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Abstracts
Saturday 2nd May
Morning sessions
Figurines in Action
John M. Matsunaga (University of California:
Berkeley) & Peter Biehl (SUNY Buffalo)
Current figurine studies have attempted to understand the
effects that figurines had on the perceptions, lived
experiences, and daily practices of the people in the past
that created and interacted with them.
Traditional
interpretations of figurines as mother-goddesses, fertility
symbols, or as mere reflections of social and political
organization have been replaced by interpretations of
figurines as active forms of material culture that played an
important role in shaping people’s identities and social
relationships. Key questions in this line of research include:
What effects did figurines have on people in the past?
What do figurines do and how do they do it? That is, how
do they work?
This session seeks to address these questions and contribute
to contemporary figurine studies by exploring the diversity
of approaches to figurines that have developed in light of
the recent trends in archaeological method and theory. In
particular, special emphasis will be given to the study of
materiality, especially in regards to aesthetics, semiotics,
agency, embodiment, identity, personhood, and the
biography of objects. It is desired that participants would
not only explore at least one of these theoretical issues
through a detailed case study, but also provide clear
statements of the methods used to address them.
9:00-9:20am
Figurines in Action: An Introduction
John M. Matsunaga (University of California: Berkeley) and
Peter Biehl (SUNY Buffalo)
9:20-9:40am
Thinking about Differential Body Part Emphasis on
Prehistoric Figurines
Douglass Bailey (San Francisco State University)
The attention of figurine analysts and voyeurs has long
focused on the different emphases that figurine makers
placed of particular parts of figurine bodies: in some
traditions, special treatment is directed to the breasts and
buttocks; in others it is to the head and face. This paper
addresses differential body part representation from two
unrelated perspectives: the linguistic anthropology of
(9am - 1pm)
Stephen Levinson and his team of cross-cultural researchers,
and the photographic work of Gary Schneider. The result
aims to open up alternative ways of understanding
representations of the human body such as those that were
in common circulation during the European Neolithic.
9:40:-10:00am
Representing the Body: The Human Figure in the 7 th-5th
Millennium BC
Peter Biehl (SUNY Buffalo)
This paper discusses how studying visual representations of
the human body (from the Neolithic and Chalcolithic in
Southeastern Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean and the
Near East) can aid us in understanding identity and
personhood in the past. The paper looks at
anthropomorphism and miniaturization as well as at
embodiment and entanglement. It will also scrutinize
corporeal as well as ideational and symbolic attributes of the
visual body in order to better understand the development
of the human figure and to analyze its short-term and longterm changes both on a spatial micro- and macro-scale.
10:00-10:20am
Creating Bodies through Symbolic Commitment and
Compromise: a Cucuteni-Tripolye Case Study
Raymond Whitlow (SUNY Buffalo)
The idea of a human body does not correspond to the total
physical dimensions and qualities of the physical human
body. Although people draw inspiration from a deep
understanding of their own bodies, these representations
possess communica-tive power only insofar as they are
recognized by others. Figurines were a powerful tool for
identity negotiation in the southeastern European
Chalcolithic, but only if individuals 'bought-in' by
negotiating a particular shared syntax of symbols for
representing the body. Thus, communication through
representation of the body necessitates a commitment to
consistent symbolism rather than a variety of expression.
Once embodied in material, the representation outlives the
compromise between individual and shared concepts
present at the moment of its creation. In this way a single
representation of the body gains increasing agency as a
conceptual marker for further buy-ins and rhetorical plays.
Utilizing Chalcolithic figurines from Cucuteni-Tripolye
sites, I argue the agentive power of representations is most
manifest in these necessary symbolic commitments.
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10:30-11:00am COFFEE BREAK
11:00-11:20am
Neolithic Materiality: The Technology and Daily Practice
of Vinča Culture Anthropomorphic Figurine Production
John M. Matsunaga (University of California: Berkeley)
Recent developments in the study of figurines have
challenged traditional approaches which view figurines as
passive and static visual representations. Figurines are now
considered by many to be active and dynamic forms of
material culture, which has enhanced our understanding of
the roles they played in past societies. While challenges to
traditional approaches have broadened our current
perspectives towards figurines, a continued focus on visual
representation has inhibited the exploration of additional
ways in which figurines can be analyzed and understood.
In this paper, I draw on recent advances in figurine studies,
materials science, the anthropology of technology, and
theories of materiality, in an attempt to shift attention away
from figurines as purely visual media and consider the
social significance of their technology, production, and the
nature of the materials that are used in their creation.
Through an analysis of Vinča Culture clay figurines from
the Neolithic tell site of Vinča-Belo Brdo, I explore the
varied social effects that figurine production and
technological practice had on the people that created and
consumed them. I argue that figurines are best understood
as material agents whose efficacy and social significance
arises not only through cultural practices associated with
their consumption as finished forms, but also through the
practices involved in all stages of their production.
Furthermore, I emphasize that the nature of the materials
from which figurines are fashioned should be taken into
greater consideration when attempting to understand their
overall significance in past societies.
