ABSTRACT
Broken Bodies, Places and Objects demonstrates the breadth of fragmentation and fragment use in prehistory and history and provides an up-to-date insight into current archaeological thinking around the topic.
A seal broken and shared by two trade parties, dog jaws accompanying the dead in Mesolithic burials, fragments of ancient warships commodified as souvenirs, parts of an ancient dynastic throne split up between different colonial collections… Pieces of the past are everywhere around us. Fragments have a special potential precisely because of their incomplete format – as a new matter that can reference its original whole but can also live on with new, unrelated meanings. Deliberate breakage of bodies, places and objects for the use of fragments has been attested from all time periods in the past. It has now been over 20 years since John Chapman’s major publication introducing fragmentation studies, and the topic is more present than ever in archaeology. This volume offers the first European-wide review of the concept of fragmentation, collecting case studies from the Neolithic to Modernity and extending the ideas of fragmentation theory in new directions.
The book is written for scholars and students in archaeology, but it is also relevant for neighbouring fields with an interest in material culture, such as anthropology, history, cultural heritage studies, museology, art and architecture.
The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|77 pages
Fragmentation and funerary practices
chapter 3|14 pages
Breaking and making the ancestors. Fragmentation as a key funerary practice in the creation of urnfield graves
chapter 5|17 pages
Revisiting, selecting, breaking and removing
part II|86 pages
Fragmentation and archaeological methods
chapter 8|19 pages
Four problems for archaeological refitting studies. Discussion from the Taï Site and its Neolithic pottery material (France)
chapter 10|16 pages
Fragmented reindeer of Stállo foundations
chapter 11|14 pages
House to house – fragmentation and deceptive memory-making at an early modern Swedish country house
part III|123 pages
Fragmentation and the manipulation of objects