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.
1. The Archaeology and Anthropology of Body Modification: Introduction Francesco d'Errico, Franz Manni 2. An Integrated Evolutionary Scenario for the Culturalization of the Human Body Francesco d'Errico 3. Body Modification: Rituals, Gender, and Symbolism Rosemary A. Joyce 4. An Introduction to Artificial Cranial Vault Modifications Vera Tiesler 5. Identifying and Characterizing Artificial Cranial Modifications in Western Mesoamerican Populations: Inputs from 3D Imaging and Shape Quantification Techniques Sélim Natahi 6. The Rise and Fall of Cranial Deformation in Southwestern France: Modern and Ancient Examples Eric Crubézy, Patrice Gérard, Didier Paya, Guillaume Fleury, Sélim Djouad, Sylvie Duchesne 7. Intentional Dental Modification: Identification, Distribution, and Significance Scott E. Burnett, Vera Tiesler, Kenneth Tremblay, John C. Willman 8. One Mark at A Time: Ethnographic Notes on Tattooing Lars Krutak 9. Global Diversity and Distributions of Traditional Tattooing Tools: An Ethnographic, Ethnohistorical, and Anthropological Perspective Benoît Robitaille, Aaron Deter-Wolf, Maya Sialuk Jacobsen 10. Archaeological Science and the Identification of Tattooing Tools Aaron Deter-Wolf, Andrew Gillreath-Brown 11. The Medical Anthropology of Tattooing, Past and Present Michael Smetana, Christopher D. Lynn, Marco Samadelli 12. Burning, Cutting, Piercing, and Tattooing the Skin for Healing Purposes Luc Renaut 13. Amuletic Tattooing among Central and Eastern Inuit Tribes from an Inuit Perspective Maya Sialuk Jacobsen 14. Nlaka'pamux Skin Marking (British Columbia, Canada): Past Significance and Current Efforts to Document, Preserve, and Update Its Ancestral Meaning Dion Kaszas 15. Techniques and Ornaments for Enlarging Body Piercing Perforations Franz Manni, Paul King 16. Cultural Transmission in the West: The Case of the Resurrection of Body Piercing in the 20th Century Paul King, Franz Manni 17. Piercing the Body in Mesoamerica: Material, Social, and Ritual Significance from Historical and Archaeological Sources Juliette Testard, Guilhem Olivier, Grégory Pereira, Eliseo F. Padilla Gutiérrez 18. The Typology of Archaeological Labrets from Kamchatka Andrei V. Ptashinsky 19. To Wear, or Not to Wear: Symbolism and Technology of Labrets in Mun (Ethiopia) and Mebêngôkre (Brazil) Shauna LaTosky, Pascale de Robert 20. The Penis Piercing Tradition in Borneo and the Philippines Antonio Guerreiro 21. Male and Female Genital Modifications in Anthropological Perspective Ellen Gruenbaum, Thomas R. Blanton IV, Cathie Spieser 22. Ancient Arts: Body Marking in Indigenous Australia Michelle C. Langley 23. Body Modifications among San Hunter-Gatherers: A Relational Practice Vibeke M. Viestad 24. Body Modifications in North-Eastern Africa Andrea Manzo, Luisa Sernicola 25. Finger Amputation in the Ethnographic and Archaeological Records Brea McCauley, Mark Collard 26. Ancient Andean Tattooing: New Perspectives from North American Museum Collections Aaron Deter-Wolf, Madison Auten, Benoît Robitaille, Daniel Riday 27. The Collection of Tattoos of the Museum of Criminal Anthropology ""Cesare Lombroso"" and of the Museum of Human Anatomy, University of Turin (Italy) Cristina Cilli, Giacomo Giacobini, Pierpaolo Leschiutta, Franz Manni, Silvano Montaldo 28. Body Modification at the Musée de l'Homme (National Museum of Natural History, Paris, France): An Overview of the Collections, and Research Examples. Aline Averbouh, Martin Friess, François Gendron, Robin Gerst, Laurence Glemarec, Liliana Huet, Franz Manni
Franz Manni is an Anthropologist 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.
