people of stone: stelae, personhood, and society in prehistoric europe

People of Stone: Stelae, Personhood, and Societyin Prehistoric Europe

John Robb

Published online: 11 June 2009# Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2009

Abstract Stelae (also known variously as statue-stelae and statue-menhirs) are apan-European phenomenon in fourth and third millennia B.C. Europe and are clearlyassociated with the social transformations characterizing Europe in this period.While the varying traditions of stelae, from the Ukraine to Iberia, differ considerably,they also share a set of general aesthetic choices towards representing the humanbody, reducing the body to a rigidly schematic, highly stylized with a widely sharedgeometry and with emphasis upon its surface as a canvas for social marking,particularly of gender. This paper reviews the aesthetic choices involved in stelaeand relates them to the changing social contexts of later prehistoric Europe.

Keywords Art . Anthropomorphic stelae . Copper age . Personhood . Aesthetics . Body

Aesthetics and the Body?

This paper began as an odd experiment some years ago when I idly tried to devise agenerative grammar (Chippindale 1992) for human figurines and statues inprehistoric Europe (Fig. 1; Table I). Surprisingly, this project worked like clockworkfor some bodies of material, particularly rigidly schematic, almost standardized onessuch as the stelae discussed here; it quickly hit a brick wall with others, for instancewith Central Mediterranean figurines which represent the body in ways which areimmensely variable and fluid and in fact seem barely rule-governed in anydiscernable way. Why should human representations differ so greatly in theiraesthetic characteristics? Why should the human figure be depicted according towidely shared aesthetic rules in some periods and not in others? Given the greatdifferences in social context within which Neolithic, Copper Age, and Bronze Agehuman body representations are found, such variation in how the body is represented

J Archaeol Method Theory (2009) 16:162–183DOI 10.1007/s10816-009-9066-z

J. Robb (*)Department of Archaeology, Cambridge University, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3 DZ, UKe-mail: [email protected]

cannot be random; it must relate to the social context of representation in some way.This paper thus addresses an important, and surprisingly neglected, problem in thestudy of ancient human representations. What is the relationship between how thebody is represented—its style or aesthetic qualities—and its social world?

It is striking how, with a few outstanding exceptions (Joyce 2005; Meskell andJoyce 2003), the recent “archaeology of the body” has so rarely discussed humanrepresentations. In part, this may be due simply to archaeological chance: for instance,there are few human representations known in the archaeology of the WesternEuropean Neolithic and Bronze Age, a field within which much key theory has beendeveloped. Yet this would not explain why there have been few body-orientedtheorizations of human figurines for the Balkan Neolithic, a period which has attractedthe attention of some quite eminent theorists (Bailey 2005; Nanoglou 2005;Nanoglou 2008). Another reason may lie in the theoretical sources upon whicharchaeologists have drawn. By and large, the various canons of theory we have used,from phenomenology to practice theory, feminism, and Foucauldian analysis ofcultural discourses, have been concerned with the “real” body—the lived,experienced, body—rather than with representations of it. Gender archaeologists,for instance, have done surprisingly little with representations, as opposed to burials,

Fig. 1 Stela traditions in Europe, 3500–2000 B.C. 1 Ukraine. 2 Northern Greece. 3 Southern Italy. 4 AdigeValley. 5 Valcamonica/Valtellina. 6 Val d'Aosta/Sion. 7 Lunigiana. 8 Corsica. 9 Sardinia. 10 EasternProvence. 11 Tarn. 12 Iberia. 13 Paris Basin/Channel Islands. Sporadic stelae and isolated examples notshown.

People of Stone: Stelae, Personhood, and Society 163

Table I Stela Traditions in European Prehistory

Area Characteristics References

“Pontic Group”(SouthernUkraine,Moldova)

Numerous. Late Neolithic “Kurganculture” stelae, found in associationwith burial mounds. Typically showingmen in several distinct substyles, withadditional weapons, “shoe” shapedmotifs, and other motifs

(Mallory and Telehin 1995; Telehinand Mallory 1994)

Bulgaria,Macedonia,Romania

Several groups, including early thirdmillennium stelae similar to PonticGroup and Bronze Age burial moundmarkers

(Heyd and Harrison 2004); B.Gaydarskaya personalcommunication

Greece Sporadic examples in Macedonia andThrace; poorly dated, but most areprobably Bronze Age, including EBA(third millennium B.C.) and a few may beearlier; varying styles

(Chrysanthaki 2004)

Hungary Sporadic grave markers in Baden culturecemeteries, not clearly anthropomorphic

(Endrődi 1995)

Germany Dated to Middle Neolithic in CentralGermany. Sporadic examples known,some shading into decorated menhirswithout obvious anthropomorphicfeatures but others defined with belt,necklace, ornaments

(Müller 1995)

Trentino-Alto Adige,Italy

Ca. 15–20 examples known in several smallclusters. Copper Age (mid-thirdmillennium). Clothing depicted, andpossibly hair. Some accumulation of othermotifs as in adjacent Valcamonica group

(Pedrotti 1995; Tecchiati 2004)

Valcamonica andValtellina, Italy

Unusual “statue-menhirs,” highly variedand often on unshaped masses of stone,diverge from general stela aestheticcanon and instead share many featuresof local rock art traditions. Alignment ofmenhirs excavated in context at ritualsite of Osimo. Copper Age (mid-thirdmillennium)

(Casini et al. 1995a; Fedele 1995,2004)

Val d'Aosta andCanton Valais(Petit-Chasseur,Sion)

Two principal sites known: Saint Martinde Corleans (Val d'Aosta) and Petit-Chasseur (Sion, Canon Valais). At bothstelae erected in alignments in front ofmegalithic chambers. Late Neolithic–Early Bronze Age, including associationwith Bell Beakers

(De Marinis 1995b; Favre and Mottet2004; Gallay 1995)

