I begin with a challenge to all of us working on embodiment, who base our analyses on the relatively durable media that we recover archaeologically-ornaments, pigments, and tools for the production and application of patterns to flesh-that are our archaeological stock-intrade.It is easy as an archaeologist to imagine that there is a natural boundary where the body-in this simplified view, a biological structure composed of flesh, blood, and bone-ends, and cultural additions begin.Anthropology as a broad discipline has repeatedly reminded us that this appearance is misleading.Some specific techniques, such as tattooing, reform the skin and thus displace the cultural into the surface of the flesh.Others, such as cranial modification, penetrate even deeper, reshaping bone to meet aesthetic expectations.As the chapters in this volume demonstrate, traces of such practices abound in archaeological sites, even after tens of thousands of years.In addition to artifacts used to produce these effects, they include modeled, painted, and engraved images of the human, the anthropomorphic, and the hybrid body, whether fixed in place or shaped as mobile objects.These things, static at our first glance, were active in processes through which human bodies emerged as already cultured, not simply additions to a stable physical essence of humanity.The implication is that we need to constantly question where we in fact should draw the boundaries around bodies and things, persons and mere extensions of personhood.As the contributions to this volume demonstrate, the kinds of operations that produce "cultured bodies" have deep antiquity, are pervasive in our species, and may in some sense be said to define what it means to be human.Our ability to think through what these kinds of practices imply will be multiplied if we can
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