Bodies and Containers

We cannot know how prehistoric people viewed their world because their voices have been lost. We must instead imagine as best we can from what little information we have, knowing that an educated guess is the best we can do. Anthropologists have long discussed the connection between bodies and containers in existing cultures. When we look at Bronze Age Food Vessels, which were buried with the dead (or used to contain the remains of the dead), we can wonder if they made the same connections. Were these abstract representations of human bodies? Where the patterns carved around the outside of the vessels drawn from clothing, tattoos, scarification, or something else? We will likely never know for sure, but we can use modeling to imagine what it might have looked like.