THE WARRIOR'S BEAUTY:

J -~HE MASCULINE BODY AND SELF-

IDENTITY IN BRONZE-AGE EUROPE 1

Paul Treherne

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ft
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Figure 1. (after Aner and Kersten 1973).

INTRODUCTION

There is a term among German speaking archaeologists, for which we in the Anglo-
American tradition no longer have an equivalent, commonly used to designate a
particular class of funerary monument found from the late Bronze Age through to
the early historic period across much of Europe: the Kriegergrab, or 'warrior grave'.
By definition this mortuary form, whether involving inhumation or cremation,
centres on the individual male warrior and his personal weaponry. Other attributes
are also diagnostic of this class, though the full suite is not represented in every
instance: drinking equipment, bodily ornamentation (both textiles and ornaments),
grooming tools ('toilet articles'), and horse harness and/ or wheeled vehioles. Graves
of this form began to appear over large parts of southern, central, and Scandinavian
Europe in the mid-second millennium BC, proliferate and spread to much of the rest
of Europe over the course of the late Bronze Age and continue in remarkably con-
served form through the Hallstatt and La Tene periods, only to be revitalised in

Paul Treherne, Department of Archaeology, Downing Street, Cambridge University, Cambridge, CB2 3DQ, Great Britain
Journal o/European Archaeology (1995) 3.1:105-144.
106 TREHERNE

Germanic society following the Roman interlude. 1bis core of expressive themes,
practices, and material objects retains its integrity over an increasingly large spatial
distribution and within a host of quite different social contexts for several millennia
of European history. Following an earlier generation, elsewhere I (forth.) seek to
account for this phenomenon through a revitalisation and revision of the dormant
concept of the Kriegeradel, the 'warrior aristocracy', once a cornerstone in our under-
standing of late European prehistory.
The prevailing consensus among English-speaking archaeologists over the past
few decades has been to interpret this constellation as part of an 'ideological
complex' tied to an emergent ~lite and centred on mortuary rituals. With its roots in
transformations of the late Neolithic and Copper Age, this complex is seen to have
spanned much of the European continent by the late second millennium. Central to
the ideology and those it supplanted, in all accounts, is the human body. Yet,
contrary to orthodoxy, it is the principal contention of this essay that the changing
nature of emphasis on the human body seen over time in the archaeological record
was more than simply ideological. In particular, it was associated with the develop-
ment of a specific form of life, a life style, among an emergent warrior ~lite, which
marked the growth of a new understanding of personhood - specifically male self-
identity - rooted in both social practices and cultural representations. Furthermore,
this life style, and the male body's place in it, is only to be understood in conjunction
with an equally important death style, a socio-culturally prescribed way of expiring.
Central to both life and death was a specific form of masculine beauty unique to
the warrior. lbis paper develops an argument for considering the constellation
of attributes enumerated above, which have hitherto been designated 'ideological',
in conjunction with the issue of masculine self-identity rooted in both the living
and dead body. First, however, we must briefly summarise the cultural transforma-
tions that have been interpreted as 'ideological' and the role of the human body in
these.

IDEOLOGY, BODY, AND THE NEOUTHlcJBRONZE-AGE TRANSITION

In the last few decades it has become clear that the fourth and third millennia BC
were marked by fundamental social transformations across the European continent.
This has yielded a dichotomy between two types of society, one of developed or
'mature' Neolithic character and another with its roots in the late Neolithic and
Copper Age but fundamentally oriented to the succeeding Bronze Age. 1bis cleav-
age has been expressed in a number of ways, yet our primary concern here is with
the ideological transformations thought to have occurred over this period, first and
most decisively in the fourth and third millennia with such horizons as Chemavoda-
Ezero-Baden, Yamnaya, Globular Amphora, Corded Ware, and Bell Beaker, and then
again, building on the earlier rupture, beginning just prior to the mid-second millen-
nium BC (e.g. Tumulus complex, Nordic period II, Mycenaean Shaft Grave period,
Terremare Italy, etc.). In both instances, as we shall see, the human body has been
attributed a central role.
THE MASCULINE BODY AND SELF-IDENTITY IN BRONZE-AGE EUROPE 107

Broadly speaking, it is thought that the developed Neolithic or Copper-Age monu-

ments of Europe (tells, megalithic tombs, enclosures, etc.) represent both nodes of
continuity and foci of activity in a fluid and vibrantly ritualised landscape. In addi-
tion to being ritually centred on fixed places, however, the ideology of most Neo-
lithic social formations was one of communality and group identity, involving the con-
sumption of social surplus in public works and collective rituals in which the status
of the corporate group was celebrated (Renfrew 1973a; 1973b; 1974; 1976; Gilman
1976; R. Chapman 1981; Hodder 1982b; 1984; 1990; Jensen 1982; Shanks and Tilley
1982; 1987b; Shennan 1982a; Kristiansen 1984a; Sherratt 1984; 1994a; Tilley 1984;
Thomas 1987; 1991a; Barrett et al1991; Bailey 1990; Damm 1991a; Barrett 1993). There
was a general lack of overt emphasis on the individual. This is most conspicuous in
the later megalithic tombs, and in particular the communal passage graves, of the
Atlantic arc. These burials did not entail the inclusion of personal grave-goods as a
means of symbolising inter-individual differences, though only the remains of
people who occupied focal genealogical positions in the social group, and were thus
venerated as ancestors, seem to have been placed in the tombs (Sherratt 1984; Tilley
1984). Functionally, this 'mature Neolithic' ideology is seen to be mystificatory, in the
sense that it masked existing social differences (Renfrew 1973a; 1973b; Gilman 1976;
Kristiansen 1982; 1984a; Shanks and Tilley 1982; Shennan 1982a; 1993; Sherratt 1984;
Tilley 1984; Whittle 1984) through its emphasis on the corporate group, and in
particular its egalitarian character (Shanks and Tilley 1982; Kristiansen 1984a; Tilley
1984).
The ideological and ritual transformations associated with the emergence of a new
social form occurred at different times in different places in European prehistory and
worked themselves out in the context of local particularities. However, similar trans-
formations unfolded across most of the continent over the fourth and third millennia
Be through the progressive articulation of various regions into large interactive net-
works, crystallising along natural corridors of cultural exchange. The essence of the
transformation was a shift from an ideology of place and community to one of the
individual and personal display, involving the adoption of a deliberately ostentatious
life style (Shennan 1982a; 1982c 1993; Kristiansen 1984a; Sherratt 1994a; 1994b; S0ren-
sen 1991a). In particular, the new ideology was marked by an emphasis on social
categorisation, notably in terms of gender and the individual, played out most con-
spicuously in mortuary rituals involving the display and consumption of exotic
('prestige') goods and practices acquired through long-distance relations of emula-
tion and exchange between ascendant groups (Shennan 1982a; 1982c; 1986b; 1993;
Champion et al. 1984).
Social categorisation, or the communication of personal status, was achieved
partially through differentiation in burial by means of grave goods, a trend which
has traditionally been associated with the rise of social hierarchies in temperate
Europe (e.g. Bintliff 1984), though these only developed in many regions over the
course of the third millennium and particularly the Bronze Age - a product of
control over the circulation of metal prestige items (Milisauskas 1978; Rowlands
1980; Shennan 1982a; 1982b; 1986a; 1986b; 1993; Champion et al. 1984; Kristiansen
108 TREHERNE

1982; 1984a; 1987b; 1992a; S0rensen 1991a; but see Coles 1982), subsistence resources
(Gilman 1976; 1981; Bintliff 1984) or both (5. E. Shennan 1975; 1982; Coles and
Harding 1979; Harding 1984b; Shennan 1986a). Instead, what initially emerged was a
rather generalised form of status group (Stand) in the Weberian (1968:927,935) sense:
a group of persons who share a style of life, consumption patterns, common conven-
tions, specific beliefs, and particular economic and ideal monopolies which create a
degree of social distance and exclusiveness. At this early stage the group may have
been composed of all males of suitable age, as the associated ideology was not only
individualising, but androcentric, involving heavy male symbolism and a general-
ised male ethos (Shennan 1993; cf. Hodder 1990: agrios). The adoption of this ideo-
logy in Atlantic and northern Europe, perhaps initially by marginalised groups
(Thorpe and Richards 1984), involved a transformation in the way in which status
differences were expressed, from their misrepresentation to their display and natural-
isation (Shennan 1982a), the latter not becoming significantly pronounced before the
late early Bronze Age, when we encounter, for instance, the late Unetician graves at
Leubingen, Helmsdorf, and Leki Male (Br A2) (Gimbutas 1965; Coles and Harding
1979).
The personal consumables of this emergent status group centred around four
fundamental themes (apparent in graves): warfare seen in weaponry, alcohol seen in
drinking vessels (Sherratt 1987a; 1991; 1994b; 1994d; forthcoming), riding/driving seen
in horse harness/wheeled vehicles (Bokonyi 1978; 1980; Sherratt 1981; 1983; 1987a;
1987b; 1994a; Piggot 1983; Champion et al. 1984; Anthony 1986; Shennan 1986a; 1993;
Levine 1990; Anthony and Brown 1991; for the importance of horse in Indo-Euro-
pean mythology see Puhve11987) and to a lesser degree bodily ornamentation. Though
some of these goods seem to have been generated and disseminated by growing
urbanism in the Near East and Anatolia, their filtration into the 'barbarian hinter-
land' was the product of active selection, adaptation, and reinterpretation within the
unique local context, a process which fuelled the development of an institution un-
represented in most of the great civilisations of the Orient (i.e., that of the warrior
aristocracy) (Sherratt 1994c; 1994d). The seemingly arbitrary concurrence of these in-
dependent expressive traits, drawn together from foreign and indigenous elements
in a process of bricolage without a bricoleur,2 contributed towards a sui generis product
- an arbitrary association became increasingly natural. As Sherratt (1994a:187)
argues, the 'ideological unity' of such practices as drinking and driving may be seen
in the 'ultimate fourth millennium status symbol', the Baden wagon-shaped drinking
cups.
By the central European middle Bronze Age, and accelerating in the late Bronze
Age, we have the first clear evidence of widespread social differentiation, often
attributed to the rise of chiefdoms in much of temperate Europe (Randsborg 1973;
1974; Coles 1982; Kristiansen 1982a; 1984a; 1987b; 1992a; Shennan 1986a; 1993). At
this time it is thought that the existing ideology underwent another transformation,
though within the idiom of that established in the preceding period. Specifically, the
generalised male ethos of the earlier phase was transformed into a differentiated
warrior ideology, which' sought to legitimate social differentiation not by hiding it but
THE MASCULINE BODY AND SELF-IDENTITY IN BRONZE-AGE EUROPE 109

