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In challenging the perception that archaeology is about digging up what people in the past have thrown away, John Chapman argues that many acts of deposition may have had a more intentional, more deliberate meaning. Drawing on evidence from the Mesolithic, Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods of the Balkans, he traces the complex relationships between people, places and objects, identifying cases of `deliberate fragmentation'. Furthermore, Chapman argues that human body parts were not divorced from this social practice and were subject to the same processes of fragmentation and special depositional practices, as objects. An important book both for the archaeology of the Balkans, and for the interpretation of prehistoric sites and assemblages as a whole.