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by Thaisa Martins
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Dealing with the experimenter’s body has been a challenge for Experimental Archaeology since its consolidation as a subdiscipline. The subjectiveness of the experience of one’s body is pointed out as a major problem of this subject and, in a search for a more scientific perspective, it was indicated to try to discard the human element (body and experience) from the analysis. In the 2000’s, the Experimental Archaeology field initiated a turn to focus into a more interpretative and an immersive comparison with the past, trying to find the people behind these artifacts through experimentation. In this scenario, the issue of the experimenter’s body was placed as an interesting affair for methodological and interpretative data but remains a tricky matter to be approached. In this paper, we will present and demonstrate the concept of Artifactual Movement, a transdisciplinary approach between the Dance and the Archaeology field that we are developing in our PhD to address this query. Rooted in Marcel Mauss's idea of “Techniques of the Body '' we argue that, in an archaeological experiment we are engaging, invariably, with body techniques in order to carry out the experimentation. Using methodologies and theories from the Dance field, we propose a method to analyze the experimenter's body during an experimentation, transforming the body experience into analyzable and repeatable data. The result of the analysis will be the Artifactual Movement, a combination of body techniques that can be used to create hypotheses of ancient bodies imprinted in the materiality and accessed through Experimental Archaeology.

#EXARC #ExperimentalArchaeology #EAC13