by representing it as natural and immutable through the use of material culture in

the form of prestige items and ritual symbols which constantly reiterated the
message'(Shennan 1982a:156; 1993). In particular, the Tumulus and Urnfield com-
plexes, centred on the eastern Alpine region, usurped the former eastern Carpathian
exchange network with Scandinavia and established their own links over the Alps
with the growing Mycenaean presence in southern Italy (BemabO Brea 1957; Taylour
1958; 1983; Sherratt 1994c), yielding, some would assert, a common ideological fabric
from Scandinavia to the Aegean (Bouzek 1985; Kristiansen 1987a; 1987b).
Specifically, this more developed form of the late-Neolithic/ early-Bronze-Age
ideology was linked in many regions of the increasingly integrated European pen-
insula to the growth of a more developed status group: a differentiated warrior elite
Gensen 1982; Kristiansen 1984a; 1984b; 1987b; 1992a; Shennan 1993). Where we have
literary references to later examples of this institution, such as epic poetry (which, as
we shall see, is itself an integral part of this institution), it seems that such a group
was typically assembled as a retinue of part- or full-time male warrior specialists (the
Miinnerbund of Germanic tradition), serving an elite of paramount position (chief,
king, etc.). Members of this fraternity bound themselves to their patron and to one
another through relations of hospitality and reciprocity involving the exchange of
valuables (weapons, ornaments, etc.), drinking rituals in which alcohol was con-
sumed, shared belief systems or codes (notably honour), shared living space and
daily life (one thinks of Hrothgar's hall or the Spartan syssition) and above all
through warfare itself, which was heavily ritualised.
Novel consumables for the warrior in this phase included pre-eminently the
sword, which after its independent debut in the Aegean (MM II Mallia) and the
eastern Carpathian basin (HajdusAmson-Apa horizon [BIlla after Moszolics]) rapidly
developed in several forms within the Tumulus sphere (notably from south-western
Germany to Transdanubia), Nordic Europe, northern Italy, the Aegean, and the
Atlantic province.3 As the new form of personal weaponry, it departed from the
earlier axe and dagger in being the first object clearly designed for combat instead of
simply being adapted from an existing tool form (S0rensen 1991a), evidence of its
use seen in hundreds of sharpened examples (Kristiansen 1987b). Organised aggres-
sion between social groups undoubtedly had existed since at least the early Neolithic
(Shennan 1986a; Starling 1985; Milisauskas and I<ruk 1989; Hodder 1990), yet as a
distinctly individual weapon (not least in terms of decoration) - perhaps carrying
names and histories and passed on by inheritance - the sword is thought to have
marked the emergence of a new style of warfare, involving prestigious personal
combat with well defined social and ritual rules (Kristiansen 1978; 1987b; Shennan
1986a; 1993; or see the niad). Hence, it was part of a symbolic emphasis on warfare
that was more pronounced than in the preceding period, and in general the warrior
became increasingly formalised throughout the second millennium (Sl2'rensen 1991a),
reaching a culmination in the late Bronze Age (seen in the standardised panoply of
arms and annour shared by the Urnfield and Mycenaean warrior: slashing sword,
thrusting spear, shield, helmet, greaves, and corslet - Miiller-Karpe 1962).
Moreover, the ideological emphasis on male drinking rituals and equestrian arts
110 TREHERNE

continued. Grave assemblages of the middle Bronze Age include a rich variety of
ceramic (in Scandinavia wooden) vessels for serving, pouring, and drinking liquids.
In the developed Urnfield period beaten bronze pails, cups, cauldrons, early situlae,
and even gold drinking cups were in wide circulation. By this time, male drinking
rituals may have been a key social mechanism by which the paramount elite could
gather a following of warrior companions: the creation and reproduction of an
armed body of supporters through warrior feasting and hospitality (e.g. Hrothgar's
hall in BeOUJulf) (Kristiansen 1987b; 1992a; Sherratt 1987a). Further developments in
the use of the horse and wheeled transport included probably the first employment
of the former for actual warfare (associated with shift to the slashing sword, spear,
and plate armour) and the introduction and dissemination of the light two-wheeled
war vehicle or chariot (Kristiansen 1987b; Piggot 1983).
Along with the other novel consumables, from the mid-second millennium in
much of Europe there was an explosion in metal ornaments designed to accentuate
every part of the body and its movement (Schutz 1983; S",rensen 1991a; Sherratt
1994b). In addition, another feature of bodily ornamentation that took off at this
time, after being introduced in the third millennium, were woollen textiles, personal
prestige garments, which, undyed, served as the canvass on which metal ornaments
such as pins (as opposed to earlier buttons) were exhibited (Childe 1930; Killen 1964;
Halstead 1981; Sherratt 1981; 1983; 1986; 1987a; 1994a; 1994b; Barber 1991; SfZJrensen
1991a; 1991b). The spectacular preservation of woollen costumes from early Bronze-
Age Denmark has given rise to a whole literature on 'Bronze-Age fashion', yet the
presence of weaving combs and the wide proliferation in pin types may indicate a
similar importance for wool elsewhere in Europe (Broholm and Hald 1948; Sherratt
1981;Barber 1991;S"rensen 1991a; 1991b).
One particular class of artefacts that we must consider part of this emphasis on
bodily decoration is the so-called personal 'toilet articles': horn, bone, and bronze
combs, bronze tweezers, razors, mirrors and ('tattooing') awls. Toilet articles appear
as a coherent horizon during the mid-second millennium in central, southern,
Nordic and north-western Europe (central Europe: Jockenhovel 1971; western Car-
pathian basin: Hansel 1968; Moszolics 1973; 1985; Britain, France and low countries:
Jockenhovel 1980; Poland: Gedl 1981; northern Italy: Bianco Peroni 1979; Nordic
sphere: Broholm 1943; 1944; 1952; Baudou 1960). Isolated examples were present as
early as the early jmiddle Bronze Age in the Aegean (particularly tweezers), but
most there are Mycenaean or later in date (Karo 1930; Vermeule 1972). By the late
Bronze Age they had reached many other areas such as the eastern Carpathian basin,
the Balkans, Iberia, peninsular Italy, and Sicily (Bernab6 Brea 1957; Hansel 1968;
Moszolics 1973; 1985). Furthermore, like some of the other 'luxury' consumables we
have been discussing in the context of male funerary practices, the toilet articles
appear to have originated in the Near East (Egypt, Mesopotamia, Indus valley),
where they are attested from at least the third millennium BC (Childe 1928; 1930;
1953).
Though many of the ornaments were not gendered and are included in both male
and female graves, certain examples (notably some arm rings, pin types, and the
THE MASCUUNE BODY AND SELF-IDENTITY IN BRONZE-AGE EUROPE 111

hooks and ornaments for sword belts) and in particular the 'toilet articles' appear to
have been exclusively 'male' funerary goods (Glob 1974; Randsborg 1974; Kristian-
sen 1982;1984a; 1984b; 1987b; 1992a; Gibbs 1987; Draiby 1989; Serensen 1987; 1991b).
In fact, by the late Bronze Age in some regions the latter appear to comprise the main
male status item in graves (Kristiansen 1992a).
Finally, elite burial became standardised by the middle Bronze Age, involving
interment under a monumental barrow in the highest and most impressive locations
in the landscape. In the late Bronze Age cremation in urns was widely adopted as a
form of burial, if not inserted in older barrows then with stelae now to indicate the
grave location Both practices marked the displacement of the generalised ancestors
of the Neolithic, ever-present in the affairs of the living, by individuals, .'whose own
origins then came to be fixed by mythological images of increasingly more distant
times. It was in those distant and mythological ages that the inaccessible and heroic
figures had lived and died who now lay buried beneath the massive turf ... tumuli'
(Barrett 1993:127-8).
In short, by the middle Bronze Age the prevailing 'ideology' was largely centred
on the male (gendered) individual and the display of his personal accoutrements
acquired through inter-regional exchange and emulation, with novel themes of
drinking, driving/ riding, body decorating, and fighting. This entire complex of
expressive traits remained, with striking conservatism, a central feature of European
society well into the Iron Age (e.g. Hallstatt C and D,.as at Hochdorf: Bie11981; Geo-
metric 'warrior graves' in the Kerameikos; Villanovan Italy: Hencken 1968; la Tene
middle-Rhine chariot burials) and early medieval period, particularly in Germanic
(e.g. Anglo-Saxon, Frankish/Merovingian, Viking) society.
I now wish to explore the central role that has been accorded one particular ele-
ment in the ideological transformations discussed: the human body. It has frequently
been remarked that the human body is a rich medium of classification, signification
and expression, not only in life but in death, through the treatment of the corpse in
mortuary practices (Benthall and Polhemus 1975; Ellen 1977; Sutherland 1977;
Shanks and Tilley 1982; Harre 1994). In particular, the physical body is metaphor-
ically connected with the social body (Douglas 1966; 1973; Benthall 1975; MacRae
1975; Sutherland 1977; Shanks and Tilley 1982; Feher 1989, vol. 3). As such, mortuary
rites are a particularly potent source of ideological representations (ibid.; Randsborg
and Chapman 1981; Bloch and Parry 1982; Parker Pearson 1982; 1984; Kristiansen
1984a; Tilley 1984; Thomas 1991a), hence the human body's central role in discus-
sions of ideology in the Neolithic and Bronze Age.
In the Neolithic of many regions of northern and western Europe, the emergence
of passage graves marked the inception of a complex ritual practice of communality,
utilising the human body. As territorial cult places for ancestor worship and burial
places of senior lineages that were descended from the ritual ancestors (Kristiansen
1982a), the passage graves involved elaborate mortuary rites for transforming the
recently dead into ancestors. Specifically, the flesh of the dead was ritually removed
before deposition, sometimes immediately by fire or cleaving, but more often prob-
ably via excarnation in the causewayed enclosures or cult houses (ibid.; Kjcerum
112 TREHERNE

