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Archaeology of Body and Thought explores what we as people can do with our bodies, what we can use them for, and how we can alter and understand them. It considers the ways in which individual human groups from the Neolithic to the Migration Period have perceived and treated the body. The analysis is based on artefacts found in graves, anthropomorphic images, and written sources, with an underlying assumption that principles of aesthetics or a canon of beauty express a way of understanding and evaluating corporality commonly adopted in a given culture. From this perspective, the human body is also an archaeological artefact and a specific kind of material culture (indeed, the most important one). The book investigates the extent to which ideology shapes our bodies and how our bodies create our world outlook. To that end, it compares bodies with other contemporary spheres of material culture and technology. Geographically, the study concentrates on central and eastern Europe, a region where various cultural trends have always intersected. Greece, Italy, Scandinavia, and Eurasian steppes are also included in the analysis.

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9781803277219

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Tomasz Gralak received his doctorate from the University of Wrocław in 2003 and habilitated in 2017. Since 1997, he has worked with the Rescue Excavations Team at the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology of the Polish Academy of Sciences (Wrocław department). He has participated in rescue excavations and conducted fieldwork at many archaeological sites in southwestern Poland, resulting in several reports and articles. Since 2008, Tomasz Gralak has been employed as an assistant professor at the Institute of Archaeology of the University of Wrocław. His principal interests focus on the Bronze Age and Early Iron Age and questions of prehistoric metrology, architecture, and art. He has completed internships and scholarships in Scandinavia, Central/Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Greece, Turkey, Russia, and Vietnam. He is the author of over 90 scientific publications.

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