Archaeological remains are ‘fragmented by definition’: apart from exceptional cases, the study of the human past takes into account mainly traces, ruins, discards, and debris of past civilisations. It is rare that things have been preserved as they were originally made and conceived in the past. However, not all the ancient fragmentary objects were the ‘leftovers’ from the past. A noticeable portion of them was part and parcel of the ancient materiality already in the form of a fragment or damaged item. In 2000, John Chapman, with his volume Fragmentation in Archaeology, attracted the attention of scholars on the need to reconsider broken artefacts as the result of the deliberate anthropic process of physical fragmentation. The phenomenon of fragmentation can be thus explored with more outcomes for a category of objects that played an important role inside the society: the figurines. Due to their portability and size, figurines are particularly entangled and engaged in social, spatial, temporal, and material relations, and – more than other artefacts – can easily accommodate acts of embodiment and dismemberment. The act of creation symmetrically also involves the act of destruction, which in turn is another act of creation, since from the fragmentation comes a new entity with a different ontology. Breaking contains the paradigms of life: creation and reparation, destruction and regeneration.

The scope of this volume is to search for traces of any voluntary and intentional fragmentation of ancient artefacts, creating, improving, and sharpening the methods and principles for a scientific investigation that goes beyond single author impression or sensitivity. The comparative lens adopted in this volume can allow the reader to explore different fields taken from ancient societies of how we can address, assess, detect, and even discuss the action of breaking and mutilation of ancient figurines.

• Front Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• At the dawn of a break: The agency of the damage
  • 1. In the footsteps of Auguste Rodin: Fragmentation is not an end
  • 2. The meaning of deliberate figurine fragmentation: Insights from the Old and New Worlds
• Beyond ritual: When the whole cracks
  • 3. In the beginning: Exploring integrity of anthropomorphic images in prehistoric Europe
  • 4. When garbage is art: Broken ceramic figural objects from ancient Honduras
  • 5. Parts, not wholes: Long histories and negative space analysis
  • 6. Not whole yet holy: Some breakage rituals and their significance in Hinduism and other religions of India
• The materiality of the damage: Searching for the intentionality
  • 7. Broken beyond repair. Reflections on the intentionality of breakage and its archaeological identification regarding Naqada period clay figurines
  • 8. The materiality of the damage in the faience figurine corpus from late Middle Bronze Age Egypt (1800–1550 BC)
  • 9. Breaking into pieces: An experimental investigation into fracture behaviours in ceramic female figurines
  • 10. Intentionality in the breaking. A case study of intentional damaging of figurines at Neolithic Tell Sabi Abyad (Syria) and Çatalhöyük (Turkey)
  • 11. Fragmented or intact – Mycenaean figurines and figures in cult and burial contexts
• Inside the fragmentation: Exploring methods and technologies
  • 12. Made it for breaking it? Assessing fragmentation of the Lahun figurines (Egypt, MBA II, c. 1800–1700 BC)
  • 13. Displaying the fragmented: Damaged and mutilated ancient Egyptian figures from Sir Charles Nicholson’s collection
  • 14. Broken collections: A 3D approach to the digital reunification and holistic study of dispersed terracotta figurines assemblages
• Concluding remarks
• Afterword: Strong at the broken places?