p. 87, com-menting on Merleau-Ponty 1962). Csordas(1994, pp. 10–11) suggests that contemporaryapproaches to embodiment rooted in phe-nomenology require an emphasis on “lived ex-perience.” He sees this shift from analysis ofan objectified “body” to understanding of ac-tive “embodiment” as involving replacementof semiotic approaches with hermeneutic in-terpretive perspectives. Under the influenceof phenomenological approaches, in the con-temporary archaeology of embodiment, thesemiotic perspective of the information trans-mission and identity signaling models andthe description of inert (often literally dead)bodies are being replaced by analysis of theproduction and experience of lived bodies,in which surface and interior are no longerseparated.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Beyond the debts evident from the work I cite, I acknowledge the many generous scholars whohave shared the development of these ideas with me. I thank Geoffrey McCafferty, VeronicaKann, Cheryl Claassen, and Mary Weismantel, who separately but almost simultaneously sug-gested I read the work of Judith Butler. For invitations that allowed me to develop my ownideas at various points, I additionally thank Rita Wright, Jeffrey Quilter, Meredith Chesson,Cecelia Klein, Roberta Gilchrist, Barbara Voss and Robert Schmidt, Genevieve Fisher andDiana Loren, and Lynn Meskell and Robert Pruecel. It is traditional to absolve all such ac-knowledged persons from responsibility of my errors, which I do; but they certainly deservecredit for anything I have achieved here and elsewhere.

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