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Material Matters: Representation and Materiality of the Harappan Body

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Abstract

In the Indus Civilization (ca. 2600–1900 BC), a society with no readable texts and few larger-scale representations, terracotta figurines were the most common representations of the human body. This paper explores the unique construction of the material representations of bodies and other material culture from Harappa, a major Indus site now in Pakistan. Hand-modeling representations of human bodies from dual clay pieces, sometimes decorated with bone pigments, suggests a focus on the process and ideological rather than practical choices in the materialization of the Harappan human body. For the Harappans, material matters as they engage physically with their world and embody themselves and their worldview.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the editors of this special edition, Lynn Meskell and Stratos Nanoglou, for inviting me to contribute and for numerous constructive suggestions on earlier drafts that helped focus the central arguments and give the paper the appropriate structure. The paper also benefited greatly from the constructive comments of Jim Skibo, Catherine Cameron, Heather Miller, and anonymous reviewers. Although this paper draws upon research presented in my dissertation, the paper allowed me to think about these data in a new way. I would like to thank my doctoral advisors C. C. Lamberg-Karlovsky and Richard Meadow for their ongoing support and for reading portions of the work presented here. I’m also grateful to Steve Weiner for generously providing additional analyses of the pigment samples. This research was made possible through the generous cooperation of the Department of Archaeology and Museums of the Government of Pakistan, including the Harappa Museum and the National Museum of Pakistan, the Harappa Archaeological Research Project, the Lahore Museum, the University of Peshawar SSAQ Museum of Archaeology, the Archaeological Survey of India, and the National Museum of India. The American School of Prehistoric Research, the George F. Dales Foundation, the Harappa Archaeological Research Project, the Cora DuBois Charitable Trust, and Harvard University provided financial support for my research. Any errors are solely the responsibility of the author.

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    Sharri R. Clark

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Clark, S.R. Material Matters: Representation and Materiality of the Harappan Body. J Archaeol Method Theory 16, 231–261 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-009-9068-x

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