The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology and Anthropology of Body Modification

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 associate professor 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.