The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology and Anthropology of Body Modification

Franz Manni, Francesco D'Errico (Herausgeber)

Buch | Hardcover

1168 Seiten

2026
Oxford University Press Inc (Verlag)
978-0-19-757252-8 (ISBN)

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Body modification practices express identity, conform to social norms, and convey cultural values that express cultural, social, and individual meanings. The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology and Anthropology of Body Modification provides a comprehensive understanding of these practices, addressing evolving cultures and identities, while also revealing the universal human desire to transcend the ordinary and connect with something greater. By exploring practices such as cranial shaping, teeth filing, tattooing, body piercing, and other modifications, this comprehensive volume sheds light on the evolution and diversification of body modification across time and space.

The Handbook's opening chapters synthesize the origins of body modification, examining the chronological emergence of clothing, body painting, and adornments across continents to introduce the deep connections between body modifications and social identity, focusing on rituals, gender, and symbolism in historical and archaeological contexts. Later chapters delve into cranial and dental modifications, tattooing, and body piercing, examining the cultural significance of these practices and the methods used to perform them. The final sections of the Handbook address other body alterations, including genital modifications and finger amputation. Museum collections are also examined, presenting a wide array of artifacts and visual media, including human remains, showing how they can be studied to understand past cultural contexts in a novel way.

Throughout the Handbook, Indigenous perspectives and methodologies are highlighted, offering insight into the amuletic function of tattoos and the relational practice of body modifications. It is important to note that colonization has stopped the cultural transmission of many of these practices, the value and dignity of which the Handbook attempts to restore. Taken together, the chapters in The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology and Anthropology of Body Modification represent a unique and groundbreaking synthesis of scholarship on this widespread yet often misunderstood aspect of human culture.

Franz Manni is an Anthropologist at the National Museum of Natural History (Paris, France). He conducts multidisciplinary studies in the realms of human population genetics, biodemography, computational linguistics, archaeology, and geography. His primary research interest is in the dynamics and determinants of past and present human migrations. He has been scientific commissioner and curator of several exhibitions at the Musée de l'Homme, (Paris), including the first exhibition of body piercing adornments from prehistory to the present (Piercing, 2019). Francesco d'Errico is a CNRS Director of Research at the University of Bordeaux and Professor at the University of Bergen. His research explores the evolution of human cognition and symbolic cultural practices in Africa and Eurasia. The author of hundreds of papers in leading scientific journals, he is known for challenging the model of a symbolic revolution by showing that symbolic artifacts existed in Africa at least 80,000 years ago. He has co-led major ERC-funded projects on cultural modernity and human numerical cognition, as well as a University of Bordeaux project devoted to identifying tipping points in biological and cultural evolution.

1. The Archaeology and Anthropology of Body Modification: Introduction
Francesco d'Errico, Franz Manni

2. An Integrated Evolutionary Scenario for the Culturalization of the Human Body
Francesco d'Errico

3. Body Modification: Rituals, Gender, and Symbolism
Rosemary A. Joyce

4. An Introduction to Artificial Cranial Vault Modifications
Vera Tiesler

5. Identifying and Characterizing Artificial Cranial Modifications in Western Mesoamerican Populations: Inputs from 3D Imaging and Shape Quantification Techniques
Sélim Natahi

6. The Rise and Fall of Cranial Deformation in Southwestern France: Modern and Ancient Examples
Eric Crubézy, Patrice Gérard, Didier Paya, Guillaume Fleury, Sélim Djouad, Sylvie Duchesne

7. Intentional Dental Modification: Identification, Distribution, and Significance
Scott E. Burnett, Vera Tiesler, Kenneth Tremblay, John C. Willman

8. One Mark at A Time: Ethnographic Notes on Tattooing
Lars Krutak

9. Global Diversity and Distributions of Traditional Tattooing Tools: An Ethnographic, Ethnohistorical, and Anthropological Perspective
Benoît Robitaille, Aaron Deter-Wolf, Maya Sialuk Jacobsen

10. Archaeological Science and the Identification of Tattooing Tools
Aaron Deter-Wolf, Andrew Gillreath-Brown

11. The Medical Anthropology of Tattooing, Past and Present
Michael Smetana, Christopher D. Lynn, Marco Samadelli

12. Burning, Cutting, Piercing, and Tattooing the Skin for Healing Purposes
Luc Renaut

13. Amuletic Tattooing among Central and Eastern Inuit Tribes from an Inuit Perspective
Maya Sialuk Jacobsen

14. Nlaka'pamux Skin Marking (British Columbia, Canada): Past Significance and Current Efforts to Document, Preserve, and Update Its Ancestral Meaning
Dion Kaszas

15. Techniques and Ornaments for Enlarging Body Piercing Perforations
Franz Manni, Paul King

16. Cultural Transmission in the West: The Case of the Resurrection of Body Piercing in the 20th Century
Paul King, Franz Manni

17. Piercing the Body in Mesoamerica: Material, Social, and Ritual Significance from Historical and Archaeological Sources
Juliette Testard, Guilhem Olivier, Grégory Pereira, Eliseo F. Padilla Gutiérrez

18. The Typology of Archaeological Labrets from Kamchatka
Andrei V. Ptashinsky

19. To Wear, or Not to Wear: Symbolism and Technology of Labrets in Mun (Ethiopia) and Mebêngôkre (Brazil)
Shauna LaTosky, Pascale de Robert

20. The Penis Piercing Tradition in Borneo and the Philippines
Antonio Guerreiro

21. Male and Female Genital Modifications in Anthropological Perspective
Ellen Gruenbaum, Thomas R. Blanton IV, Cathie Spieser

22. Ancient Arts: Body Marking in Indigenous Australia
Michelle C. Langley

23. Body Modifications among San Hunter-Gatherers: A Relational Practice
Vibeke M. Viestad

24. Body Modifications in North-Eastern Africa
Andrea Manzo, Luisa Sernicola

25. Finger Amputation in the Ethnographic and Archaeological Records
Brea McCauley, Mark Collard

26. Ancient Andean Tattooing: New Perspectives from North American Museum Collections
Aaron Deter-Wolf, Madison Auten, Benoît Robitaille, Daniel Riday

27. The Collection of Tattoos of the Museum of Criminal Anthropology "Cesare Lombroso" and of the Museum of Human Anatomy, University of Turin (Italy)
Cristina Cilli, Giacomo Giacobini, Pierpaolo Leschiutta, Franz Manni, Silvano Montaldo

28. Body Modification at the Musée de l'Homme (National Museum of Natural History, Paris, France): An Overview of the Collections, and Research Examples.
Aline Averbouh, Martin Friess, François Gendron, Robin Gerst, Laurence Glemarec, Liliana Huet, Franz Manni

Erscheinungsdatum	16.05.2023
Reihe/Serie	Oxford Handbooks
Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	171 x 248 mm
Gewicht	3 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Archäologie
	Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Vor- und Frühgeschichte
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
ISBN-10	0-19-757252-9 / 0197572529
ISBN-13	978-0-19-757252-8 / 9780197572528
Zustand	Neuware