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The Archaeology of Personhood: An Anthropological Approach

Chris Fowler
TLDR
The Archaeology of Personhood examines the characteristics that define a person as a category of being, highlights how definitions of personhood are culturally variable and explores how that variation is connected to human uses of material culture as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract
Bringing together a wealth of research in social and cultural anthropology, philosophy and related fields, this is the first book to address the contribution that an understanding of personhood can make to our interpretations of the past Applying an anthropological approach to detailed case studies from European prehistoric archaeology, the book explores the connection between people, animals, objects, their societies and environments and investigates the relationship that jointly produces bodies, persons, communities and artefacts. The Archaeology of Personhood examines the characteristics that define a person as a category of being, highlights how definitions of personhood are culturally variable and explores how that variation is connected to human uses of material culture.

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Journal ArticleDOI

The King is a Woman: Shaping Power in Luba Royal Arts

TL;DR: Men have long been central to Luba political practices in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and they are depicted prominently in royal arts dating from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries.
Journal ArticleDOI

Is it time for an elemental and humoral (re)turn in archaeology

TL;DR: In this article, the pre-Enlightenment doctrines of elemental philosophy and humoral theory are re-engaged with archaeological interpretation in certain contexts than much of current theoretical discourse, in order to provide fairer representations of past cultures through the readoption of ideas that they understood rather than through the imposition of more recent and thus anachronistic frames of analytical reference.
Book ChapterDOI

When Space Is Limited: A Spatial Exploration of Pre-Hispanic Chachapoya Mortuary and Ritual Microlandscape

TL;DR: The Chachapoya culture of northern Peru (AD 800-1470) is often associated with elaborate and visually striking mortuary structures such as anthropomorphic sarcophagi known as purunmachus and burial chullpas, precariously situated within the Andean vertical environment as mentioned in this paper.
Journal ArticleDOI

The social Qualia of Kuml. An exploration of the iconicity of rune-stones with Kuml inscriptions from the Scandinavian Late Viking Age

TL;DR: In this paper, the qualitative experiences of Scandinavian Late Viking Age rune-stones from a semiotically theorized perspective are discussed, and the authors demonstrate that the semiotics of Peirce can be of great value to archaeologists who want to delve deeper into the social analysis of things.
Journal ArticleDOI

Sheltering experience in underground places: thinking through precolonial Chagga Caves on Mount Kilimanjaro

TL;DR: In this paper, insights derived from ethnographic and ethnohistoric study among the Chagga of Mount Kilimanjaro, Northern Tanzania, who extensively utilized underground fastnesses in precolonial times, might be used to inform cave archaeologies.