1967i Kristiansen 1982ai 1984ai Thorpe 1984i Thomas 1991a). Once reduced to a
skeleton, the bodies were frequently disarticulated and the bones interred in the
passage graves. In many cases, not all the bones were deposited in the tomb, but
only some were selected and these were arranged in particular ways, by body parts
or symmetries (Shanks and Tilley 1982; Kristiansen 1984a; Whittle 1984; Thomas
1991a). In addition, the development of a passage facilitated not only repeated de-
position within a single tomb over time, but also the ritual removal and/ or resorting
of existing osteological remains (Thomas 1991a; Barrett 1993). This suggests that the
rites performed at these monuments were not only funerary, but ancestral, in which
the dead, unseparated from this world, were repeatedly called upon by the living
(Kristiansen 1984ai Barrett 1993).
Some have suggested that the rituals at megalithic tombs involved a separate
priesthood, who were the only ones allowed to view and arrange the bones within
the increasingly recessive interior chambers (Thomas and Whittle 1986; Thomas
1991ai Barrett 1993i Shennan 1993). Perhaps they periodically removed some, which,
defleshed and deposited in the mausoleum, were infused with new meanings as
potent relics (see Harre 1994:221-3), and used for ritual display in the forecourt. It is
in this connection that these mortuary rituals, and in particular their use of the
human body, have been seen as ideological, legitimising the existing social order by
misrepresenting it as inevitable and disguising control by lineage heads/elders
(Shanks and Tilley 1982i Tilley 1984). In particular, the representation of human
remains in these tombs, as the geometric design and spatial deposition of contempor-
ary (e.g. Trichterbecher) vessels (Tilley 1983i 1984; Shanks and Tilley 1987b), is seen
to be guided by a number of structuring principles, most notably' an assertion of the
collective and a denial of the individual and differences between individuals'
(Shanks and Tilley 1982:150).The individual was literally destroyed through the act
of disarticulation, as vessels were through smashing. The boundedness and solidar-
ity of the group was simultaneously underscored through the re-articulation of
bones from several different people, while the symmetrical arrangement of body
parts in the tombs obscured asymmetrical relationships in life (ibid.; Tilley 1984;
Danun 1991ai 1991b).
The body was also a central player in the ideological transformation that occurred
between the late Neolithic/Copper Age and the Bronze Age. The practice of single
inhumation introduced in this period involved heavy conventions for treatment of
the body. As before, the corpse, initially crouched or flexed and lying on one side, is
seen as the vehicle of ideological representation, yet here involving individual dis-
play for the purposes of social categorisation and prestige competition. In contrast to
the esoteric rites within the passage graves, the body was highly visible not merely
to a select few, but to a host of onlookers during the ceremonies preceding burial, in
which it was dressed and carried on a bier or coffin, and in the grave itself before the
mound was raised (or later the pyre lit) (Thomas 1991a; 1991b; for the burial
practices in Mycenaean shaft graves and tholoi see Protonotariou-Deilaki 1990ai
1990bi Demakopoulou 1990i Wells 1990). According to Barrett (1993:117), the arte-
facts that accompanied the corpse into the grave came from three sources: decorative
THE MASCUUNE BODY AND SELF-IDENTITY IN BRONZE-AGE EUROPE 113

material attached to the body throughout the mortuary ritual, items of adornment
arranged around the body only after it had been placed in the grave, and material
discarded by the mourners. In short, the 'corpse acted as the dominant referent for
the construction of this grave assemblage by determining its arrangement in the
grave.' Moreover, the practice of extended and supine, as opposed to crouched or
flexed inhumation, which gained increasing favour by the end of the early Bronze
Age, dramatically increased the potential for individual display (Sherratt 1987a;
1994b).
In further contrast to the 'ideology' of late megalithic cultures, the new funerary
practices demanded that the body be buried once and for all, after a relatively brief
ceremony, rather than interred over a long period and remaining accessible to the
living (ibid.; Sherratt 1991; Thomas 1991a; 1991b; Shennan 1993). Such mortuary
rituals 'were singular events in which a particular identity for the deceased had to be
produced and fixed in the minds of the onlookers' (Thomas 1991b:40). Yet the corpse
was only visible for a short time, so the message communicated by the body and its
accoutrements to the audience had to be unambiguous, and this lent itself to highly
formalised or stereotyped representation (S",rensen 1991a; Thomas 1991a; 1991b). For
instance, Corded-Ware and Bell-Beaker male burials included standardised equip-
ment which was placed in graves in a limited number of positions, notably in the
case of the personal battle axe, which was regularly placed in front of the face
(Kristiansen 1984a; Tilley 1984; Thomas 1991b). However, the common thread to all
the social identities is that they centred on the whole, singular body (Braithwaite
1984; Thomas 1991a). As these new 'ideological' influences penetrated the former
areas of Megalithismus, the entrances to the passage graves were blocked off so that
the human remains in the tombs could not be altered or added to. This confirms
what the practice of closed single inhumation suggests: the transformation of an
imminent but anonymous community of ancestors into a remote and unchanging set
of personal named forebears (ibid.; Sherratt 1994a).
Having highlighted the evidence for the development of a coherent and novel
ideological framework by the mid second millennium BC in wide parts of Europe,
and in particular its concern with the human body, let us now tum to consider the
theoretical underpinnings of this model with greater care.

ELITES, IDEOLOGY, AND PRESTIGE

The expressive features so far discussed have predominantly been treated as

'prestige goods' involved in the developed Bronze-Age ideology of individual
warrior display, which some envision as diffusing from the Aegean to temperate
Europe (Kristiansen 1984a; 1991b; 1987a; 1987b; 1992a; Sherratt 1994b). The concept
of ideology has been used by archaeologists in this context largely in the Marxist
sense of mystification, involving the misrepresentation and legitimisation of
arbitrary social asymmetries through their naturalisation, especially in ostentatious
funerary rites (ibid.; Shennan 1982a; 1986a; 1993). Central to these rituals of
legitimisation, it is argued, was the exhibition of 'prestige goods' - objects and
114 TREHERNE

practices acquired through exchange or emulation between the upper echelons of

local hierarchies. For instance, following the central principle of the prestige goods
model - 'the association between political power and foreign goods assigned high
status' (Frankenstein and Rowlands 1978:75; Friedman and Rowlands 1978) -
Kristiansen argues that the practices of bodily transformation achieved with toilet
articles were exotic and therefore widely coveted. For instance, the toilet articles are
seen as tools for the alteration of bodily appearance with the purpose of creating
social identity, and thereby garnering distinction (Kristiansen 1987b; Sherratt 1994b;
see especially Bourdieu 1984: ch. 3 on the body and distinction; on hair as a medium
of conspicuous consumption, see Veblen 1970). According to Kristiansen (1984a;
1984b; 1987b; 1992a), these implements are one feature which chiefs and their
warrior retinues shared in common as high ranking males (cf. Coles and Harding
1989:303).More fundamentally, as prestige goods they, like all the items of personal
display described above, were necessary for the social transactions and practices -
funerary goods, status insignia, etc. - basic to the reproduction of every member of
the warrior fraternity Gensen 1982; Kristiansen 1987b).
It is also argued that elite control of the exchange/emulation networks supplying
these primitive valuables, and in tum their redistribution to subordinates, was a
potent source both of politico-economic power and its legitimisation ('wealth
finance') (Frankenstein and Rowlands 1978; Earle 1982; D'Altroy and Earle 1985).
Specifically, the elite 'legitimated their political privilege by ritual and monopolised
access to ritual and new religious ideas which were channelled through the same
lines of chiefly alliances as bronze' (Kristiansen 1987b:44; 1987a). These networks of
long-distance contacts between local elite not only facilitated ideological exchange
but provided 'the paths along which decorative and dress fashions were to spread'
(Sherratt 1994b:253), producing over much of Europe in the middle and especially
late Bronze Age a common elite culture (Kristiansen 1992a; Earle 1989). lhis is
particularly true of prestige weaponry, such as swords (Shennan 1993), many of
whose fonns are shared with remarkable consistency over wide areas (e.g. the Br
D/Ha A1 flange-hilted sword known variously as Sprockhoff ITa (Sprockhoff 1931),
Naue II (Naue 1903; Cowen 1955; Catling 1956; 1961; Snodgrass 1964), Nenzingen
(Cowen 1955; Novak 1975; Alexandrescu 1966), Reutlingen (Schauer 1971), C
(Kemenczei 1988) and Montegiorgio-Treviso-Cetona types (Bianco Peroni 1970».
Even in the case of consumables like the toilet articles, whose many distinct regional
styles suggest localised production, there must at least have been exchange of the
exotic fashion of these goods and practices.4 Indeed, it is thought that ~lite monopol-
isation of the circulation of locally produced valuables, such as toilet articles, could
only have been achieved through controlling their production in specialised work-
shops. Furthermore, such networks of elite interaction would have been inherently
expansive, as 'prestige objects' are seen not merely to represent rank, but to possess
an intrinsic value capable of creating social power, which in turn is ideologically
defined to depend on the ability to supply exotic materials and practices. Hence, it is
argued, there was an emphasis on the active seeking-out of remote contacts as
sources of esoteric valuables and fashions (Shennan 1982a; 1986a; 1986b; Champion
THE MASCUUNE BODY AND SELF-IDENTITY IN BRONZE-AGE EUROPE 115

