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This chapter deals with material culture using John Gay's poem Trivia: or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London as a visual source. It shows how clothes were important in ways that were particular to the eighteenth century — ways that included the political concept of ‘Englishness’. You might think costume history was a distinct discipline, and what the poem says about clothes requires specialist knowledge to understand it. Indeed it does. But the history of clothes includes their use, and several of the other essays engage with that: how differences in clothing help to construct gender and class; how the cleanliness of clothes involves histories of hygiene, labour, and transport; how investments in adornment and ornament connect people in periods as ostensibly different as eighteenth-century London and ancient Rome, not least through debates about luxury.

Kiowas communicated the importance of their identity though expressive culture in new arenas. Expressive culture provided sites to express what nationhood meant in the past as well as what it meant to be Kiowa during the twentieth century. Painters, bead workers, and others debated these ideas with one another though visual culture. They imbued dresses, dance clothes, and adornment with substantial meaning with regard to gender, family, intertribal and intratribal spheres.

In agency-based archaeology, a theoretical trend fosters a great interest in how the human body serves as a venue for negotiating and expressing social identity. Archaeological evidence may thus be used as a means for deducing relevant information when adopting a diachronic point of view. Utilizing this approach proves to be effective in looking at the various aspects of body image from the Early Postclassic Sapoá phase site's material culture found in Santa Isabel, Nicaragua. The human body, according to Erica Reisher and Kathryn Koo's review article, served as an agent and as a symbol since it was recognized as a “conduit of social meaning.” A common symbol set is thus needed to decipher the meanings of a symbolic body. This chapter attempts to examine the various aspects of the “body beautiful” in skeletal remains, dress and adornment, and representational art.

Ortiz and co-authors assemble diverse lines of evidence, namely biodistance data, mortuary patterns, ethnobotanical and zooarchaeological data, dress, and adornment from Magdalena de Cao during the Colonial period. They seek to understand the construction, manipulation, and negotiation of identity at this reducción and, although their sample is small, they find that the people from Magdalena were biometrically and morphologically most similar to Spanish comparative samples, rather than pre-Hispanic samples from the Central Andes. They contrast these observations with archaeological data and argue for evidence of material and cultural hybridity as well as the continuity of local beliefs and practices.

This chapter focuses on an object type associated with the body and female adornment in the Roman Empire's northern provinces, particularly Britain: a hairpin decorated with the image of a right hand holding a circular object. This object type occurs over much of the Roman Empire and its wide distribution may relate to shared religious and symbolic beliefs. Although hairpins are strongly gendered objects of relatively low value, there are other artefacts depicting the same motif, an indication that the right hand had a wider significance in Roman thought. After discussing the material evidence, the chapter examines the symbolic significance of the right hand and the meaning of the object held within it. Finally, it considers the question of the fragmented human body and the use of body parts, especially hands, arms, and feet, as ritual deposits and ex votos in Roman Britain.

As the most salient feature of Khemā’s biography is her obsession with her own appearance, this chapter focuses on female beauty. The notion of beauty is discussed with emphasis on the relationship between beauty and adornment. A preoccupation with bodily adornment can be seen in the earliest Indian sculptures, circa 150 BCE, so it would appear that this was a prominent idea in north India prior to the Common Era. If Pāli passages on women’s bodies are re-read in light of an understanding of the importance of beauty and adornment in this historical milieu, it becomes clear that what has been understood as desire for the female body is in fact desire for the ornamented and adorned body (made ready for sex) so it is not women and their bodies per se that are the problem, but rather the problem is the (doctrinally endorsed) problem of sexual desire.

“Distinction” identifies the often-tortured efforts by Britons to have their gold and wear it too. Mayors, liverymen, admirals, peers, and royals conspicuously brandished gold well into the nineteenth century, while belittling foreigners and status-hungry nouveau riches for wearing wealth. The ideal and reality did start to converge after 1820, when doctors started to trade in their gold-headed canes for stethoscopes, watches lost their gold chains, and gold-laced hats gave way to felt derbies. Increasingly, wearing gold appeared in conduct manuals and novels as resoundingly atavistic; and once it had been consigned to the past it could be safely enjoyed in historical settings, as when Victoria and Albert presided over costume balls bedecked in Elizabethan embroidery. More generally, Britons carefully carved out exceptions—including servants, military officers, and members of the royal family—that proved a general rule against wearing gold.