Introduction: Archaeologies of Emotion, Attachment, and Social Bonds

From cradle to grave, human behaviour is greatly influenced by our emotional attachments to other people, animals, objects, places, and ideologies. In this volume, “Archaeologies of Attachment”, we seek to explore new approaches in archaeological thought to study these bonds from the Palaeolithic to the recent past. This introduction provides a basic overview of attachment, considers attachment as a more general explanatory concept for social bonds, and offers a short introduction into the rest of the chapters contained within.