et ale 1984). Ostensibly, this is how the 'differentiated warrior ideology' of the mid-
second millennium attained such an 'international' scale.
Having sketched out the theoretical framework within which the central expres-
sive themes and luxury consumables of the middle/late Bronze Age have been inter-
preted by archaeologists, I now propose to highlight a serious deficiency in the
notion of an ideology of prestige display for the European Bronze Age. Specifically, I
shall offer criticism at both the theoretical and substantive levels. First, there are
notorious problems with the concept of ideology itself - here I intend to draw on the
notion employed for our period by Shennan (1982a), Kristiansen (1984a), and Gilman
(1976). These and other thinkers follow the orthodox materialist formulation of
ideology as legitimisation through mystification, here specifically in the sense of
naturalisation ('reification', Lukacs 1971). This involves Marx's 'pejorative' concep-
tion of ideology as epistemically false (Geuss 1981) or illusory, 'social reality' inverted
through a 'camera obscura' (Marx 1978:154), hence a variable to be removed from the
equation, like taphonomic processes, in securing a 'true' representation of society
(Kristiansen 1984a).
However, as Foucault (1984b; cf. also Castoriadis 1975; Thompson 1984; Rabinow
1986; Hodder 1991; Thomas 1990; Barrett 1993) has argued, there are serious
problems in drawing a sharp distinction between ideology and social 'reality'.
Specifically, the opposition derives from a notion of ideology, itself a form of power
(Mann 1986), as merely negative, repressive, or distorting. Yet power not only has
this 'juridico-discursive' aspect, classically expressed by Weber, but is positive and
creative in the sense that it is a central part of the constitution of social reality (Weber
1968; Foucault 1981; d. Miller and Tilley 1984; Thompson 1984; Shanks and Tilley
1987b; Eagleton 1991; Hodder 1991). Ideology not only subjugates subjects, it creates
them (Shanks and Tilley 1982; 1987a). As the chief proponent of this position,
Althusser (following Gramsci) has argued that people live in an 'imaginary relation-
ship to their real conditions of existence' - which for him means that ideology has a
material existence in all human practice, the mediator of consciousness and action,
and as such people infra-consciously live their ideology as real (Althusser 1969; 1984;
cf. Gramsci 1992; Hirst 1979; Turner 1983). This is akin to Bourdieu's notion that
ideology is inscribed in the every-day actions of individuals, which are generated by
pre-reflective dispositions (habitus) inculcated through exposure, and thus spontan-
eously attuned, to the 'objective' conditions of existence. Ideology is thus naturalised
as self evident, 'misrecognised' and taken for granted in that it entails a 'practical
faith', an 'undisputed, pre-reflexive, naive, native compliance with the fundamental
presuppositions' of a given form of life - what Bourdieu (1990a:68; 1977; 1984;
1990b; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992; compare also Smart's notion of 'hegemony'
1986:160) labels doxa. Permeating the entire social fabric, ideology is a component of
all forms of human practice, and not the conspiritorial product of a 'small number of
cynical men' (Althusser 1984:37; cf. Foucault on power). Given this, Althusser for-
wards the central thesis that 'ideology interpellates individuals as subjects', which is
to say that ideology is central to the constitution of human subjectivity or self-ident-
ity. Though this somewhat underestimates the ability of humans to knowledgeably
116 TREHERNE

negotiate the signification structures within which they act, and in general one might
doubt whether dominant ideologies penetrate the consciousness of all members of
the social hierarchy (Thompson 1963; Giddens 1979; Braithwaite 1982; Abercrombie
et ale 1980; Miller et ale 1989; Hodder 1991), ideology operates most effectively at the
routine, non-discursive level of human practice, particularly through its objectifica-
tion in the material objects that actively mediate social action (Hodder 1982b; Shanks
and Tilley 1982; 1987a; 1987b; Tilley 1982; Miller and Tilley 1984; Parker Pearson
1984).
The notion that people live their ideology as real implies that ideology is a taken
for granted part of any particular life style, even that of an ~lite, which adheres to a
particular set of practices and beliefs with deep commitment and not merely as part of
a cynical charade. This notion is central to Weber's conception of the status group
(and more specifically his notion of the warrior status group: 1968:905-8; 1142;
1153-4; 1951:24; 1958:63-5; cf. Van Wees 1992), which I have used to characterise
the retinue of male warriors more popularly (though inaccurately) labelled an
Iaristocracy'. However, this relativisation of the notion of ideology does not entail
dismissing it as obsolete, as some post-modernists would have us do.S Rather, it is
prudent to retain the concept and in particular its Marxist connection to social
domination, lest we end up with a relativistic notion of ideology simply as Welt-
anschauung or symbol system. 6
Second, ideology is one of those general concepts which, for Weber, by virtue of its
scope, 'leads us away from the richness of reality ... since ... it must be as abstract
as possible and hence devoid of content' (Weber 1949:80). In particular, the model of
an ideology of individual prestige competition and display corresponds to what
Geuss terms its functional pejorative sense' - in the end it is functionalist (Geuss
I

1981; Hodder 1982a; 1991; Shanks and Tilley 1987a; 1987b). Specifically, the problem
lies in its generality: its treatment of exotic' goods and practices as functionally
I

Iprestigious' fails to account for their specific socio-historical character (cf. Hodder
1984 on megaliths). In other words, the prevailing model of mortuary rituals simply
as a 'platform for social aggrandisement' (parker Pearson 1982; 1984) does not
answer the simple question of why weaponry and toilet articles, as opposed to some-
thing else, were used for legitimatory display and the creation of social identity? To
say people consume conspicuously (A la Veblen) is to say nothing of why they con-
sume what they do.
In contrast, it is a central premise of this essay that the goods and practices de-
scribed in this paper need to be understood in their own right, rather than simply
explained away in a reductionist fashion as 'prestige goods'. As Sherratt (1987a:83;
cf. Hodder 1991) perspicaciously observes with respect to the male drinking com-
plex, 'recent explanations of this kind of phenomenon, appealing to ... prestige goods,
have correctly perceived the importance of these assemblages but are unhelpful in
understanding their meaning.' The meaning of objects is constituted not only func-
tionally (A la Binford), formally by difference (A la structuralism), and practically (A la
Wittgenstein), but contextually - it has arbitrary socio-historical content (Hodder
1982a; 1987; 1991). The failure of the prestige goods ideology model to account for
THE MASCUUNE BODY AND SELF-IDENTITY IN BRONZE-AGE EUROPE 117

contextual meaning stems from the cross-cultural fashion in which ideology is form-
ulated by most archaeologists (Shanks and Tilley 1982; Hodder 1984; 1991). As
Althusser argues, one may pursue a theory of ideology in general because the latter
has no history - it is omni-historical, eternal, which is to say that its 'structure and
functioning are immutable' (Althusser 1984:35). In this spirit, Kristiansen reveals that
hundreds of years of cultural-ideological forms, spanning the Neolithic and Bronze
Age, may be reduced to the solitary purpose of prestige display and legitimisation -
we are spared the redundancy of detail (Kristiansen 1984a; cf. Shanks and Tilley
1987a; 1989).
In sum, the notion of ideology as it has been used for the Neolithic and Bronze Age
in Europe is deficient. Specifically, we must seek an additional means of under-
standing our complex of ~lite goods and practices which takes account of their sub-
stantive content and their implications for subjectivity as well as their potential
legitimatory .function. It is in this light that I should like to return to a discussion of
the human body, with which all of these objects, most patently the toilet articles, are
associated.

BODy,~,ANDS~

With respect to the prevailing model of ideological change from the Neolithic to the
Bronze Age, the body has been seen principally as a medium of signification
inscribed with ideological representations. This perspective is drawn largely from
socio-cu1tural anthropology, which since Darwin (1965) has sought to counter re-
ductions of bodily action to mere biology, taking the position that bodily expression,
activity, and representation are socially learned and hence culturally variable
(Durkheim 1964; Hertz 1960; Efron 1972; LeBarre 1947; Mead and Macgregor 1951;
Kluckhohn 1954). This has led to a preoccupation with the social classification,
symbolic conununication, and representation of the body, as in the work of Uvi-
Strauss (1963; 1966). In short, there has been an overall concern with 'social bodies'
or the way in which 'social meaning is grafted onto the physical medium of the
human body', a perspective which continues to inform more recent anthropology
(Polhemus 1975; Benthall and Polhemus 1975; Polhemus 1978; Synnott 1993). For
instance, Douglas (1973:93; 1966; 1975) asserts that 'the social body constrains the
way the physical body is perceived.' In turn, the body as perceived by the in-
dividual, as well as its representation to others, serves to sustain an image of the
social body - the ideological component. Though this notion of the body as a com-
pletely social construct has certain merits, it is deficient. Most importantly, it does
not satisfactorily address the fundamental relationship between the body and sub-
jectivity.
Above I invoked the concept of subjectivity with respect to the Althusserian
account of ideology, though without explicitly discussing or defining it. In general
terms, the notion has traditionally been associated with conscious selfawareness on the
part of the individual. This is particularly developed in Cartesian metaphysics and
Husserlian phenomenology. However, various thinkers within the 'structuralist/
118 TREHERNE

post-structuralist' tradition have expressed a strong suspicion of subjectivity, leading

to a demand for a genetic account of its production (subjectification) and a refusal to
accept it as essential (i.e. as given). This position has had considerable influence in
recent archaeological thought (e.g. Shanks and Tilley 1987a; 1987b; Tilley 1990; Bapty
and Yates 1992), but suffers from some very serious weaknesses. For instance,
though Foucault's (1977;1981; 1983a; 1983b; 1984a; 1984b; 1985; 1986; 1988) genealogy
of subjectivity overcomes Althusser's radical disembodiment and dehistoricisation of
the subjectification process (the same illusory subject is given to every epoch, pas-
sively functioning as the bearer of social structures: Eagleton 1991), its dualistic
scheme of subjectification (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983; Foucault 1983a; 1983b; 1988)
tends to slide towards one or the other extreme of a purely de<entred ('dividing
practices') or 'intentional and voluntary' (Foucault 1985:10, 'technologies of the self')
process (Frank 1991;Schilling 1993).
A useful means of transcending this dualism may be found in those theorists who
emphasise the non-discursive, infra-conscious, or embodied dimension of social
practices which contribute to subjectification. The best modem representative of this
tradition, which springs from the seminal work of Merleau-Ponty (1962), is Bourdieu
(1977;1984; 1990a; 1990b; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). Above I alluded to his con-
cept of habitus, generative schemes that engender actions, thoughts, and perceptions
consistent with their conditions of acquisition, yet I omitted their specific mode of in-
culcation, namely embodiment. Bourdieu coined the term 'bodily hexis' to capture
the way in which the fundamental though arbitrary principles of a culture are
appropriated by the body, and thus rendered 'durable'. This has profound implica-
tions for self-understanding, which is practically instilled in the socialisation process
and the reproductive practices of everyday life, precisely because it is inscribed in
the body. Unlike for Foucault, even morality is often non-discursive, learned and re-
produced through everyday and apparently trivial 'techniques of the body' (cf.
Mauss 1979, from whom Bourdieu derived the notion of habitus and its embodied
nature). In a similar vein, Giddens sees the infra-conscious engagement of the body
with the material and social world and its management in social interaction as
central to the maintenance of a sense of unity and continuity in time-space, a bio-
graphy of self (Giddens 1984; 1991; cf. Goffman 1959; 1961; 1971; Garfinkel 1967;
Harre 1994). However, like the later Foucault, Giddens (1991:242) tends to over-
emphasise the discursiveness of subjectivity - 'the self is the agent as characterised
by the agent.'
In order to clarify my position on the relationship between body and subjectivity, I
shall briefly develop a critique of another post-structuralist posture, that of Lacan, as
it has been invoked archaeologically by Yates, in an effort to specify the nature of
masculinity - male subjectivity and sexual identity in particular - as revealed
through the rock art of the Nordic Bronze Age (Nordbladh and Yates 1990; Yates
1992;1994). In particular, Yates argues that an ethic of aggressive masculinity is evid-
enced in the petro glyphs, which functioned as a discourse to produce masculine self-
identity by inscribing it in bodies. To put it most crudely, following the work of
Lacan and Deleuze and Guattari, Yates develops the positio~ that subjectivity does
THE MASCUUNE BODY AND SELF-IDENTITY IN BRONZE-AGE EUROPE 119

