John Robb

The interpretation of skeletal muscle sites: a statistical approach

Muscle attachments have only recently been used systematically as markers of ancient activity, in part because of methodological and interpretive difficulties involved in associating muscle markings with specific activities. An alternative analytical approach focuses on the organization of activity rather than the identification of specific activities. This paper presents data from 18 muscle insertion sites in 56 adult skeletons from the Italian Iron Age cemetery of Pontecagnano. These data indicate that: (1) skeletal development of muscle sites is related to an individuals age; (2) variations in muscle marking within and between skeletons may be linked to activities performed; and (3) even when specific activities cannot be deduced, statistical patterns within a group may inform us about past lifeways and the social organization of activities.

Gender Contradictions, Moral Coalitions, and Inequality in Prehistoric Italy

Abstract This attempts, as an experiment, to reconstruct gender ideology and social inequality in prehistoric Italy through an analysis of symbols, particularly depictions of People (e.g. figures distinguished as male or female by representations of daggers or breasts), using theoretical notions of inequality and coalition. After a theoretical introduction the paper traces the evolution of an ideology of male potency from peripheral middle-Neolithic hunting cults (with a balanced male/female gender ideology and formal ritualism) through an Eneolithic and Bronze-Age system of gender stratification (with male prestige competition), and finally into the Iron-Age ideology of military aristocracy (with a gender ideology of male hierarchy that encompassed a female hierarchy, functioning to exclude unequal classes).

Intentional tooth removal in Neolithic Italian women

As many an excavator - and many an older person - knows, it is in the nature of human teeth to fall out, before death if they can, after and into the ground if they may not. So any consideration of tooth loss as we see it in prehistoric remains - if it is to be - the cultural evidence for the deliberate removal of teeth - needs properly to identify a sufficiently distinctive pattern.

Warfare and Violence in Prehistoric Europe: an Introduction

At the moment, one trend in both North American and European archaeology has been to un-pacify the past. The study of warfare and violence in past societies has long been problematic. The debate has been thrown into much sharper focus during the 1990s by a series of publications, notably Keeleys own War before Civilization (1996) in which he proposed that the past had been effectively pacified by modern anthropologists for broadly ideological reasons. Modern state societies may have an unparalleled ability to organise destructive mass violence; yet both ethnographic studies of groups, such as the Gebusi (Knauft 1987) and the Yanomamo (Chagnon 1968), and archaeological studies, like recent Anasazi reinterpretations, have shown that non-state societies are equally capable of using deadly force, sometimes with rates of homicide and war casualties exceeding any known in the modern West. Keywords: archaeological studies; European archaeology; Keeleys War before Civilization ; modern anthropologists; North American archaeology; warfare; Yanomamo

A social prehistory of European languages

Consistent to most views of Indo-European in later European prehistory is a genetic focus. The blanket of related languages across Europe marks an equal human spread – whether of steppe warriors, Beaker burialists or slashing-and-burning farmers. What if the languages are reconstructed using other premisses than this ‘genealogical’ view?

Gardening, foraging and herding: Neolithic land use and social territories in Southern Italy

The authors explore the use of land in Neolithic south Italy, showing how the new territories combined arable farming with hunting and foraging wild resources from the hinterland.

Cleaning the dead: Neolithic ritual processing of human bone at Scaloria Cave, Italy

Abstract Detailed taphonomic and skeletal analyses document the diverse and often unusual burial practices employed by European Neolithic populations. In the Upper Chamber at Scaloria Cave in southern Italy, the remains of some two dozen individuals had been subjected to careful and systematic defleshing and disarticulation involving cutting and scraping with stone tools, which had left their marks on the bones. In some cases these were not complete bodies but parts of bodies that had been brought to the cave from the surrounding area. The fragmented and commingled burial layer that resulted from these activities indicates complex secondary burial rites effecting the transition from entirely living to entirely dead individuals.

Tradition and agency: human body representations in later prehistoric Europe

Abstract What is a tradition? This paper argues that the concept of tradition has to be regarded as more than either a shorthand for passively inherited cultural baggage or an actively invented ancient heritage. Through a discussion of Neolithic figurines and Copper and Bronze Age statue-stelae in the Central Mediterranean and Alps, I argue that in some cases archaeological traditions should be understood as having an emergent quality that makes them more than the sum of the individual creative acts generating them and gives them qualities of agency. The implications for a multi-scalar interpretation of the past are discussed.

Prehistoric Art in Europe: A Deep-Time Social History

Although many researchers have studied prehistoric European artthere has been virtually no attention paid to the broad prehistory of art as a specialized form of material culture: virtually all studies focus narrowly on single bodies of art. This paper presents a new approach to analyzing prehistoric art: quantitative deep time study. It analyzes a database of 211 art traditions from across Europe and from 40,000 B.C. to 0 AD.to identify changes in the amountnatureand use of prehistoric art. The results reveal clear long-term trends. The amount of art made increased sharply with the origins of sedentary farming and continued to rise throughout prehistory. New forms of art arise in conjunction with new ways of life: “period genres “ are closely tied into patterns of social change. There are also long-term shifts in aesthetics and the uses of art (such as a gradual shift from arts of ritual and concealment to arts of surface and display). These resultsthough preliminaryshow that a deep-time approach familiar from topics such as climate change is applicable to art; the resulting social history can illuminate both art and its social context.

Art makes society: an introductory visual essay

Abstract In this visual essay that serves as an introduction to the set of articles presented in this issue, we illustrate four ways that art makes society. We adopt a stance informed by recent perspectives on material culture, moving away from thinking about art purely in aesthetic terms, instead asking how art objects have significance in particular cultural and social contexts. Arguing that art is participatory as well as visually affecting, we first suggest that art creates sites of activity for shared interaction. Second, we discuss the varied ways that people use art to create and assert representational models for social relations. Third, we consider the varied roles of art as cultural capital, marking out members of society through shared forms of knowledge or access to art. Finally, we document the ways that art serves as a medium of exclusion and as a means for resisting authority or challenging power relations. We highlight the layered meanings inherent in many artworks.