Crafting Kin: Clay and the Human Body in the Ancient World

The ubiquity of clay in the ancient world is often regarded as a result of mere practicality. And yet,
ancient peoples regularly theorized unique relationships between clay and flesh. In the ancient Greek epic
poem the Theogony, the craftsman god Hephaestus shaped Pandora “from earth.” That is, the first woman
was, essentially, a terracotta statue. In the K’iche’ Maya Popol Vuh, the Framer and the Shaper likewise
first attempt to make people out of mud and earth, but this creation is not successful. Why might clay be a
fitting material from which to consider rendering a human body? And how can thinking about the
affordances of clay provoke specific ways of understanding how the human body relates to the more-
than-human world?

This panel seeks to investigate how clay and objects made from it explore, interrogate, and redefine the
human body. Recent scholarship has approached both making and materiality as critical modes by which
knowledge about the cosmos and humanity’s place within it could be produced. How, therefore, do the
unique qualities of clay — from the site at which it is harvested to the transformative process of firing —
invite culturally specific understandings of the human body? From anthropogony to eschatology, how
could clay craft humanity? How did objects made of clay shape ancient ways of conceptualizing bodies
— and how do they provide evidence of those conceptions today? This panel invites considerations of the
relationship between clay and the human body from throughout the geo-temporal scope of the ancient
world.