not originate or inhere in the body, but is imposed externally: a subject's identity
begins to crystallise when the child first (mis)apprehends itself as a unitary and auto-
nomous identity through the objectification of the self in an image ('mirror phase'),
and is completed with its entry into language and 'the Symbolic', through which the
child learns to identify and represent itself with the first person singular pronoun
('I') (Lacan 1977:1-7). However, what 'the mirror' and language offer the child, as
Althusser's ideology, is an imaginary identity (ego): the 'subject' emerges merely as a
sign within a significatory system of differences. No inherent identity or character-
istics are granted to corporeality. Prior to its entry into the Symbolic (in which the
rock art is included), the child's body is a bundle of unordered desire, a 'body with-
out organs' in Deleuze and Guattari's scheme, which is to say a body without an
image imposed on it by culture: 'everything that was hitherto though ... to inhere in
the body, is ... a cultural construction' (Yates 1994:61; 1992; Deleuze and Guattari
1984).
There are three principal problems with this account. First, the insistence that the
body and subjectivity are purely cultural-linguistic constructs, a position similar to
that of the anthropologists discussed above, is untenable in that it utterly denies the
organic existence of the body, the physicality by virtue of which it can actively resist
social construction (Ellen 1977; McDougall 1977). The reduction of the body and self
to a mere product of discourse or the symbolic is fundamentally idealist and as such
at odds with the materiality of the subject rooted in the body (cf. Marx's 1st Thesis on
Feurbach; Blacking 1977; Ellen 1977; Foucault 1980; Turner 1984; Elias 1991; Giddens
1991; Shilling 1993). Furthermore, Yates and Lacan maintain that self-identity does
not inhere in the body and must be learned, but they, as most anthropologists,
privilege the discursive representation of the body, whether in the 'mirror' or
Symbolic, as essential to subjectivity. As such, their account is a paradigmatic
example of 'intellectualism': the 'intellectualist language of representation' sub-
stitutes the detached, totalising and disembodied, 'observers relation to practice for
the practical relation to practice' (Bourdieu 1977:116; 1990a:34; d. I<risteva 1973).
That is, the typical structuralist/post-structuralist 'retreat into the code' of significa-
tion (Giddens 1979; 1987) ignores the practical logic of subjectification, inscribed in
the lived body - like language in Wittgenstein's aphorism, it takes subjectivity and
the body' on holiday'. In response, I should like to reassert the fundamental material-
ity of the body and self, not to advocate a facile naturalism (e.g. socio-biology), but to
restore their practical necessity.
Second, there is no account of the practical character of the body and self because
the subject is largely equated with the conscious ego presiding over an unconscious,
surely a mistake (Giddens 1984). There is no notion of an infra-conscious mode of
thought, action, and being -Ie sens pratique (Bourdieu 1990a; Giddens 1979; 1984). As
Yates (1992) argues, self-consciousness is 'dependent on a representational con-
frontation with the Other ... [and] made possible only by language.' Yet, the human
subject, as the interface par excellence between the mental and the material (Godelier
1986), possesses a consciousness which is intrinsically corporeal, not least because it
is practically mediated by the body (Bourdieu's position: 'after two hundred years of
120 TREHERNE

pervasive Platonism, it is hard for us to think that the body can 'think itself' through
a logic alien to that of theoretical reflection' (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992:172».
Third, as a consequent of the second problem, there is no notion of the 'lived
body', as it is discussed by Merleau-Ponty. There is no acknowledgment that the
body is a unique object in that our knowledge and understanding of it is not entirely
dependent on its representation in a signification system: it can be 'known from
within' (Harre 1994:14).
Hence, in addition to language, ,the "1" has to be related to the body as the sphere
of action' (Giddens 1984). The body is central, both in a genetic (socialisation) and
chronic (day-to-day practice) sense, to subjectification. Specifically, self-identity
emerges through the infant's sensory exploration of the body as a practical medium
of action and the concomitant expansion of non-discursive consciousness, both of
which precede and facilitate linguistic competence.7 Self-consciousness is realised as
the reflexive monitoring of every-day conduct, which proceeds to a large degree at
an infra-conscious level (Giddens 1979). A coherent sense of self-identity and person-
hood is created and its continuity in time/space sustained by routine and reflexive,
yet practical, activities demanding mutual trust between agents, especially those in-
volving the management of the body (Giddens 1991; Goffman 1959; 1961; 1971; and
Garfinkel 1967; Harre 1994). This is not to deny that the perception of the body as an
objectified image is central to subjectification (Postal 1965; Fisher and Cleveland
1968),but to assert the active role of the body in this process.
What has been said thus far is rather general and ahistorical. However, following
Nietzsche, the body is an unfinished organism which is 'completed' by the in-
dividual within a particular socio-historical context (furner 1992; Schilling 1993).
Hence, one must consider the specific contours of a mode of subjectification - though
(contra Foucault and Yates) this does not entail reducing self-identity to the construct
of its cultural milieu. In this light, I shall now turn to consider the specific nature of
masculine self-identity for the Bronze-Age warrior elite.

THE WARRIOR'S BEAUTY

Beau ty in death
Having critiqued the notion of ideology as inadequate and offered a revised theoret-
ical perspective from which to approach practices associated with the human body, I
now wish to explore the latter's implications for the complex of consumable goods
and expressive practices of the developed Bronze Age described above. I have dis-
cussed the nature of Bronze-Age burial and the role of the body as the centre-piece of
a signification system involving grave goods arranged around and upon it, prior to
raising the mound or igniting the pyre. lbis group of signs was designed to fix in the
minds of the onlookers an image of the deceased during the relatively brief duration
of the funeral ceremony. How, if at all, were the grave goods used in this context?
Let us begin with the toilet articles.
A functional term is given to the ' toilet articles', for since the nineteenth century
they have generally been ~cknowledged to be associated with various forms of bod-
 THE MASCUUNE BODY AND SELF-IDENTITY IN BRONZE-AGE EUROPE 121

ily grooming and transformation: shaving, combing and plucking hair, scarification,
tattooing, etc. (Childe 1928; 1929; 1930; Jockenhovel 1971; S0rensen 1991a; Schutz
1983). 1his is not an uncritical interpretation, as in Wiltshire, Silesia, and many places
in central Europe, razors with hair attached have been found Oockenhovel 1971).
Furthermore, many of the toilet articles show signs of wear, resharpening
(hammering), and repair (notably tweezers) (S0rensen 1987; personal communica-
tion). Finally, in many of the well-preserved Danish burials in oak coffins (e.g.
Trindlwj, Borum lEslwj), there is evidence of pubic hair and/or cephalic hair, but no
traces of a beard - 'die Manner in den bekannten Eichsbaumsiirgen der iilteren Bronzezeit
waren aile rasierf (Baudou 1960:30; Broholm and Hald 1948; Coles and Harding 1979).
Let us consider the use of toilet articles in mortuary practices more carefully.
The body in the Bronze Age was the centre-piece in a signification system com-
posed of mutually referential personal items. However, because of the comparative
brevity of the funerary ceremonies, stock formulae for the representation of part-
icular social identities, involving certain artefact assemblages (e.g. our warrior
'package') and their arrangement with respect to the body, were often employed (a
convention analogous to that used in the complementary institution of epic poetry -
see below). How were the toilet articles involved in these acts of semiosis? A perusal
of the well-preserved oak-coffin graves from Denmark in the Bronze Age (period
II/III) confinns Jockenhovel's assertion that there was no standard position in which
toilet articles were interred with respect to the corpse Oockenhovel 1971; Aner and
Kersten 1973; 1976). However, a broad distinction may be drawn between those
items, including toilet articles and ornaments, which were treated as part of the
costume and arranged directly on or beside the body, and swords, which were
placed outside the cow hide that was frequently used to mantle the corpse. This
separated the presentation of the body and sword into two acts (Serensen 1991b;
1992). Furthermore, in general, the Bronze-Age costumes, composed of clothing/
object combinations, were fairly simple and standardised in terms of the syntagmatic
and paradigmatic arrangement of their components (Hodder 1982a; 1987; Thomas
1991a; 1991b; S0rensen 1991b).
Beyond simply being arranged around the body, it is likely that the toilet articles
were actually used either in the preparation of the corpse or by the participants in
the funerary ceremonies. In the Iliad (XXIII, 135 ff.), the mourners shaved or plucked
their locks and mantled the deceased with them. I shall return to the possible
significance of this act below, but it is important to note here that the use of the toilet
articles by mourners and on the deceased probably played a role in fixing a certain
image of the latter in death.
Still, we have yet to broach the question of just what message that image was in-
tended to convey. According to the 'prestige ideology' model, funerary rites in-
volved the creation and manipulation of idealised images of the deceased, for the
purposes of legitimisation and social aggrandisement (Randsborg et al. 1981; Parker
Pearson 1982; 1984; Shennan 1982a; Kristiansen 1984a; Tilley 1984; Thomas 1991a).
We have reviewed the theoretical shortcomings of this model, reiterated in Thomas'
(1991a:140) assertion that mortuary rites are not merely ideological, but central in
122 TREHERNE