Lunigiana, Italy Numerous concentrations located invalleys northeast of La Spezia.Apparently erected in alignments inopen country, perhaps along transitroutes. Very simplified with minimaldetail. Long series dated stylisticallyspans Copper Age through Iron Age

(Ambrosi 1972; Ambrosi 1988; Anati1981; De Marinis 1995; Iardella etal. 2004; Maggi 2001)

Southern Italy Concentration of poorly dated (Copper–Bronze Age) stelae from Castelluccio

(Acanfora 1960; Tunzi Sisto 1995;Tunzi Sisto 1999)

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dress and ornament, and roles and activities (perhaps of a fear that discussingdecontextualized representations can lead to essentialism, as in fact happens in“Goddess” interpretations of Neolithic figurines (Gimbutas 1991)). Similarly, studiesof embodiment have tended to focus on the body as the bridge between the internaland external worlds, particularly via sensory experience, self-understanding, self-presentation, and memory (Hamilakis et al. 2002). When body representations havebeen studied explicitly in body theory, it has tended to be in fields less obviouslygeneralizable to ancient situations, for instance, the commodification of the femalebody via imagery or the self-fashioning of the body in consumer culture. Where theaesthetic style of representation has been addressed in archaeology, it has most oftenbeen done in art historically, in ways which are atheoretical (as in many specialiststudies of prehistoric “art”) or difficult to relate to anthropological work because ofdisciplinary orientations (as in art historical discussions of the meanings of Classical“naturalism”).

Table I (continued)

Area Characteristics References

dei Sauri, Puglia; note also isolatedexample at Ustica, Sicily

Corsica Numerous stelae, particularly insouthwest Corsica, dated generally toLate Neolithic through Bronze Age, butapparently developing out of Neolithicmegalithic alignments; occur inalignments, circles, or monuments

(D'Anna et al. 2004)

Sardinia Widely scattered examples, with a densecluster of sites around Laconi yieldingabout 100 stelae, sometimes found inalignments associated with megalithicsites, dated to Copper Age

(Atzeni 2004)

Provence, SouthernFrance

Highly schematic; poorly dated andcontextualized, but prior to Chalcolithic

(d'Anna 1977; D'Anna et al. 1995)

Languedoc, SouthernFrance

Possibly associated with funerarymonuments. Late Neolithic

(d'Anna 1977, 1995)

Haut Languedoc–Rouergue (Tarn,Aveyron)

Numerous; men sometimes distinguishedby sash and unknown object; hair,clothing and legs may be shown. Poorlydated but probably late Neolithic.Possibly erected in open country

(d'Anna 1977, 1995)

Iberia Several subgroups known throughoutIberia in north, Meseta and Estremadura.Varied and often found in megalithiccontexts

(Bueno Ramirez 1995)

Northern France,Channel Islands

Few examples known, scattered betweenGuernsey, Brittany, Marne valley andParis basin; all female; some are free-standing menhirs, others shade intoparietal or megalithic art

(Kinnes 1995)


Yet the potential exists for forging a bridge between the representation of thebody and the body's agency, and the theoretical footwork needed is not overlycomplex. The principle of objectification (Miller 2005) provides a starting point: theprocess of human action upon material things also produces persona andexternalized culture, which then can act as autonomous, external forces shapingfurther human understandings, choices and actions. Given this, it is obvious that thebody is both produced by human actions (for instance, nourishing, clothing, training,categorizing, recognizing, and many others) and forms the vehicle for action. It thusaffords a paradigmatic example of objectification, of culture made flesh andunderstood and experienced as such. Material representations, in this view, provide ameta-order of objectifications which abstract a given understanding of the body andperson, and present it to self and world as a fait accompli, as a regulatory ideal inFoucault's terminology.

Hence, the link between the body as experienced and lived and the body asrepresented is via more general concepts which link thought and action. Suchconcepts and their form of instantiation will never be unique, to the absoluteexclusion of alternatives, nor will they be context-free. But even though contextssuch as pre-existing power relations are without doubt important, concepts of thebody cannot simply be regarded merely as superficial calls to bring the body in linewith pre-existing power relations; the ideas they represent are important ones. In aclear example of self-objectification, some Mesoamerican figurines served a didacticrole in instilling ideals of what it meant to belong to a given gender (Joyce 2000;Meskell and Joyce 2003). Similarly, the human body in Breton megalithic artprovided a generative, polysemic metaphor (Thomas and Tilley 1993), and inBronze and Iron Age burials and bodily practices, the fashioning and transformationof the body itself merged with representations of it (Treherne 1995). In an exampleparticularly relevant to this paper, the contrast between wood and stone in the BritishNeolithic may have summarized key differences between living bodies and thebodies of ancestors (Parker Pearson and Ramilsonina 1998).

Whether or not such examples are accepted within their own fields—and anytruly interesting interpretation will raise controversy—they suggest some points foran approach to the question raised above. “Art” is regarded as a specializedtechnology for achieving specific effects (Gell 1998); the style in whichrepresentation is carried out can be a key element in achieving specific effects (anargument typified by Gell's (1992) discussion of technologies of enchantment). Byaesthetics, I mean conformity to a canon of expectations which governs howrepresentation is carried out. While our focus is often upon the object ofrepresentation, it is clear that the aesthetics of representation often encodes equallyimportant social meanings. For instance, Victorian Gothic and Modernist publicbuildings both served to house functions such as school, offices, and factories, butthey enshrined completely different ideals in the architectural canons they employed,with contrasting claims to ancient and elaborate hierarchy and to streamlined,accelerating efficiency.

In sum, the materiality of the body involves an understanding of it which isestablished relative to a particular social context, and this materiality is an importantelement in the process of self-objectification. Such an understanding can becommunicated as much, or more, from the canon of aesthetic choices used to represent

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the body as from the body itself. The style or aesthetic qualities of representation are akey means of making statements about the nature of the body and person. Usingprehistoric European stelae as an example, I will argue that the aesthetics of bodyrepresentation can be a powerful vector of self-understanding or self-fashioning.

