The recording of the first monthly UHI Archaeology Institute research seminar of the 2021/22 season, which took place on Friday, September 3.
In Masks Unmasked: tracing traditions of mask wearing in the hunter-gatherer communities of Early Prehistoric Europe, Dr Ben Elliott presents some of the findings from the Masks Unmasked project and focuses on the use of clay and amber in the mid Holocene of the Eastern Baltic.
The project’s aims were to look at the evidence for mask wearing within prehistoric hunter-gatherer communities across Europe.
Previous scholars have argued that masks played a role in the earliest modern human societies in Europe, but the ambiguity of the evidence has meant that the significance of masks in has been overlooked.
Masks Unmasked reviewed the evidence for masks in relation to the ethnographic data from societies across the world and seeks to develop an understanding of the different roles that masks and masking played in Europe’s hunter-gatherer past.
