The first part of this project focuses on changes brought to peoples beliefs about the world over the period commonly known as the transition from foraging to farming in Old World Prehistory. By choosing the body, as a hitherto rarely explored research focus with regard to both the period and the region, our research design addresses four areas of prehistoric lives, which we recognize as important:

• the (in)stability of boundaries between human and animal bodies;
• the use of body in life through everyday practice;
• the treatment of bodies in death; and
• the representational iconography of the body form.

We examine what brought changes to beliefs and practices relating to each of these particular fields over the period of forager-farmer transformations, following contextual details and wider regional patterns of three particular regional sequences: the Near East, the central Balkans and southern Scandinavia. This processes are explored along two different axes: (a) as a series of transformations that affected these communities due to the changes in the mode of production, i.e. consequences of both societal and economic transition from largely foraging to largely farming lifestyles; and, (b) as a historical process that connects all three sequences in a larger grand narrative of the changing Old World from c. 10000 to around 5500 cal BC.

Reconstruction of practical activities with regard to fishing migratory sturgeon in the Mesolithic Danube Gorges, the central Balkans (c. 9500-6000 cal BC). These practices were imbued with complex sets of symbolic and ritual meanings (reconstruction drawing by John Swogger).

We take the body both as the referent of culture changes and the main medium for expressing these changes and build upon some past theoretical models including Ingold’s dwelling perspective of being "enworlded", Freedberg’s idea about the power of the body image, Viveiros de Castro’s ideas on perspectivism and multi-naturalism, ideas on processuality of becoming a particular personhood that also applies to gender ascriptions, as well as Lévi-Strauss’s idea of the "house society" social institution. Such approaches help us release new ways of thinking about the change in the past, with the body mediating between different scales of analyses and thus opening up new interpretive possibilities. Focusing on the three aforementioned sequences enables us to provide details of contextual studies that approximate microhistorical approaches and enable meaningful regional comparisons in examining the character of changes on a grand narrative level.

Three studied sequences with key sites	Comaparative chronological table for the Near Eastern and South East European sites

The Near East has been seen in the history of research on the beginnings of agriculture as the centre, core area of all subsequent changes that affected other regions of the Old World. Here, one follows a long and complex history of changes from the Epi-Palaeolithic/Mesolithic Natufian period (c. 12800-10000 cal BC) through various phases of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period (c. 10000-6300 cal BC) with an unmatched richness of symbolic expression in either depictions, adorning, or circulation of body parts (primarily skulls). We explored the possibility that some of the hybrid depictions of human and animal bodies in the PPN period might have stemmed from new forms sociality and community integration over large areas (Miracle & Borić 2008). It has often been suggested that changes in subsistence, social contracts, ideology and religion that took place in the Near East must have affected neighbouring regions too.

South-east Europe seems to have been affected by the new Neolithic world of the Near East at a particular moment in the late mid-7th millennium BC. Yet, particular regions of south-east Europe, such as the region of the Danube Gorges, where one finds a remarkable richness of contextual details unprecedented for pre-Neolithic Europe, for several millennia resisted economic influences of their Neareastern neighbours while, at the same time, maintaining social networks of long-distance contacts with these distant worlds through exchanges of material for body decoration. This community developed its own symbolic universe grounded in a dramatic landscape along the Danube banks and everyday focus of fishing from at least c. 10,000 BC if not earlier. Here, again, the body is both the main medium for articulating the ideational structures as well as the scene or arena for the display of hybrid cultural vocabularies. It is this type of encounters with expanding Neolithic social networks across the Balkans that at the end of the 7th millennium BC produced the most fascinating examples of hybridity—from art and architecture to burials—at sites such as Lepenski Vir. This hybridity of cultural orders is clearly connected to and expressed through the body.

In 2006, the project members focused on exploring the notion of animal-human hybridity found in different forms in all three discussed sequences. The emphasis on the animal-human combinations is found as much in the "representational" iconography as in the mortuary record of both the Near Eastern and the central Balkans case studies while in southern Scandinavia mixing of human and animal realms is visible only through the mortuary evidence. The question of animal/human hibridity triggers wider theoretical problems in relation to animals and other non-human bodies and human bodies, and one of the symposia we organised in Cambridge in 2007 addressed this issue (see events/news). In 2007, our thematic focus moved to fragmentation in the treatment of dead bodies and the more general question of body boundaries. We identified five main themes that are actively worked on for the forthcoming monograph. These five themes are construed from the archaeological evidence from the three discussed regional sequences. The themes/chapter titles are as follows: body in praxis, fragmented and violated body, hybrid body, gendered body, containing body. The project’s activities in the Central Balkans focused on the ongoing excavation of the Mesolithic-Neolithic site of Vlasac in the Danube Gorges and this work also continues into 2009.

In a separate strand of research, Robb investigated patterns of scale and change in human body imagery in later European prehistory. This research provides both an important case study in its own right and a way of framing the interpretive concepts necessary for the global synthesis. One element was to bring together a database of corpuses of human body representations in prehistoric art for all of European prehistory. A second element was an analytical focus upon a particular problem, the shift from Neolithic figurines to Copper and Bronze Age statue-stelae as the dominant mode of portraying the human body in the Alps and Central Mediterranean. The two investigations came together via a discussion of scales of analysis; the transition from figurine to stela has to be understood both regionally, as a development spanning much of Europe, and locally, as a process negotiated and altered by agents in specific historical situations. Moreover, it shows clearly how some aspects of human body imagery were fundamentally tied into larger social orders; the Copper and Bronze Age stelae, in their representational conventions, embody a new conception of personhood which is also evident in economy, burial, and ritual.

Petit-Chasseur, Sion, Switzerland: 3rd millennium BC statue-stela. The conventions of tabular, schematic body geometry, definition of body zones, and ornamentation tie this idealised body to a specific notion of personhood based upon exchange and prestige. See Robb 2007; image from Gallay 1995.