Fourth and Third Millennia B.C. Europe

Between 4000 B.C. and 2000 B.C., Europe was a continent in transition. For most ofcontinental Europe, people had been practicing Neolithic economies for up to twomillennia; only in Britain and Scandinavia was the Neolithic transition still inprogress. The social hierarchies which characterized the later Bronze and Iron Agesin many places were still at least half a millennium off. Yet, the long span of laterprehistory was not an undifferentiated arc of generic “tribal” societies. Between themid-fourth and mid-third millennia (which variously spans the later Neolithic, theCopper Age, and the earlier Bronze Age in different areas), most societies underwenta major social transition, one which has consistently defied classification in anysimple linear way as an increase in hierarchy or social complexity.

This transition has been identified with particular archaeological cultures indifferent parts of Europe, particularly with the Globular Amphora and Corded Waresin Eastern and Central Europe and the Bell Beakers in Western Europe, but thesecases really provide partial, local, and often over-generalized instances of a muchmore widespread sea change which characterized most of Europe. There was nosingle cookie-cutter pattern of life “before” or “after.” Rather, from about the mid-fourth millennium onwards, many groups made use of various combinations ofgeneral characteristics different from those which typified earlier Neolithic societies(Bintliff 1984; Sherratt 1994; Whittle 1996):

& Much more elaborate and monumental burial practices, with the emergence ofmegalithic tombs across much of Western Europe

& Less emphasis on central settlement places, with the decline of large villagesor tell life in many areas, to be replaced by a more dispersed form ofsettlement

& Intensified human–animal relations, with an increase in the scale of pastoralismand possibly an increase in dairying and wool use

& A more central role for hunting, which had been economically marginal for muchof Europe during the Early–Middle Neolithic but which appears at leastsymbolically important once again in the Late Neolithic–Copper Age

& Metallurgy; the earliest experiments in metallurgy date to the Middle Neolithic inthe Balkans, but metals came into widespread use, at least for a restricted set offorms and artifacts, from the later fourth millennium B.C.

& A shift in long-distance trade from stones such as obsidian and flint to metals and(in some regions) fine flint useful for particular forms of axes or long blades;accompanying this was the rise, in some areas, of broad horizons of ceramicstyles and innovations in flint-working, particularly in bifacial pressure flakingused to produce fine blades and arrow points

& The widespread use of weaponry and ornamentation as gender symbolisms


These changes create an obvious transition which has been explained many ways.Culture-historical explanations ascribed them to a horizon of Indo-Europeaninvaders spreading outwards from the South Russian steppes (Mallory 1989). Whilesocial interpretation of these changes has focused upon particular aspects, such aseconomic intensification (Sherratt 1981), an ideology of individual prestigecompetition (Shennan 1982), a shift in how relations between people wereconceptualized (Thorpe and Richards 1984), a shift in formal social structure from“group-oriented” to “individualizing” chiefdoms or from “corporate” to “network”leadership strategies (Feinman 2001; Renfrew 1976), such explanations, ifapplicable at all, probably related only to specific areas. On a broader scale, it isclear that a general change from one widely shared cultural repertory to another wastaking place. This is the context in which stelae emerge.

Stelae in Fourth and Third Millennia B.C. Europe

Stelae are a widespread form of statuary in later prehistoric Europe (Casini et al.1995b; Casini and Fossati 2004; van Berg and Cauwe 1995). Materially, stelaeconsist of shaped stones, typically flattened into a tabular or slab-like form (Figs. 2,3, and 4). They are usually about “life-size,” ranging from about half a meter tall to2 m tall; while many are recovered broken, the modal size for unbroken ones wasprobably about 1.5 m. They are usually about a quarter or third as wide as they aretall. Most commonly, they are carved with anthropomorphic designs, though a feware known with other representational or geometric symbols. Common decorativeelements include a face with eyes or brow-ridge and a nose, a neck or line delimitingthe head from the upper body, and arms. There may be also additional anatomicaldetails such as hands or legs. Stelae are commonly decorated with weaponry(daggers, axes, and bows) and with necklaces, and sometimes with carvedrepresentations of clothing as well.

Materially, stelae are made from many kinds of stone, including sandstone(Lunigiana), limestone (Malta, Southern Italy), granite (Channel Islands), and schist

Fig. 2 Stelae from Iberia and Southern France. a Hernán Pérez, Cáceres, Spain (modified after BuenoRamirez 1995: Fig. 34). b Saint-Sernin-sur-Rance, Aveyron, France (modified after Guilaine 1980:Fig. 14.5). c Bouisset, Hérault, France (modified after Guilaine 1980: Fig. 14.4).

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(Valcamonica) as well as others. They are typically shaped by splitting andhammering the rock, then smoothed by pecking and grinding to a smooth surface.Not infrequently the lowest part of the stela was left rough, suggesting it would nothave been visible when the stela was erected with a shallow footer pit. In color, theyrange from tan to white or gray; they are rarely made of dark stone. Almost allexamples have been recovered after exposure to the elements for a substantial time,and it is not known if they may have originally been painted.