forming 'a community's expectation of what it is to be a person.' In particular, the

latter, following Bloch and Parry, suggests that the late Neolithic practice of dis-
articulation and secondary burial was the product of a society that perceived indi-
vidual existence as a transient state of being, whilst the ancestors existed as a collect-
ivity (Bloch and Parry 1982). 1bis is a fundamentally different notion of personhood
to that exhibited in the Beaker period and early Bronze Age, when the transition to
single inhumation may imply the subject was no longer merely 'a temporary trans-
formation of materials held in common by the conununity' but a bounded, 'isolated
thing, indivisible in perpetuity' (Thomas 1991a:142; 1991b). Specifically, the bones
and grave goods were deposited in such a fashion as to ensure the continuity of the
identity of the deceased as personal and named, rather than generalised, ancestor.
In a complementary vein, Tarlow has rebuked the ideology theorists for cynically
reducing human practices in burial contexts to little more than the expression of an
inexorable will to power. Rather, in burial 'neither actual nor idealised relations of
power are being expressed, but particular responses to a profoundly meaningful part
of human experience' (Tarlow 1992:126). Similarly, Vemant (1991c:76) argues that
funerary practice 'makes use of the social imagination in order to develop an
acculturation of death.' In particular, affective attitudes towards death such as grief
playa central part in the mourners' attempt to come to terms with their anguish.
Drawing on Thomas and Tarlow, I focus not on the bereavement which ac-
companies death, but another emotion: existential anxiety or what Kierkegaard
terms dread (Giddens 1991; Baumann 1992). Through discontinuity death highlights
human finitude and thus poses a threat to our framework for coping with one of the
most basic existential questions: that of self-identity and its continuity (ibid.; Harre
1994). Specifically, death's 'radical alterity' (Vemant 1991c:76) challenges the routine
aspects of daily life through which a sense of continuity of body and self in time and
space (self-identity or subjectivity) is created and sustained (Giddens 1991). The
death of the embodied subject stirs in humans profound fear and anxiety: 'beyond
the threshold, on the other side, a face of terror: the unspeakable' (Vemant 1991c:83).
Furthermore, in its challenge to self-identity, death forces our daily coping frame-
works from the infra-conscious level and renders them explicit, particularly in
mortuary practices. Thus, in funerary rites one may see how death and its ritual
articulates with the rest of lived experience (Tarlow 1992; Barrett 1993).
How did the members of our late-Bronze-Age status group, the 'warrior aristo-
cracy', cope with the Angst provoked by death? Different social group's deal with it
in rather subtle ways; I shall use Homeric epic as a relevant means of illustration,
analogous to our case in quite profound if not direct terms.8 In the Iliad and Odyssey
there is no conception of a blissful afterlife, only Hades: an existence devoid of
mental or physical consciousness (Schein 1984). In addition, there is no notion of an
inunortal soul inhering within a corporeal vessel, the latter merely a transient object
of nature, as was later to develop in Platonic metaphysics and early Christian theo-
logy. Rather, the self and body were largely aligned. 1his intertwining of the cor-
poreal and subjective leads to a paradox: the human body is the seat of subjectivity,
yet it is ephemeral, thus exacerbating the existential threat to self-identity posed by
THE MASCUUNE BODY AND SELF-IDENTITY IN BRONZE-AGE EUROPE 123

death.9 How did the Homeric Greeks cope with this anxiety - how did they tran-
scend death? They did it in death.
There are two distinctive features to the Greek means of socially integrating death:
'the role of memory and the place of the individual, envisaged in the uniqueness of
his biography' (Vernant 1991c:81).There was only one way that the self, the subject,
could transcend death: in the minds of the living (Vernant 1991a; 1991b; 1991c;
1991e). In particular, by achieving a 'beautiful death', the warrior 'inscribes his real-
ity as an individual subject on the collective memory of the group' thereby achieving
a certain immortality (Vernant 1991b:57). Specifically, through attaining excellence
(ap£T~) and glory (lCA.EOS') in life, and especially in death, the subject would be pre-
served in two ways (Schein 1984; Vernant 1991a). First, the funerary practices left
behind the enduring physicality of the funerary monument, a highly visible
memorial of the deceased's exploits (Barrett 1993; cf. Rowlands 1993). Second, in the
epic songs of oral poetry the individual is preserved from the anonymity of death.
What gave this fonn of death its value, its necessity, was its contrast to that which
was most nightmarish for the Homeric warrior, that which negated his one means of
dealing with the anxiety of death: the mutilation of the corpse (Vernant 1991a; 1991b;
1991d). At death, the body, to which the self remained connected, became the object
for the actions of others. The corollary to care, mourning and funerary rites, was its
disfiguration by the enemy - what RecYield terms the 'anti-funeral' (Redfield 1994).
Specifically, defilement and pollution of the self through outrages visited on the
body and its abandonment as carrion to birds and dogs threatened to deprive the in-
dividual of his identity and dispatch him unremembered to the underworld: 'the
horror of the indescribable, which cuts you off altogether from the living, the dead
and the self'; Priam's nightmare (Vemant 1991b:72). This accounts for the great con-
cern for what happens to the corpse and the struggle over fallen bodies in Homer
(Schein 1984). However, such horror is part of the existential anxiety which ac-
companies death in general and not restricted to Homeric society. The visible decay
of the corpse unleashes those unspeakable visions (blood, pus, rotting flesh, 'the
sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay') which both fascinate and revolt us - the
'abject' - which, because they are at the 'border of ... [our) condition as a living
being', we must routinely and 'permanently thrust aside in order to live' (Kristeva
1988:3).The culmination of a beautiful death in funerary rites fixes a place for the de-
ceased both in the landscape and the minds of others and as such is one way to obvi-
ate the horror and anonymity of death's threshold.
How does this relate to the European Bronze Age? We have already seen the im-
portance of fixing an image of the deceased, through a manipulation of the corpse, in
the minds of the onlookers and inscribing it in their memory (Thomas 1991a; 1991b).
However, rather than seeing this as caught up in ideological mystification or power-
jockeying, one might suggest instead that it is a fundamental means of coping with
the emotion of existential anxiety evoked by the death of a(n important) member of
society. Against the prospect of the rotting corpse, the spectacle was designed to
highlight, or even embellish, the beauty of the deceased, not simply for social
aggrandisement but to bring about a change of state in the warrior lying in his tomb.
124 TREHERNE

Specifically, it involved a 'transmutation of the subject that functions in and through

the body', a reconstitution of the individual's personal being in the memory of his
survivors (Vernant 1991b:68). The body was not, as in the early Neolithic, broken
down and interred over time, only to be continually retrieved in its skeletal
(decayed) form. Rather, it was briefly displayed in all its grandeur and then dis-
patched to the other world - which is to say it was consumed by the raising of the
mound or later by flame10 - 'still intact in the integrity of its form and beauty'
(Vernant 1991d:87).
The significance of memory in Bronze-Age funerary practices and cultural trans-
mission has recently been highlighted both by Mizoguchi and Rowlands (Mizoguchi
1993; Rowlands 1993). One need only think of the tumuli of middle-Bronze-Age
Europe, situated on the highest, most conspicuous points in the landscape, or the
stelae of the late-Bronze-Age urnfields. These concrete markers were a store of signif-
ication - a means of mnemonically preserving the deceased in social discourse -
which could structure continual social interaction and thereby the living, remem-
bering, individual's sense of self and continuity: 'self, body and memory are . . . in-
timately related (Giddens 1984:51;cf. Frank 1991;Thomas 1994).
However, it is doubtful that the goods interred in the graves received their mean-
ing exclusively from participation in a closed and abstract significatory system
centred on the corpse - a 'text' analogous in structure and function to that of epic
poetry. Rather, they also were meaningfully implicated in their contextual uses in
everyday life (Hodder 1982a; 1987). In fact, the consumables interred in the tumuli
metaphorically or metonymically 'spoke of ... [their] own history and its association
with specific practices' in the lived world (Barrett 1993:121; Thomas 1991b). The
memory created through signification centred on the corpse was designed to elicit
references to feats and reputations achieved in life - deeds to be remembered in
thought and song. nus leads me into a discussion of subjectivity and the body in
relation to the role the entire assemblage of goods and practices associated with the
developed Bronze-Age ideology played in the life style of the warrior elite.

Beauty in life
The notion that the constellation of grave goods discussed throughout this essay
were implicated in the life style of a warrior elite implies that their use was not con-
fined to mortuary practices. This is arguably clear for the weaponry, particularly the
swords (many of which are sharpened), the drinking vessels and harness/wheeled
vehicles, yet Barrett (1993:116)has warned that 'although similar items may have
been used both to dress the living and to adorn the corpse, we must distinguish
between the two ... the adornment of the corpse was obviously not as part of its
own self-conscious display as in the dress of the living.' With specific reference to
toilet articles, he has argued that they were restricted to funerary rituals, a thesis
which is lent credence by their near exclusive presence in graves. However, the toilet
articles do appear to have been an integral part of the warrior life style. Given the
wear and repair of the implements, despite their continual removal from circulation
in graves, they must have been used and curated in life and not only in mortuary
THE MASCULINE BODY AND SELF-IDENTITY IN BRONZE-AGE EUROPE 125

