ABSTRACT
Archaeologists frequently access personhood through the remains or depictions of past bodies. Yet the body is not all there is to a person, and if we study only the human body we miss out on other features that commonly compose a person. For example, in European philosophical and religious reasoning a person consists of a series of aspects, defined as the mind, the body and the soul. Scholars have repeatedly attempted to define these different aspects of the person and their relationships to each other. René Descartes (1596-1650) argued that the mind and body were theoretically separable, and that the mind sets humans apart from the rest of the world; he placed ‘I think therefore I am’ as the fundamental statement of human being. The mind was the ‘seat of reason’, the soul the enduring aspect of the person with overtones of spiritual value, and the body was the material location of the mind and the soul. For Descartes, animals had bodies but were not endowed with the ability to think or feel, had no souls or minds, and were not persons. He also argued that the soul was not a part of the body but an entwined feature of the mind (Morris 1991:11). All of the emotional and sensory faculties of the person were, he argued, matters of the body which could be separated from the soul. The soul was eternal and rational. The mind-as a faculty of the soul-possessed ‘those qualities which the human being shares with God: freedom, will, consciousness’ (Bordo 1987:93). Descartes was attempting to elucidate the composition of the person, clearly viewing the person as a composite being. Some of these components permeated the person but originated elsewhere, since the soul was an eternal connection with God.