Stelae tend to occur in local concentrations which share a very homogeneous stylewithin each group. About half a dozen major traditions occur, of which the bestknown are in the southern Ukraine and Moldova, in three areas of the Italian andSwiss Alps (the Trentino-Alto Adige, Valcamonica and Valtellina, and Val d'Aostaand Canton Valais, Switzerland), in Lunigiana in the Apuan Alps, and in SouthernFrance. Considerable concentrations of stelae are also known in Sardinia, Corsica,and Iberia, with other examples also known from Southern Italy, Malta, the ParisBasin, the Channel Islands, Germany, Hungary, and Bulgaria. While it is impossibleto estimate the total numbers of stelae in each group, the largest known groups arethe Lunigiana group and the Ukrainian group, for which more than 100 examples are

Fig. 3 Stelae from Italy and the Alps. a Pontevecchio, Lunigiana, Italy (modified after Cocchi Genick1996: Fig. 171.1). b Pontevecchio, Lunigiana, Italy (modified after Cocchi Genick 1996: Fig. 171.2). cPetit-Chasseur, Sion, Canton Valais, Switzerland (modified after Gallay 1995: Fig. 7). d Lagundo,Trentino-Alto Adige, Italy (modified after Cocchi Genick 1996: Fig. 85.2). e Lagundo, Trentino-AltoAdige, Italy, front and back of same stela (modified after Cocchi Genick 1996: Fig. 85.3). f Castellucciodei Sauri, Italy (modified after Tunzi Sisto 1995: Fig. 1).


known; for Southern France and Iberia, the total would probably come to between50 and 100, and there are five to 25 examples known in most of the other traditions.Stelae are most commonly found out of archaeological context (indeed, it is notuncommon to find them re-used in modern buildings or walls), and in such cases,they tend to be dated stylistically and through their depiction of typologicallyidentifiable artifacts (especially weapons); a few examples in all regions have beenrecovered in datable archaeological contexts, particularly burial monuments. All ofthe instances noted above date to between the mid-fourth millennium B.C. and theend of the third millennium B.C. Stela traditions continue in some areas throughoutthe Bronze and Iron Ages, for instance various Bronze Age examples including theMycenaean stelae at Grave Circle A in Greece, and Iron Age traditions include theVillanovan, Daunian, and sporadic other examples in Italy. One of the mysteries ofstela geography is how widely separated but clearly related traditions could havebeen maintained; it has been plausibly suggested that similar wooden representationswhich have not been preserved archaeologically were used in intervening areas(Barfield 2004).

As a genre of material culture, stelae are generally quite distinct from the otherforms of representation known in Holocene Europe—principally small figurines androck art. In a few contexts, they do grade into other forms of “art”; this occursprincipally in Iberia, northern and western France, and the Channel Islands, wheresome examples share imagery, form, or contexts with megalithic art. Stelae inValcamonica and Valtellina, in the Italian Alps, also share conventions and imagerywith the local rock art traditions (they are locally termed “statue-menhirs” for thisreason; Robb 2008). However, these locations aside, stelae form a well-bounded,easily recognized form of human representation whose conventions are shared over avery large part of Europe.

Fig. 4 Stelae from Eastern Europe: Natal'evka, Ukraine (modified after Mallory and Telehin 1995:Fig. 3:1, p. 323).

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Stelae are thus a widespread phenomenon in much of Europe between about 3500and 2000 B.C. While each stela tradition has its own characteristics, there is also a setof widely shared formal conventions which unite far-flung local traditions.Archaeologists have not succeeded at explaining either of these facts. It has beenargued that the widespread distribution of stelae reflects Indo-European migrations(Mallory 1989), but both the migrationist basis of this and the actual archaeologicalunderpinning of this are doubtful—for instance why mid-fourth millennia stelaeshould turn up in tombs in the Paris Basin and on Gozo, why stelae are lacking in somany other archaeological traditions considered part of the Indo-Europeanphylogeny, and why there are so many female stelae in statuary supposedlyrepresenting a warrior ideology.

Instead, historically, stelae seem to appear by a process of convergence fromvaried local sources. In the Central Mediterranean, the earliest ones are small, quiteabstract stone sculptures such as the Arnesano and Alfaedo examples (Graziosi1974) which may derive from figurines and which parallel developments in small,schematic stone statuary in the Cyclades, Sardinia, and southern Spain. In theAtlantic façade, stelae may derive from menhirs and other megalithic structures (vanBerg and Cauwe 1995). They may have had other, less archaeologically visibleprogenitors elsewhere. What is important is the process of convergence towards acommon genre by people in different communities making parallel choices in theprocess of cultural transmission.

Other, more social interpretations have focused upon stelae's use and meaning.The uses of stelae may have varied regionally, and very few examples anywherehave been recovered in good archaeological contexts. Nevertheless, they clearlyoccur in monumental, often funerary contexts:

& In the Ukrainian, Bulgarian, and Hungarian examples, stelae seem to have servedas grave or mound markers.

& Two examples from the Maltese Islands seem to come from early to mid-fourthmillennium chamber tombs.

& In Southern Italy, stelae occur in groups or alignments at ritual sites (e.g.,Bovino), though their association with burial there is unclear.

& In Sardinia and Corsica, stelae occur in association with megalithic ritual placessuch as stone circles.

& The Lunigiana stelae appear to have been erected in groups or alignments inopen country, perhaps along pathways or transit routes; no funerary associationsare known, but almost none have been excavated in context. The same is true forthe Adige Valley group.

& In Saint Martin (Val d'Aosta) in Italy and Sion in Switzerland, stelae wereerected in alignments in front of megalithic burial chambers.

& In Iberia, stelae tend to occur at burial sites, often of Bronze Age date.& In the Paris Basin, stelae occur in chamber tombs, where they may shade into

anthropomorphic depictions carved directly upon the tomb architecture itself.

Perhaps the most interesting example of stelae in context comes fromValcamonica. Stelae in Valcamonica (or more properly statue-menhirs, as theydiverge from stelae in some formal characteristics) tend to occur in groups of up toten stelae. At Ossimo-Anvoia (Fedele 1995, 2004), an alignment of stelae was


excavated on a small plateau which may have accommodated up to 100 people atrituals in a clearing in the forest. The stelae had been erected, re-erected, andmodified periodically, and a range of items including unusual natural stones hadbeen deposited. While Ossimo-Anvoia was not a burial site per se, some crematedbone imported from a burial site elsewhere had been deposited under a cairn ofstones.

