• How were human bodies defined differently over the trajectory between Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic foragers and Neolithic farmers?
• Why and how did cremation, a novel way of transforming dead bodies, sweep quickly across much of Europe in the Later Bronze Age?
• How did the Classical Greek conceptualisation of the human body, shown not only in painting and sculpture but also in medical and philosophical writings and practices, differ from earlier understandings?
• How did the "Modern body" emerge between the 17th and 19th centuries in Britain? How do changing treatments of dead bodies incorporate or counter official scientific and theological doctrines, and traditional or new folk practices?
• What becomes of the modern Western notion of persons defined by integral, bounded bodies when the borders of the body are breached through new medical technologies such as transplants?

At the January 2008 seminar, when our researchers had a chance to show which way the final directions of their work are leading. For the first time we were able to get a sense of the extent to which our five research projects are converging in a common answer to the question of why beliefs about the human body change. While we will reserve a full account for later reports, several basic aspects of an answer are becoming clear:

• A core of a model of changing belief is an anthropological model of historical practice by agents situated in changing circumstances. But this has to be supplemented by discussions at other scales (in a theoretical movement paralleling rather than drawing directly upon Braudelian history); in particular, entities such as traditions and bodily ontologies may have a historical continuity and force which must be taken into account.
• At any given point, however, beliefs about the body include not only heterogeneous doctrines, practices and structures, but also quite contradictory things. For example, much Classical art stressed the integrality of the whole body at the same time as votive offerings, sacrificial practices and medical doctrine stressed its partibility. Similarly, a citizen of 17th-18th century Britain could have recourse in different contexts, seamlessly, to strong religious denials of the importance of the flesh and affirmations of the potency of material substances in folk healing rites and practices, and modern medical students are inducted into a highly-charged world where one must treat a body both as a person and as a mechanical, depersonalised object. This multiplicity, apparently incoherent both created flexible possibilities for action and may manifest longer-term tensions between competing traditions or ontologies.
• In all five studies, one can and must deconstruct simple views of a single major transition between a homogeneous prior body and a homogeneous, unproblematic posterior body. The Bronze Age burial study shows in exquisite detail the complexity of the transition between inhumation and cremation, just as it is clear that there is no univocal change in the body in 5th century BC Athens.
• While beliefs about the body are heterogenous, at least some of them may change in ways different from other kinds of beliefs. For example, there were great variations in later European prehistory over how the body’s gender was made manifest in burial practices, but these must be contextualised within a larger continuity of basic gender definitions which probably reflects the body’s centrality in furnishing not only an object of thought but also the medium and terms of thought. This is an outcome not anticipated in our approach to the problem, and it will provide an important focus for discussion in further analysis of it.

Cross-disciplinary integration

These five studies, carried out in prehistoric archaeology, Classics, history and social anthropology, take place within structures designed to help us cross disciplinary boundaries and develop an integrated understanding of changing beliefs of the body not limited by the strong traditions of each of the disciplines involved. The research programme as a whole thus is an experiment in the possibility of cross-disciplinary discourse in any academic field. The three principal initiatives include:

• Frequent internal seminars in which programme members discuss key works in their various field and present their work to each other;
• An active programme of visiting speakers, seminars and conferences in which people working within a variety of fields encounter each other;
• A museum exhibition at the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, to open in 2009, which will integrates key insights from all five projects thematically and faces the challenge of presenting them thought-provokingly to visitors.