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People of Stone: Stelae, Personhood, and Society in Prehistoric Europe

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Abstract

Stelae (also known variously as statue-stelae and statue-menhirs) are a pan-European phenomenon in fourth and third millennia b.c. Europe and are clearly associated 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 human body, reducing the body to a rigidly schematic, highly stylized with a widely shared geometry and with emphasis upon its surface as a canvas for social marking, particularly of gender. This paper reviews the aesthetic choices involved in stelae and relates them to the changing social contexts of later prehistoric Europe.

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Acknowledgments

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

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    John Robb

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Robb, J. People of Stone: Stelae, Personhood, and Society in Prehistoric Europe. J Archaeol Method Theory 16, 162–183 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-009-9066-z

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