To the extent that a social interpretation has been given, stelae have alternatelybeen regarded as representations of gods or of ancestral figures, with the latter viewgradually becoming ascendant in recent times (Barfield 1995; Fedele 1995; Keates2000). A collection of up to a dozen stelae would have been a large undertaking toconstruct and was probably done by and for a community rather than individuals orfamilies. Choreographically, we must imagine a collection of stelae as a relativelypermanent, visible component of a constructed place which was normally notinhabited but which would have been visited periodically, a place either directly usedfor burying the dead or involved with a chain of operations which involvedremembering or presencing them.

This brief account of stelae throws into relief two unanswered questions. Whatsocial contexts did the genre fit into, and how were these contexts related to theaesthetic qualities of the stelae?

Aesthetics of the Body

A good starting point for this discussion is to imagine the range of choices involvedin representing the human body materially. Does one portray the entire body fromhead to foot or selected regions of it (a head? a votive foot or organ? A torso minusextremities like a Paleolithic “Venus”)? Is the body represented in visually accuratedetail or in exaggerated or distorted form to emphasize values such as sexuality,juvenility, or otherness? With individuating detail (“warts and all”) or according toan idealized schema (as in Pharaonic sarcophagi) or both (as in Roman busts withstandardized torsos but individual faces)? In a formalized, ritually significant pose,as in a police mug shot or class portrait, or with meaningful informality as in afamily snapshot? Is metaphor invoked (the body as a machine, as microcosm, as aparticular substance, as movements)? Are material qualities such as size, rawmaterial, or durability used to impart meanings such as dominating grandeur (as ingreater-than-life monumental statuary) or a miniaturized, intimate, or private world(as in figurines)? How does the medium position the viewer choreographically withrelation to the body represented, and why?

It is striking that virtually the entire conceptual possibility-space created by suchchoices has been used in the history of human representations. Moreover, differentforms of representation are often used within different settings or for different useswithin a single historical context. Such real variability provides a convincingargument that these choices are not random nor merely historical details but areintimately related to the context of representation at many scales.

This gives us a basis for a close reading of the formal characteristics of Copperand Bronze Age stelae. Stelae vary dramatically in their formal characteristics fromearlier forms of representation such as Neolithic figurines (Robb 2007, 2008),

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although they will be discussed here on their own. While the stelae corpuses notedabove vary, they share some general features.

Substance, Size, and Time

As the potential human body morphs into the particular concrete Copper and BronzeAge stela, it takes on qualities of substance and size. The material chosen is stone.While it is somewhat circular to argue that stone was chosen specifically for itsdurability, since if less durable materials were also chosen we would not know aboutthem archaeologically, it remains likely that the temporal properties of stone wereappreciated. Much has been written about the general use of stone as a metaphor forpermanence, time, and ancestry in the Western European Neolithic (Bradley 1991;Bradley 1998; Parker Pearson and Ramilsonina 1998; Tilley and Bennett 2004).Whether or not one subscribes to specific interpretations such as the ones proposedin these works, many of the material affordances of stone, in qualities such as mass,duration, immobility, and its apparent pre-existence in the earth rather than cominginto being in a process such as animal or vegetative growth, lend it a different scaleof temporality; throughout Europe in the fourth and third millennia B.C., people usedsuch qualities to create meanings. It thus seems quite likely that persons of stoneexist in a different temporality than persons of wood, bone, flesh, and blood, or othermaterials. This may be reinforced by size; Bailey (2005) has argued thatminiaturization of human representations projects a quicker temporality than onessized similarly to living humans, and the life size and great mass of many stelae mayhave slowed down time in interactions with them. It is also worth noting an aestheticchoice to make the boundaries of the represented body coterminous with the materialit is carved upon; rather than having a block of stone with a person carved, upon it,as in a bas relief, stelae present a person made of stone. A very few sporadicexamples suggest that the latter was a possibility, and hence the almost unanimouschoice to make material and image coincide may be a visual means of reinforcingthe identity of person and material.

Choreographically, although stelae appear occasionally to have been moved andremodeled, it is assumed that stelae were immobile, both because of their mass aslarge stone slabs and because examples found in context are normally fixed in place.Relative mobility would have been an important element of materiality. When smallfigurines were manipulated manually, the figurine was mobile and the living humanfixed relative to the situation of interaction. In contrast, stelae were relatively fixed,and humans were quick, possibly with both meanings of the word (e.g., alive andmobile). Stelae hence anchored landscapes in which people moved rather than thereverse.

The Geometric Body

One of the most notable features of stelae is their geometric schematism. Theirregular, three-dimensional body is reduced to a formulaic representation which iscommon to virtually all stela traditions. The first step is to project the volumetricbody onto a tabular surface: while stelae differ in thickness, this projectionemphasizes not the body's corporeal mass (as in many figurines and as in the


contemporary, massive statues inappropriately called “fat ladies” from Malta) but itssurfaces. The projection renders a rounded object as a slab-like rectangular volumewith a clearly defined front and back. The visual emphasis is upon the front; in moststela traditions (the exceptions are the Ukrainian and Alto Adige traditions), there isvery little detail carved upon the back and sides of the figure. The mandatorydefinition of a front, which is sometimes reinforced by the placement of stelae inmonumental settings such as alignments, choreographs a static, formalizedrelationship which goes beyond the stela to encompass the viewer as well. Uponthis slab-like figure, the body projection is laid out according to a fundamentalbilateral symmetry which is only varied by the placement of occasional“accessories” such as dagger images, and according to a static, rigidly reproducedtemplate (see below). The overall effect is to reduce the corporeal, mobile body intoa formalized, static canvas for social display.