11:20-11:40am
Figurines and Fragmentation: Implications of the Two
Paradigms on Southeast Europe Prehistoric Archaeology
Slobodan Mitrović (The Graduate Center, CUNY)
In 2000 two books appeared that strongly influenced future
scholarship on the Neolithic of Southeast Europe –
Fragmentation in Archaeology by J. Chapman and Balkan
Prehistory by D. Bailey. The former in his volume established
notions of accumulation /fragmentation and enchainment,
and these concepts were further elaborated on in J.
Chapman & B. Gaydarska 2007, where they were perhaps
promoted to the level of proper theory. Bailey’s short
chapter on figurines in his 2000 volume was massively
expanded in 2005 with Prehistoric Figurines, in which
figurine scholarship gets full scrutiny and new ideas
deepen, as well as intensify general material culture
research.
Quite literally, this paper explores theoretical and
methodological implications of figurines and fragmentation,
as the two areas of inquiry that go hand in hand and
perform considerable influence on understanding and
production of the Balkan prehistoric archaeology. The pair
is also interesting because it is formulated by researchers
who are originally from the outside of the geographical area
– but have worked in the locale for a long time, and have
built on the local publications and assemblages – thereby
opening up the Neolithic Southeast Europe to the
Anglophone (and general) public, albeit through specific
lenses.
11:40-12:00pm
Of Sickle and Axe Men: Burials and Figurines in the Late
Neolithic Carpathian Basin
Dusan Borić, University of Cambridge
The paper starts from an empirical case-study with evident
homologies between the iconic form of representation found
in burials and a particular figurine iconography of the Late
Neolithic Carpathian Basin around 4700-4600 cal. BC. In the
only presently known intramural cemetery of the late Vinča
culture at the site of Gomolava, one finds exclusively male
burials of both adults and children, all placed in flexed
positions on their left sides. By rule, adult burials were
accompanied by ceramic vessels, stone axes and flint sickle
inserts. The taphonomy of axes’ and flint sickle inserts’
positions in relation to the body indicates that these items
were always placed over the right shoulder of the deceased.
On the other hand, in the Tisza culture settlement of
Szegvár-Tűzköves, two clay figurines were found depicting
male (?) individuals: one with a sickle and the other with an
axe over their right shoulders.
Firstly, the significance and meanings of these particular
figurines in this wider region are contextualized in relation
to the mortuary data by identifying a particular type of male
embodiment, possibly shared by these two neighbouring
communities. The likely ground-ing of such a
representational embodiment is examined on the basis of
Ingold’s concept of taskscape. Other instances of such
gender-specific separations in different media of corporeal
display during this period are explored. Secondly, possible
constitutive elements of a shared belief system are identified
in the appearance and utilization of a new visual-corporeal
vocabulary with mythical and/or foreign elements, both in
figurine depictions and the mortuary domain. It is
suggested that such corporeal “citations” might have related
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to particular historical dynamics that affected both the Tisza
and the Vinča culture groups in the terminal phases of the
tell-based existence in this part of south-east Europe.
12:00-12:20pm
Archive Fever: Words, Images and Things in NeoAssyrian Apotropaic Figurine Deposits
Carolyn Nakamura (Stanford University)
Figurine studies have not been immune to the disciplinary
divide between words and things that pervades much of
archaeological research. For practical reasons, this divide
often falls down the line of historic vs. prehistoric, or
indeed, Classical (including Ancient Near Eastern) vs.
archaeological methods. Figurines are one of the more
evocative material cultures found in prehistoric contexts,
and researchers have turned to theories of embodiment,
materiality, and ritual in order to offer compelling
interpretations of such figurine worlds. Alternatively,
figurines from historic contexts are commonly subjected to
iconographic analyses that draw upon sophisticated
theories of representation and text. Such perspectives offer
different but equally thoughtful insights, and this paper
seeks to bring these varied perspectives into considered
cooperation in order to evoke a more multidimensional
image of an ancient figurine practice.
Neo-Assyrian apotropaic figurine deposits (first millennium
BC, now modern day Iraq) and their related texts provide a
rare opportunity to examine the prescription and execution
of a 'magical' ritual from ancient Mesopotamia.
Commencing from Derrida's multiple notions of the archive,
I discuss the various aspects of the figurine deposit
assemblage as effective, ritual action. Drawing specifically
from ideas of the archive as 'commencement and
commandment', guardian, consignation and promise, I
consider how words, images and figurines in Neo-Assyrian
apotropaic deposits operated with an archival economy and
thus articulated not simply a gesture, but an institution of
protection.
12:20-12:40pm
Figuring it Out: Figurines and the Body in the Neolithic
Near East
Karina Croucher (University of Manchester) & Aurelie
Daems (Ghent University)
Figurines remain intriguing, in part due to their likeness to
the human body. This paper investigates relationships
between figurines and the lived body, examining how
figurine evidence may provide further insight into bodily
treatment and manipulation. Using as a starting point
evidence for artificial cranial modification, we investigate
the role that figurines can play in providing evidence of
body modification in the Neolithic of Southwest Asia.
