Hamilakis, Y., ed. (2002). Thinking through the body:. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers.

outlines the aims and organisation of the volume, the reasons for academic interest in the body, its relationship to archaeological research, and future agendas

the author argues that throughout the modern era the dominant understanding of the body has been a humanist one, and that this remains influential within archaeology; he suggests that the issue of the human body is one that troubles and polarises the various approaches which are grouped under the term `post-processual archaeology' and that some interpretive archaeologies have been unable or unwilling to discard the legacy of humanism

the paper deals with the (de)construction of human self in the ritual domain of death and burial, with special attention given to the body as a cultural project in which the successive life cycle transformations of the person can be considered as the joining together, development and breaking up of different ``constituents'', these transformations being realised by the activation of different relations within the human world and between it and the supernatural world and through the exchange of gifts with entities in both domains; from this perspective, the constituent parts of the human being are conceived of as valorised parts of exchange objects

introduction to four papers dealing with experience from and of the located material body

introduction to four papers exploring what bodies mean, especially in relation to things that are not, by usual reckoning, human bodies