Tiny Bodies for Intimate Worlds

This chapter seeks to understand the material and corporeal significance of human figurines through a comparative examination of two ritual contexts from Iron Age Iberia: the cave sanctuaries of Cástulo (Linares, Jaén) and the urban sanctuary of La Serreta (Alcoi, Alicante). The authors specifically focus on the materiality of the figurines—production technologies, patterns of use, and deposition—to address issues of social significance, body construction, and personhood among the communities that produced, handled, and deposited them. They analyze the web of material and social relations between humans, miniatures of humans, and the materials the miniatures were crafted of—bronze and clay. In the final section, the authors consider the corporeal implications of processes of miniaturization of human bodies and the qualities of the bodies that were sought after by the Iberian communities.