One of the most striking effects of schematism is the loss of information. A bodyrepresentation can convey many kinds of information—motion, individuality,texture, qualities, attitudes, gestures. It is interesting that the movement toschematism often happens in the history of body representations and is usuallyassociated with promotion of a simplified, powerful message, whether a simpleiconographic distinction (as in male and female icons on bathroom doors), genericrejection of an intellectual movement (as in twentieth-century modernist art), orpresencing a particular semantic value in a particular context (as in Classical Greekphallic “herms”). The stelae's aesthetic qualities, which convey none of thisinformation, carry out a powerful act of abstraction. There is very little attempt todefine an individual biography or to show people in any different categories beyondgenders and whatever category of person the stelae generically represent. Thesimplification of the body is a powerful act of concentration; it presents aconcentrated statement about what essentially makes up a person, and what it losesin detail and nuance it gains in immediate, cross-context comprehensibility.

Body Composition and Social Marking

Stelae have a consistent and widely shared layout for how the body is defined. Thefoundation is a division of the body into either two zones—a head and a torso,separated by the neck, by a line representing it, or by a necklace—or three zones—the head, upper body, and lower body, with the latter two separated by a belt or waistline. Each zone is distinguished firstly by its relationship to the others within theoverall body and secondly by a primary anatomical reference. For the head, this isnot the combination of eyes and mouth we might intuitively draw but a T-shapedline uniting the brows and nose. For the upper body, this is often the arms, placedsymmetrically at the sides. The lower body, when present, is usually defined simplyby division from the upper body, with no further characteristics such as legs, knees,feet, or genitalia indicated.

Stelae are gendered. It is a misconception to consider them as representing apatriarchical ideology, as is sometimes done (Mallory 1989); instead, in mosttraditions, both men and women are represented, often in relatively equal numbers,although there is some regional variation (the Ukrainian stelae are mostly be-weaponed, as are Iberian examples; in Northern France most examples are female,

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although male symbols may be represented in megalithic art via representations ofaxes; Shee Twohig 1981). There has been widespread archaeological consensus onassigning female gender to stelae on which breasts are represented and male genderto stelae on which weapons are represented. Without imposing modern, essentialistassumptions about gender ideologies, this dichotomy rests upon a strong empiricalpattern; the two symbolisms virtually never occur together on a single stelae, and inmost series, every stela bears one or the other symbolism (see Whitehouse (1992) forNorthern Italy). Necklaces are a consistent secondary symbol of femaleness in manytraditions. In a few series, such as the Lunigiana and Alto Adige series, a few smallerstelae without breasts or weapons may indicate children.

The very matter-of-fact consistency with which this understated definition of thebody occurs makes it easy to overlook its most striking feature, the uniform templatefor depicting a body schematically. The most informative contrast is with NeolithicCentral Mediterranean figurines, which have no consistently repeated arrangementsof body zones. Within the territory of modern Italy, for example, Neolithic figurinesvariously represent the female form in “naturalistic” detail, as a rod with breasts, as acone with arms, as an upper torso, as buttocks with the upper body indicated only bya shaft, and even with two heads (Robb 2007, 2008). Stelae, in contrast, representthe body not as a fluid arrangement of parts but as a standardized set of partssubordinated to a whole; the importance of each part derives from its place in arelatively fixed order. This presents the body not as a fluid assemblage of qualities orcitations but as a whole, emphasizing the regularity of unity made up of internaldiversity.

What makes up a body? Whether or not one considers the body as a “naturalsymbol” (Douglas 1996) for society, it remains true that divisions of the body intozones, organs, or substances often supplies a fundamental map for understanding thenature of personhood. Gender ideologies, for instance, involve the localization ofphysical qualities by which men, women, or other genders are distinguished; manysocieties traditionally conceptualize stigmatized individuals such as witches aspossessing different internal organs or physical souls; qualities such as intelligence,affection, bravery, or fertility are identified with zones such as the head, heart, orstomach.

In the case of prehistoric European stelae, the consistent body divisionspresumably represent a standard template for composing a body of differentelements. We are unlikely to be able to know what body divisions represent withoutretrojecting more recent suppositions, and the suggestion of Dumézilian tripartitionof functions such as leadership, courage and fertility among the head, upper bodyand lower body as a characteristic of prehistoric European culture (Dumézil 1973;Littleton 1982) remains an interesting but theoretically problematic possibility.Nevertheless, we can still make some pertinent observations about this way of“seeing” a body. First, these basic body divisions cross genders and presumablyrepresent some basic concept about the composition of all humans. Secondly, theupper torso is the principal area of social marking and the localization of genderdifference. Gender is indicated by breasts and by weapons located at the belt or onthe upper torso rather than, say, genitalia; the lower body is effectively a null zone.This may perhaps indicate a social displacement of functions such as fertility frombiology to social exchange: bodies were defined by their relations to material things


which also marked living bodies and which were keys to other fields of socialreproduction (see below).

Social Contexts

There are two obvious broader social contexts in which to place stelae. One is ageneral monumentalization of the landscape. While megalithic building is oftenassociated (particularly in British theory) with Neolithic origins, it is probably morecorrect to think in chronological rather than evolutionary “stage” time here. There isa general wave of monumentalization across much of Europe after about 4000 B.C.Along the Atlantic and Baltic, this coincides with the Early Neolithic, but elsewhere,from France to Poland and throughout much of the Mediterranean, it can follow upto two millennia of nonmonumental Neolithic life, and it accompanies the end of theNeolithic. Monumental constructions (in earth and stone), rock art, and stelae are allpart of this new marking of the landscape. Monumentalized landscapes may havebeen linked to ancestry via the meaningful use of stone as an enduring material, asdiscussed above. An associated fourth-millennium trend is the widespread rise ingroup burial ceremonialism, both in formal cemeteries of single burials and incommunal tombs. In the few cases where stelae have been excavated in context, theyappear to occur in funerary sites or in cult sites with redeposited human bone.