rites. Furthermore, many of the features of the well-preserved Danish period IT/m
corpses, such as well-manicured hands (e.g. Muldbjerg), could not have been
produced in the context of mortuary rituals, but would have required daily care for
extended periods of time. In addition, most of the anthropomorphic representations
from Bronze-Age Europe are either beardless or attest to the grooming of facial
hair.ll
Hence, the toilet articles, as well as the other consumables, were implicated in
bodily practices which comprised a life style, structuring every-day interaction. The
implications of this are profound, in that the notion of a unique life style of an emerg-
ent warrior aristocracy suggests not only a novel ideology, but a new notion of self
and personhood, grounded in changing attitudes to and practices in, on, and
through the body.
Thomas has made a similar claim, with respect to the relationship between subject-
ivity and the habitual movement and perception of the liv~d body within socio-
culturally constructed space, in the context of the transformation in ritual archi-
tecture between late-Neolithic and Bell-Beaker Wessex (Thomas 1991a; 1991b; 1994).
But rather than seeing built space as inscribed by ideology (e.g. Kus 1982; 1984;
Leone 1984), Thomas (1991a:ch. 3; 1989; 1990; 1994) envisions practical engagement
with architecture and landscape as a mode of subjectification and hence 'an element
of what Foucault would term a technology of the self.' Though this account has a
great deal of affinity with the position I am developing in this paper, Thomas' atten-
tion is given to the manipulation of individual bodies, and concomitant notions of
subjectivity, through the dominant interpretations of built or acculturated space
fixed by hegemonic groups. As such, he has mistakenly invoked Foucault's notion of
technology of the self, when what he is really concerned with is an external process
of subjectification: what Foucault terms' dividing practices'. While Thomas (1994;cf.
Frank 1991) is correct to argue that the techniques of self-understanding which
Foucault (1985:10-11) discusses are not the exclusive province of the individual, but
are also given by society, he misses the essence of this concept: an aesthetics of exist-
ence effected through reflexive, personal action. For the late-Bronze-Age warrior, an
aesthetic of male beauty appears to have been central in life as well as death, the two
states mutually constituting one another and together the individual's self-identity.
In this light, we shall consider hair, the modification of which the razors, tweezers,
and combs were principally associated with.
In the context of expounding the 'ideology model', I alluded to Kristiansen's
assumption that toilet articles were used for bodily transformation, specifically hair-
dressing, as a means of display and social distinction - a position which resonates
with Veblen's (1970) remarks on hair as a medium of conspicuous consumption. For
some time, anthropologists have recognised hair, both of body and head, as a potent
symbol in most cultures (Wilken 1886; Leach 1958; Hallpike 1969; Synnott 1993),
because its relation to the body is highly ambiguous: it continually grows, may be
painlessly cut, etc. (MacRae 1975; Hallpike 1969). Social interpretations have exer-
cised the greatest influence, portraying coiffure as socially constructed, conunun-
icative, and principally involved in episodic rituals entailing changes in social status
126 TREHERNE

- rites de passage - including death itself (Leach 1958;Hallpike 1969; Synnott 1993).
However, given my contention that toilet articles were used in daily life, I wish to
focus on grooming as part of an aesthetic of the body cultivated by the life style of
the warrior elite. Like the perfumed oil of Archaic Greece, the toilet articles belong
'to a concern with the body, its appearance, and personal condition', and hence to the
identity of the owner (Shanks 1993a; 1992). In this light, it is interesting to find a
general consensus that hair forms a central component of self-identity cross-cultur-
ally (Wilken 1886; Frazer 1915; Hutton 1928; Leach 1958; Hallpike 1969; Synnott
1993). In particular, the head is widely associated with the self, including in Homer
and Indo-European philology (Onians 1951). In the latter contexts, zones of part-
icular significance on the head are the face, the 'prime symbol of the self' as well as
hair (Synnott 1993:73;Onians 1951; Vernant 1991a; Redfield 1994). Yet, uniquely, it is
not as a receptacle for the soul that the head receives its significance for self-identity
in Homer. Rather, it was through the body itself that the Homeric Greek came 'to
express and think about his relation to himself, his presence to himself' (Vernant
1991a:31;1991b; 1991e;Onians 1951; Vermeule 1979;Schein 1984; Redfield 1985;1994;
Loraux 1989). What is often rendered 'soul', psyche ('I'UX~), 'has none of the intel-
lectual or spiritual significance that it came to have for later Greeks and for the West'
(Schein 1984:68).
In addition, the head is often seen as the source of life and seed, and thus hair is
associated with sexual potency (Berg 1951; Derrett 1973); the Homeric warrior's
'flower of vitality' - particularly the beard, a sacred element, the first appearance of
which signals the coming of generative power and marks the individual male with
the vibrant beauty unique to the warrior (Vemant 1991b:66; Onians 1951). However,
because of its potency, regimens of hair management are necessary to avoid pollu-
tion (Leach 1958; Sutherland 1977). The Homeric, like the later Spartan, Celtic, or
Frankish, warrior grew his hair long and delighted in its grooming; the Celtic
warrior is said to have washed his hair back with lime before entering battle. Such
'regimens' of bodily appearance are central to the constitution of self-identity and
subjectivity (Foucault 1985;1986; Giddens 1991).
However, this emphasis on the practical, day-to-day hair rituals which are con-
stitutive of self-identity is not intended to deny the importance of hair in focussed
rituals of a more episodic nature. In fact, its importance to the male elite in daily life
makes sense of why it, as 'that which most embodies their nature as fierce warriors'
(Vemant 1991b:66), may have been the object of ritual treatment in death. Detached
hair is commonly thought to retain its potency (Leach 1958; Hallpike 1969). In the
Iliad, the mourners drape the deceased with their hair, perhaps as a sign of grief and
with an impulse not to let him go - in parting, the mourners part with a part of
themselves, that which symbolises the self (Redfield 1994). In addition to mortuary
contexts, hair is often associated with sacrifice (Wilken 1886), a notion that is borne
out by the deposition of Bronze-Age braided locks (female or male?) in Danish bogs
(Brendsted 1962).
Yet, as a form of bodily 'mutilation',12 coiffure underscores the need to forge a
definition of the body which is not limited to the boundaries of the epidermis.
THE MASCUUNE BODY AND SElf-IDENTITY IN BRONZE-AGE EUROPE 127

Rather, bodily decoration, adornment, and clothing must be included in any account
of bodily transformation and its relation to society and the self (MacRae 1975;
Polhemus 1978; 1988). This expansion of the corporeal sphere may be illustrated
through a discussion of the entire panoply of goods and practices of the Bronze-Age
warrior aristocracy.
The toilet articles were not the only artefacts implicated in subjectification through
their association with die Art der Kiirperpjlege (Hansel 1968:54). I have already men-
tioned the ornaments that proliferated in this period. Certain of these, in conjunction
with various weapons, must be seen as components of costumes that characterised
the warrior of the late Bronze Age (Serensen 1991b). These costumes not only visu-
ally and acoustically accentuated the body (Schutz 1983; Serensen 1991b), nor did
they only function as a medium of non-verbal (semiotic) communication (S0rensen
1987; 1991b; 1992; d. Barthes 1967; Bogatyrev 1971), but formed the context within
which the lived body reached an understanding of self. Socio-culturally organised
regimes of self-adornment not only physically protect the individual, but symbolic-
ally express narratives of self-identity (Fischer 1964; Mazuri 1970; Polhemus 1978;
1988;Giddens 1991). In fact, all aspects of bodily appearance, notably modes of dress
and adornment, are involved in what Giddens terms bodily demeanour, or 'the styl-
ized conduct of the individual within the contexts of day-to-day life' through which
he or she creates a specific impression of self as well as personhood, applied both re-
flexively and to others (Giddens 1991:242). In Homer, 'all these precious objects ...
belong to ... [a person's] "appurtenances", like his (or her) arms or legs, and,
together with the other parts of the body, define that person's bodily configuration'
(Vernant 1991a:38). Similarly, the male drinking practices involving alcohol as a
stimulant were concerned with alterations in bodily experience in the context of
social interaction and as such were only part of a spectrum of expressive behaviour
involving consumption, which includes bodily applications such as perfume and
incense and grade into other categories such as cosmetics and paints, and the use of
ornaments and special clothing (Sherratt 1991).
The same is true of the other Bronze-Age goods and practices, all of which exhibit
a fundamentally personal character and together sustained a distinct life style among
the warrior ~lite. However, perhaps the best representative of the implications of
these 'techniques of the body' on subjectivity is the weaponry, especially the sword
and the personal style of warfare associated with it. Shanks has emphasised that 'war
is not only a restricted field of political authority and physical domination; war is a
function of the body. The body is the site of the political ethos of militarism' (Shanks
1993a; 1993b). Specifically, there is a bodily aesthetics to warfare and violence which
is cultivated through the life style of the warrior. As Theweleit (1987; 1989; Frank
1991) argues, the body of the masculine warrior is experienced as a dark territory, a
source of fear, which in battle is turned outward and erupts in explosive energy.
How this energy is harnessed, turned into a bodily aesthetic of violence, however, is
culturally and historically variable. Theweleit was concerned with the modem
warrior (specifically the German Freikorps) - the professional soldier, for whom this
energy is channelled through drills and subordination to the fighting machine
128 TREHERNE

(Shanks 1993a). In particular, he is the construct of a tradition of 'disciplines', which

resolve the soldier's actions into a syntax of bodily motions, each of which is then
subject to rigid conditioning and temporal imperatives. The weapon is treated as but
a component in this scheme of imposed gestures. In battle, as in training, the soldier
emerges as a non-individual, his personal identity largely erased (the shaved head) -
he is but a segment within a larger machine: the army, 'the disciplined mass'
(Foucault 1977). 1bis conditioning of the soldier's body, however, did not emerge ex
nihilo in the eighteenth century, but had its roots in the hoplite's phalanx (Vemant
1991b; Shanks 1993a) and the legionary's cohort (Foucault 1977).
In contrast, consider the Miinnerbund of warriors so central to ancient European
mythology and society (Benveniste 1973; Dumezil 1970; 1983): Hesiod's men of
Bronze (Nagy 1979. In their blood-stained bodies simmered the 'dark and recessive
dimension' of the Homeric hero (ibid.:172; Vian 1968). Yet, this was not a force to be
sublimated into rational, disciplined and anonymous murder (Elias 1994). Rather,
war was a personal matter, an expressive act of beauty undertaken between
individuals (Keegan 1993:102):'in this brooding atmosphere, combat is salvation; the
cruelty of victory is the pinnacle of life's jubilation' (Nietzsche 1982:34). And in the
fray, the body of the individual warrior served as an 'heraldic device' on which were
emblazoned the values which proclaimed his honour (T11J~) and in which the forces
of ardour (IJEVOs-), fear (cPo~o~),desire (EpO~), and the warrior's frenzy (Auaaa) were
all invested (Foucault 1977; Vernant 1991a; 1991b). For this warrior, his weapons,
even more than his ornaments, were but an extension of his body and self (Vemant
1991a:37):
The powers that, in penetrating the body, act upon the inner scene in order
to move and animate it, find on its outside - in what a man wears or handles
(clothing, garb, adornment, weapons, tools) - extensions that permit them to
enlarge their field of action and to enforce their effects. For example, the
ardor of menos burns in the warrior's breast; it shines in his eyes. Sometimes,
in exceptional cases when it becomes incandescent, as with Achilles, this
menos bursts into flame above his head. But it also manifests itself in the
dazzling brilliance of the bronze worn by the warrior. Rising skyward, the
gleam of weapons that incites panic in the enemy's ranks is like an exhala-
tion of fire that burns in the warrior's body. The hero's accoutrements, the
prestigious arms that represent his career, his exploits, and his personal
value, are a direct extension of his body. They adhere to him, form an
alliance with him, are integrated into his remarkable figure like every other
trait of his bodily armour.

