This edited volume offers a new approach to the study of emotion in the past, focusing on the experience of emotional attachment. Psychological research has demonstrated that all humans are capable of forming a variety of close social and emotional attachments from cradle to grave, yet archaeology has not, to date, considered the significance of these attachments in any detail. Inspired by Bowlby’s theory of attachment, one of the key theories in developmental psychology over the last 60 years, this volume (...) sheds light on what attachment is, how it functions, and how it has influenced human life and material culture from the Palaeolithic to the present. This volume brings together contributions from authors focusing on a variety of subjects related to attachment, from social relationships with people and animals, to places, to material culture, from the deepest reaches of prehistory to the contemporary era. It aims to improve our understanding of where and how archaeologists can look for evidence of these attachments, and in doing so, it helps us to consider how these shape our understanding of human behaviour, cognition and life more broadly. This volume is of interest to archaeologists and scholars of social attachment theory. (shrink)

Archaeological contexts sometimes yield artefacts that are interpreted by scholars as ‘heirlooms’. Although the criteria of identifying them in the archaeological record are still not fully clear, these are considered objects of memory passed down in a human group at variable social levels (family, tribes, communities etc.) through generations, as symbolic markers of hereditary rank, ancestry, ethnicity and personal bond. I will present a case from a funerary area of Libarna, a Roman town located in the Regio IX of Italia (...) (Eastern Piedmont). This necropolis, whose occupation is dated between the first and third centuries AD, yielded a group of 36 tombs, both inhumations and cremations. One of these contained a child aged 5–10 years old, according to anthropological analysis. A rich outfit, including personal objects in precious materials and pottery typical of the Roman tradition, was placed along the child and dates the grave to the late first–second century AD. Within the grave goods, remarkable is the presence of a bronze object, conventionally called ‘borchia a scudetto’ in the archaeological literature. This is likely a cloth ornament frequently documented in the pre-Roman indigenous tombs and settlements of Liguria from the third to early first century BC. In this paper I will try to analyse the meaning of such an artifact, by focusing on the following key questions: (1) Can we consider this older object a ‘family heirloom’? (2) Why was it placed in a child’s tomb and how does this relate to the other grave goods? (3) Does the presence of the ornament within the funerary outfits reveal any form of individual or collective memory and personal attachment of the child (or of the living, who buried the child) toward family members, including their ‘ethnic’ component and how? (shrink)