The other relevant context concerns exchange, display, and prestige. There arerelatively few clear and recurrent prestige symbolisms in the Neolithic up throughabout the mid-fourth millennium B.C. In contrast, during the late Neolithic andCopper Age, there are much more clearly marked and recurrent material symbol-izations of prestige. As noted above, both weapons and ornaments were displayitems made of traded materials; trade increased in this period, with new items beingdeveloped, particularly in metals and in fine quality flint used to make items such asdaggers and axes. Beyond exchange, weapons particularly tie into identity symbol-isms in burial, rock art, and everyday life. A fourth-millennium resurgence inhunting and in associated technologies (e.g., pressure-flaked bifaces) may beassociated.

These characteristics tie into the stelae representations, not only iconographicallybut also stylistically in the aesthetics of representation. Iconographically, it is nosurprise that the major diacritics distinguishing kinds of persons in stelae are derivedfrom exchanged and displayed items which are prominent in a range of otherarchaeological contexts. Again, we should not take this at face value as an obviousor natural thing; comparison with the preceding Neolithic period, in which neithergender symbols nor exchanged items had such a role, shows it to be something novelto the Copper Age. It points to the new social centrality of both exchange and gendersymbolism. Aesthetically, why would the stela convention be well-suited to conveysuch meanings? One reason was probably a shift in emphasis from the corporealsubstance of the body to the surface of the body: the reduction of a body from acollection of parts, each with its own characteristic form and nature, to a simplegeometric solid which provided a constant surface for social presentation. We mightalso suggest that a uniform template for the body, in which the individual body partsare subordinated representationally to a unifying conception, may result in a

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balanced or integrated rather than context-specific vision of the body, somethingwhich is consonant with the recurrence of a handful of key symbols in thepresentation of the body across many contexts of social life.

The Lived Body

In many respects, the body portrayed in stelae corresponds well with bodiesknown in other contexts. Without going through the evidence for Late Neolithic,Copper Age, and Bronze Age bodies at length, it is worth noting some parallels.Key symbolisms turn up in other fields of social action. One is the use of stone,as noted above. Another obvious example is weaponry, which was usedthroughout much of Europe to define social maleness in burials in this period;the prominence of weaponry in rock art such as Valcamonica, Monte Bego, andthe Spanish Levantine art probably also had gender connotations. In NorthernItaly, for instance, the Alpine and Lunigiana stelae are mirrored by Copper Ageburials at sites such as Remedello di Sotto (Manzi et al. 1997) and Spilamberto(Bagolini 1981) in which weaponry is a defining feature of male burials, asymbolism found not only elsewhere in Copper Age Italy but throughout fourthand third millennia Europe. These linkages tied stelae to systems of connotationknown in other contexts of life and death.

The Tyrolean “Ice Man” (Höpfel et al. 1992; Spindler 1994; Spindler 1995)affords us a unique opportunity to compare the idealized body of the stelae with areal, contemporary body. The Ice Man is thought to have lived in or around the ValVenosta, a side valley off the Adige Valley in which a group of about a dozen stelaehave been found (Pedrotti 1995). The Adige Valley stelae are generally dated to theearly–mid third millennium, only a few centuries after the Ice Man lived. There aresome striking parallels between the Ice Man and the stelae from this area. In definingthe body, for example, the Adige Valley stelae portray the body down to the limit ofthe area covered by the Ice Man's knee-length tunic, which may have demarked thezone of the body relevant to social display. In both the stelae and the Ice Man's body,this zone is divided into an upper body and a lower body by a belt, which seems tohave been the Ice Man's foundation garment, supporting his leggings and loinclothand probably worn in all situations in which he was clothed. This body wasgendered male through the addition of weapons: the full panoply of knife, bow,arrows, and ax for the Ice Man, the Remedello dagger for the stone men. The IceMan's stone knife, kept in a grass sheath probably hanging from the right side of hisbelt, would have been at the same position as daggers in some stelae; the fixity ofposition implies a body habituated to the specific gestures of drawing and using it.The upper body was the zone for social display: one of the peculiarities of the Adigegroup of stelae is the detailed portrayal of clothing, particularly the vertically stripedtunic on the upper body which corresponds astonishingly with the Ice Man's visuallystriking tunic sewn from dark and light strips of animal skin. Finally, the localtradition of stelae in the Adige Valley and the adjacent Valcamonica/Valtellinatradition is characterized by citations of animals, particularly game, and ofcosmological qualities (as in the “solar disks” in Valcamonica statue-menhirs). Inthe Ice Man's body, similar citation may be seen in his bearskin cap, a reference to


the largest carnivore in the Alps, his shining copper ax, and the small disk of white,imported marble he carried.

The Ice Man's body, thus, shows a living body composed in much the same waythe stelae from his area were: divided into meaningful zones, gendered, createdthrough exchange relationships to procure key material items, dressed in a local,highly visual tradition of costume, and adorned through citation of animals andqualities. However, the Ice Man's famous tattoos—the small groups of blue-blackmarks on his lower back, knees and ankles, the earliest tattoos known—provide afascinating contrast. They too result from the action of other people upon the bodywhich permanently changed it: making them was part of the social creation of thebody. Yet, the tattoos clearly reference other systems of embodiment: they occur in abody zone rarely depicted upon stelae, no such marks are depicted upon stelae, andthey imply visibility and perhaps relatedness in a particular, perhaps different contextthan the fully clothed body represented both by the stelae and the Ice Man in fullregalia. They stand as a reminder that conceptions of embodiment within any societyare rarely likely to be unique or univocal.

Discussion

Aesthetic elements of style guide the viewer in ways of seeing, but they presume aviewer predisposed or habituated to understanding the taken-for-granted meanings:what silent conventions are involved in understanding the trick of perspective, themovement from one panel to the next as the passage of time, the representation ofspiritual power as light (Morphy 1992), or the derivation of aesthetic terms from abasic system of material reference such as cattle (Coote 1992)? The challenge ininterpreting prehistoric aesthetics is to turn the interaction around and try tounderstand what we can deduce about the habituated reflexes of the viewer from theclues presented to guide them.

