Abstract
What can a body do? To answer Baruch Spinoza's question, we engage with posthumanist feminist concepts of nomadic subjectivity and relations with non-humans. Through an exploration of two ‘patches’, the Chinchorro Mummies of the Atacama Desert in South America and the burials at Wor Barrow in the Neolithic of southern England, we suggest that these approaches open up a new way of encountering past bodies. What capabilities do bodies, past and present, have? This question is one in which bodies’ capacities are revealed as immanent, historically contextual and emergent.
Highlights
Let us begin by thinking about two very different mummified bodies.1 The first (Cam-17 T1:C3) was once a human infant, less than six months old, but through a complex process of mummification is a composition of human and non-human, animal and person
Their extremities are enveloped in the skin of a sea lion, their crown adorned with a wig of adult human hair
The human body was given different capacities: it was bound to earth and sea, its infancy complicated by the addition of adult human hair
Summary
Let us begin by thinking about two very different mummified bodies. The first (Cam-17 T1:C3) was once a human infant, less than six months old, but through a complex process of mummification is a composition of human and non-human, animal and person. The first (Cam-17 T1:C3) was once a human infant, less than six months old, but through a complex process of mummification is a composition of human and non-human, animal and person Their extremities are enveloped in the skin of a sea lion, their crown adorned with a wig of adult human hair. The human body was given different capacities: it was bound to earth and sea, its infancy complicated by the addition of adult human hair This transformation of time allows the body to do new things, to engage in new relationships, to enter new places. This mummified body gained the capacity to continue to engage with and influence the living in death as a whole, not a fragment The body of this man, aged between 25 and 35 when he died, perhaps violently, gained new potentials to act in new ways here. We explore how new capacities emerge via the transformations through which these bodies went, and how new understandings await archaeologists when we approach such bodies open to the possibilities of difference that they offer us
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