In this spirit, the 'invincible' arms and armour of Hesiod's Men of Bronze actually
grow 'out of their shoulders and over powerful limbs' (Frazer 1983:102 148-9). The
centrality of personal weaponry to the body-self is further underscored by the
emphasis in Homer on the stripping of arms from the enemy as a form of pollution
and defilement (Friedrich 1973; Rowlands 1980;Redfield 1994).
In short, the ancient sovereign warrior of a bygone 'heroic age' cultivates a differ-
THE MASCUUNE BODY AND SELF-IDENTITY IN BRONZE-AGE EUROPE 129

ent aesthetic of body and violence to that of the modem soldier. 1his is the product
of a different life style, one not only of risk and violence, but of luxury and excess
(Shanks 1993a), seen in the valuable weaponry but also the bodily grooming and
cu1tivatio~ an aesthetic, which presupposes a position of privilege (Bourdieu 1977;
1984).In turn, this life style is constitutive of a different form of self-identity than that
of the modem soldier. Contrary to Beck, the Western mind/body dichotomy does
not come to us via a long Indo-European heritage - the Homeric warrior has a sense
of himself, as his body, in and through his actions: 'existence is prior to the con-
sciousness of existing ... the cogito ergo sum ... has no meaning for a [Homeric]
Greek. I exist because I have hands, feet, and feelings; I exist because I walk and run,
because I see and feel. But I never think my existence through the consciousness I
have of these sensations' (Beck1975;Vemant 1991f:328-9;Redfield 1994).

CoNCLUSION

If the 'ideological unity' of the Chalcolithic complex of goods and practices is

expressed in the Baden wagon-shaped drinking cups (Sherratt 1994a:187), the
developed Bronze-Age complex oriented on the individual subject, through his
body, is captured in the anthropomorphic razor from Zealand (see title page). This
essay has been concerned with a suite of material culture, which has been associated
with distinct bodily practices and a new form of subjectivity that crystallised across
Europe in the mid-second millennium BC out of roots in the previous few millennia.
In particular, I have argued that this complex was part of a new and authentic life
style, specifically that of an emergent warrior elite, and not one which was lived in a
purely cynical fashion, as the prevailing notion of ideology suggests. However, my
intention has not been to debunk the notion of ideology, only to show that the
manner in which it is commonly employed in archaeology is deficient. As should be
clear from the previous discussion, the problems of ideology and subjectivity are by
no means contradictory, but rather complementary (cf.Shanks 1993a).
This life style was to remain remarkably intact for centuries of European history
and through some rather potent episodes of socio-historical change. However,
though the institution of the warrior elite was to survive into and in part give rise to
one component of the later feudal order, at the level of the body and self-identity this
ancient institution could not entirely resist such forces as Romanisation and Christ-
ianisation. The seeds of transformation were sewn with the emergence in antiquity of
religious mysticism - Pythagorism, Orphism, and Gnosticism (Williams 1989) -
which increasingly transferred the self from body to soul. Plato lent metaphysical
credence to this vision (Loraux 1989; Vernant 1991e), which later found its most ex-
treme exponent in Plotinus (Alliez and Feher 1989; Vemant 1991e). With late pagan-
ism there also emerged, in Stoicism for instance, an explicit concern for developing
an intimate relationship with the self, for self-decipherment, introspection (Foucault
1985; 1986; 1988). With the dissemination of this movement throughout the Roman
Empire the stage was set for the early Christian holy man, whose renunciation of
worldly life emerged as a cornerstone of Western subjectivity (Brown 1988). Still, the
130 TREHERNE

corporeality of subjectivity among the European warrior aristocracy resisted this

change: the Germanic elite did not initially adopt the metaphysical extremism of
eastern Christianity, they took up Arianism and Christ was depicted with the trap-
pings of the warrior.13 Furthermore, this physicalist Ouistianity, though ultimately
renounced as heresy (not until the seventh century in Germanic Europe), profoundly
shaped the self-identity of the developing medieval warrior elite - the knights - who
eventually found service for God in worldly acts14 which embodied expressive
themes and practices very reminiscent of those exhibited by their Bronze Age
forebears. Ultimately, however, the forces of corporeal self-negation proved too
strong, and during the high Middle Ages the ancient European institution of the
warrior nobility was gradually transformed into a court aristocracy stamped by a
rigid code of bodily manners (Elias 1994).With this was lost irrevocably the world of
the heroic warrior, for whom there was no notion of self-intimacy, much less an
abandonment of worldly life. Introspection was impossible, because' the subject does
not make up a closed, interior world that he must penetrate in order to find himself;
the subject is extroverted' (Vernant 1991f:328).This warrior experienced himself in
his actions, through which he pressed the logic of a worldly existence to its extreme,
winning for himself glory, beauty and eternal remembrance (ibid., 1991c). These
pages, like the scores of Bronze Age barrows still standing across Europe or the
surviving fragments of an oral poetic tradition, are a testimony to that memory.

NOTES

1. This essay derives largely from research undertaken for an M.Phil. dissertation at the
University of Cambridge. In the course of that work I benefitted from the advice of a number of
people, notably Marie-Louise Stig Serensen (my supervisor), Ian Hodder, and David Van
Reybrouck. Since submitting my dissertation, I also received very useful commentary from Andrew
Sherratt. Naturally, however, any faults of this paper are entirely my own. I should also like to
acknowledge the National Science Foundation (USA) for granting me a three-year graduate research
fellowship with which to finance the research for my M. Phil. dissertation and this paper.
2. To adapt one of Bourdieu's (1977) expressive metaphors.
3. The literature on this subject is quite extensive; for a sample of the various and conflicting
views on this process see Sandars 1961; 1963; Miiller-Karpe 1962; Foltiny 1964; Cowen 1951; 1955;
1958; 1966; Schauer 1971.
4. Childe (1930:98) once remarked that 'the majority of European razors belong to the same
family.
5. E.g. Rorty 1989; a cynical repetition of the 'end of ideology' proclamations of the post-war
period: Parsons 1977; Bell 1988.
6. The fault of Mannheim 1936 (the 'total' conception of ideology) and Geertz 1973; d. Giddens
1979;Miller and Tilley 1984;Thompson 1984.
7. Giddens 1984; Harre 1994; NB the (post-)structuralist disembodiment of language itself is
equally flawed, as demonstrated by post-Bakhtinian (e.g. Voloshinov, Vygotsky, etc.) and post-
Wittgenstinian (e.g. Austin, Searle, etc.) philosophy; American 'micro'-sociology/anthropology
(symbolic Interactionism [e.g. Mead, Goffman, etc.]; ethno-methodology [Garfinkel, Heritage, etc.];
conversation analysis [Sacks, Schegloff, Goodwin, etc.]; the ethnography of speaking [Ochs, Duranti,
etc.]); and socio-lingusitics (Gumperz, Hymes, Cicourel, etc.).
THE MASCUUNE BODY AND SEU:-IDENTITY IN BRONZE-AGE EUROPE 131

8. It is my contention that many features of Homeric (as well as Indic, Nordic or Celtic) epic re-
fleet the sort of socio<ultural climate - though not precisely the same cosmogeny - that prevailed in
much of Europe over the late Bronze Age and into the Iron Age: what some have termed an 'heroic
society' (d. Weber's 1968 remarks on the nature of values and beliefs in warrior status groups or
heroic societies; also Van Wees 1992).
9. A predicament that, with the 'death of God', has returned to haunt modernity (Harre 1994).
10. In the late Bronze Age (or early Iron Age in Greece), the shift to cremation need not have
changed the relation between body and soul, as it was the act of burial itself which was essential for
transferring the body to a new state, whether this involved its consumption by earth or flame
(Vermeule 1979).
11. Danish representations (e.g. statuettes from the Grevensvaenge hoard) are clean-shaven;
Mycenaean and Geometric representations (e.g. the 'Warrior Vase') often depict men with low-
shaven beards but no moustaches.
12. Tylor 1873; other examples are body tatooing and painting, also significant in the present
context as suggested by the 'tattooing' awls and the recent frozen body from northern Italy (6tzi);
late prehistoric warriors in Europe (Celts, Picts) were famous for painting their bodies.
13. Thanks to J. D. Hill for reminding me of this fact.
14. Perhaps, contra Weber, a prelude to the Reformation? In this case, maybe Childe was right in
thinking that the Western individualism and wordly ethic which gave rise to Weber's capitalist spirit
did not emerge ex nihilo with Protestantism in early modem Europe, but had their roots ultimately in
the Bronze Age, when the 'European' trajectory began to diverge from that of adjacent areas - not
only socially but at the level of embodied human subjectivity.

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ABSTRACT

The warrior's beauty: the masculine body and self-identity in Bronze-Age Europe
The concept of ideology has figured centrally in recent accounts of the fundamental social trans-
formation sweeping Europe from the mid-fifth to second millennia BC. In particular, many have
focussed on the human body as a principal medium of ideological expression, notably in terms of a
growing 'prestige goods ideology'. This paper endeavours to expose the deficiencies of this model,
which lie in its overly cynical nature and its disregard for the specific socio-cultural contours of
status expression. Specifically, by linking the 'ideological' transformations of this Period to the
development of a distinct institution, a male warrior status group, and its package of expressive
themes - individualism, warfare, bodily ornamentation, horses and wheeled vehicles, the hunt, the
ritual consumption of alcohol - I seek to demonstrate that the changing treabnent of the human
body in mortuary rites and in everyday life is more than ideological. In particular, it is implicated in
the development of a coherent life style, and as such is fundamentally bound up with changing
notions of Personhood and self-identity. Running through the fabric of this life style, through its
embodiment of the subject in both life and death, is an equally distinctive notion of male beauty,
unique to the warrior.