The Late Neolithic, Copper, and Bronze Age stelae of Europe are made to presenta highly conventionalized aesthetic which varies little from the Ukraine to Iberia. Toreview briefly some elements of this, it includes:

1. Invocation of the material qualities of stone, including not only basic qualitiessuch as mass and immobility but also an implied temporality of endurance andperhaps metaphorical associations with beings and places

2. Choreographic aspects such as the fixity of stelae relative to humans and the useof positioning and faces to create a context of action

3. A strongly schematized body geometry, characterized by a reduction of thepotential layers of information to present a simple, regular division into bodyzones and the subordination of distinct body parts to a unifying whole

4. The use of gendered material symbols such as weaponry and ornaments tocategorize the body in terms understandable from other contexts of life anddeath

Comparison not only with contemporary burials and material culture but with thebody of the Ice Man shows that, while the first two of these features are particular to

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stelae and their place in ritual practices, the others characterized lived andconceptualized bodies as well.

While aesthetic patterns can never be read simply as a unique transcript of a socialcontext, neither will they bear no relationship to their setting. Some links betweenstelae, material culture, and social ideals have been noted above, but they have notreally got to the heart of the matter, the linkage between social context and aestheticreflexes or ways of seeing. One reason for this, of course, is that this is anexceptionally difficult issue to affront even with copious ethnographic information(as in Gell's (1998) discussion of the reflex for the “creation of minimal difference”in Marquesan art), and to tackle it for material well back in prehistory requirescouching it in the most tentative terms. Another reason is the problem of historicalreconstruction: stelae occur in too many places, too many different contexts, and attoo different dates to understand them as the simple diffusion of a single practice;they must be seen at most as part of a rather vaguely defined regional repertory ofpotential practices and beliefs. Yet, it is worth a try, if only to propose somepossibilities.

I have argued elsewhere (Robb 2007) that the fourth and third millennia inEurope were characterized by a “great simplification.” It has been long recognizedthat there was a general shift in the nature of social reproduction in this period. Torecount this model—which really posits heuristic ideal types—various archaeolog-ical sources suggest that, in much of continental Europe, sources of prestige werereorganized, from a heterarchical system in which people were valued forqualitatively different, separated activities and statuses to one in which a moregeneralized form of prestige was gained through participation in many differentactivities and which could be transferred from one sphere to another. Among theresulting archaeological patterns, we might cite the increased social centrality ofexchange, the use of burial to construct extended networks of relatedness, economicintensification, and particularly the sudden visibility of readily identifiable, genderedsymbols of social standing which are seen in many different social contexts (Robb1995). Such a transformation implies a new conception of personhood as well. Anearlier Neolithic social person would have drawn upon many different kinds ofidentity and relatedness; a fourth–third millennia person participated in a simplifiedand standardized form of personhood organized around fewer, more central conceptsof value.

This model suggests a context for understanding stela aesthetics. People formedstelae and installed them in the landscape to act as presences in special places, placesin which the dead and the past were invoked or encountered. The salient elementwas probably the presence of the “people of stone” themselves in the place, theirsolidity, fixity, and materiality. But their aesthetic canon also conveyed a powerfulsocial reality. The stelae present a standardized, simplified model of a social personin terms of gendered materialities familiar from other spheres of life. But—as befitsa ritual context—the stelae also present this model in a strong, minimal way, in anabstract and formalized form which contrasts with, and clarifies, the multiplesystems of meaning which form everyday life. Effectively, they present anessentialized view of personhood. It is a model of a singular person whose qualitiesare defined by relation to the whole and which is applicable across contexts, ratherthan the fluid accumulation of citations or context-specific choices suggested by the


disparate spheres of activity of Neolithic life. The reductive schematism of the stelae,which flattens the body's corporeality to a simple surface for display of key symbols,excludes the alternative ways of creating social bodies suggested by the Ice Man'stattoos. The uniformity of stelae within a series echoes the general lack of socialdistinctions visible in burial and settlement, suggesting a different but stillheterarchical form of society in which people competed for adequacy rather thansuperiority; although the new form of society contained the structural basis forhierarchy, it was rarely actualized.

Human bodies can be represented in a staggering variety of ways. In ancientEurope, one might think of the twisted, shifting hybrids of early historic “animalart,” of the active, varied people in Levantine rock art, of the schematic, minimallyanthropomorphic “idols” of Copper Age southern Iberia, or of the robust butgraceful “sleeping ladies” of Neolithic Malta. Such comparisons are useful to makeus realize the many aesthetic choices involved in producing fourth–third millenniastelae as a specific kind of artifact. Like these body representations, the stelae weremade to serve a particular purpose—in this case, grave markers or site furniture forrites of ancestry and kinship—but they also rested upon, and reproduced,fundamental conceptions of the body. Their purpose was surely not to impose orforeground these conceptions, which would have been all the more effectivelyexpressed by the basic, assumed conventions of the genre. It is for this reason thatthe aesthetic conventions of stelae were a powerful medium for making their visionof personhood and social order seem obvious and taken for granted.

Acknowledgments I am grateful to Craig Alexander and Sheila Kohring for helping to gather thesources for this paper, to Douglass Bailey, John Chapman, and Bisserka Gaydarskaya for informationupon Balkan stelae, and to Stratos Nanoglou for the invitation to contribute to this issue. I would like tothank the editors and two anonymous reviewers for comments which have helped improve the manuscriptand colleagues at Cambridge University who have discussed these ideas with me. I gratefullyacknowledge the sources of the stelae drawings (Figs. 2, 3, and 4) which have been modified forconsistency of format. Financial support for this research came from the Leverhulme Trust (“Changingbeliefs of the human body” research programme).

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people of stone: stelae, personhood, and society in prehistoric europe

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