Relational bodies: Affordances, substances and embodiment in Chinchorro funerary practices c. 7000-3250 BP

Abstract

Funerary art has the body as its main material component, expresses responses to death and offers insight into relationships between the living and the dead. Chinchorro hunter-gatherer-fisher societies along the Atacama Desert coast provide a key example of such connections, having developed one of the world's oldest-known systems of post-mortem body transformation (c. 7000-3250 BP). A study of 162 modified Chinchorro bodies identifies diachronic changes in these practices, including a decrease in internal stuffing - adding invisible contents that created corporeal volume - and an increase in external body treatment that created visible features. The authors propose that such manipulation was a meaningful form of social embodiment designed to construct a collective identity.