Robert Wallis

Abstract

In this article I consider several instances in which the body parts of birds of prey, namely talons, were brought into relationship with the bodies of humans in both cremation and inhumation funerary settings. Certain objects decorated with imagery including raptor body parts, namely square-headed brooches, were also brought into relationship with the bodies of humans and body parts of raptors in inhumations specifically. Raptor body parts, images of raptors and the objects they decorated were being treated like human bodies in ways that challenge speciesist distinctions and anthropocentrism, and boundaries between living beings and objects outside of modern mechanistic accounts of the body and humanistic conceptions of the subject/object divide. Drawing upon multispecies, relational and new materialist thinking, I argue that the evidence is suggestive of ontological contiguities between humans, animals and objects and also explore how these human, raptor and object intersections may articulate different forms of human-raptor sociality over time in early medieval England.

Keywords: early medieval England, raptor bodies, square-headed brooches, Style I art, human-raptor relations, post-humanism, human-raptor sociality

Full text: Picturing Bodies_1_Wallis.

DOI: 10.5456/issn.2050-3679/2025w01

Biographical note 

Robert J. Wallis is Senior Lecturer, Staff Tutor and Head of the Art History Department at The Open University. His anthology exploring the art and archaeology of human-raptor relations was published by Bloomsbury in 2023. His articles on falconry in early medieval England have been published in the Archaeological Journal and Cambridge Archaeological Journal. He is currently writing a monograph on the art and archaeology of falconry.