12:40-1:00pm
General Discussion
Intimate Encounters, Postcolonial Engagements
Barbara Voss (Stanford University) & Eleanor
Conlin Casella (University of Manchester)
This session presents an ongoing collaborative project aimed
at stimulating research and discussion on issues of sexuality
in the archaeology of colonialism. Archaeology has tended
to minimize sexuality in its studies of colonization and of
colonial, colonized, and post-colonial societies, although our
colleagues in other disciplines have long understood that
sexual politics and sexual encounters were central to
projects of empire and in local responses to those projects.
What can archaeology’s methodological emphases on place,
material culture, and representation bring to studies of
sexuality and colonialism? How do theories of materiality,
landscape, and representation contribute new perspectives
to queer theory and postcolonial theory?
9:00-9:20am
Sex in the Colonies: Performing Sex as Ritual Practice in
Punic Sites
Mireia López-Bertran
Representations of sexual organs in Ancient Mediterranean
human terracotas have been traditionally interpreted in
connection with feminine or masculine fertility.
Consequently, other possibilites related to the existence of
sex activities have been rejected due to the influence of
Christian ideas in explaining religious phenomena in
Antiquity. This paper seeks to identify the presence of sex as
ritual practice from two examples of Punic votive deposits:
Illa Plana (Ibiza, Spain) and Bithia (Sardinia, Italy) (6 th – 3rd
centuries BC). Both deposits have provided human
terracotas with exagerated genitalia. I argue that sex would
have been an essential activity in everyday life and, thus, it
would be understandable that it became ritualised. Sex
would be a ritual performance due to different reasons:
from hygienic or curative rituals to ways of cultural contact.
It is my intention to compare figurines from both deposits in
terms of different constructions of bodies and corporealities.
Besides, I will focus on bodily local practices to analyze the
heterogeneity of colonial settings, which might have
influenced the way people engage with each other.
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9:20-9:40am
Intimate practices: daily and ritual spaces in the Western
Phoenician world (s. VIII-V a.C.)
Ana Delgado Hervás and Meritxell Ferrer Martín
(Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona)
In western Mediterranean Phoenician colonies practices and
material culture related to the daily and ritual life illustrate
a cohabitation of groups of people that are social, cultural
and ethnically very heterogeneous. This heterogeneity is
common in all western Phoenician colonies. However,
practices and material culture related with power
representations and social hierarchies in the colonial settings
that we are studying here –Iberian Peninsula and Sicily- are
clearly different. This difference points out two aspects: on
one hand different gender constructions; and on the other,
the existence of different sexual politics legitimating the
colonial power of each one of these spaces.
9:40:-10:00am
Archaeology and text: How Epigraphy can contribute to
rethink common people daily lives in Roman Empire
Renata Senna Garraffoni (Paraná Federal University/Brazil)
Literary sources and some Roman laws support a powerful
image, which portrayed the common people as an idle mob
that lived for bread and circus. As Archaeology can provide
different evidence for interpreting the ancient past, there
was a growing awareness that new epistemological
approaches, inspired in post-colonial theory, are important
for a more critical approach to the Roman Empire. In this
context, my paper will focus on the Epigraphic evidence
(the graffiti) scratched on the Pompeii’s walls. This
particular type of material culture can provide us different
approaches to the Roman daily lives and can help us to
rethink violence, sexuality, social relationship and Roman
identity in a less normative experience. As there are few
theoretical studies of ancient graffiti or its interpretation, the
aim of this paper is to contribute to a more pluralist
approach to the Roman past, emphasizing the diversity of
points of view expressed on the walls and seeking for a
better understanding of this material culture neglected in
scholars’ discourses.
10:00-10:20am
Renegotiating Sex? Norms and Taboo in the Wake of
Colonial-era Depopulation
Kathleen L. Hull (University of California, Merced)
The biological, cultural, and psychological consequences for
the indigenous people who survived disease-induced
catastrophic mortality during the colonial era were
significant. Such circumstances likely necessitated a
renegotiation, or at least critical examination, of sexual
taboos and marriage practices as individuals sought to
rebuild biologically viable communities. Significantly, these
challenges to societal norms may have played out in native
villages prior to direct engagement with colonists, rather
than being limited to traditional colonial contexts such as
mercantile outposts, missions, and other institutional
settings. Drawing on archaeological and ethnohistoric data
from the Yosemite region of California, this paper explores
these issues as well as the challenges such contexts bring to
our notions of colonialism.
10:30-11:00am COFFEE BREAK
11:00-11:20am
Gender Relations in a Maroon Community
Pedro Paulo A. Funari and Aline Vieira de Carvalho
(UNICAMP)
The goal of the paper is to study several interpretations in
social sciences, especially in historical archeology, about
gender relations in “Palmares Quilombo” (a marron
community of 17th century Brazil). Faced with a variety of
views about the maroon community, and the gender
relations and identities, the reader will be able to come to
the conclusion that there is no consensus, most importantly,
that choosing and celebrating one of these ideas constructed
by scholarship conveys different power mess-ages.
11:20-11:40am
Sexual Anxieties and Material Strategies in Eighteenthcentury Colonial Louisiana
Diana D. Loren (Peabody Museum, Harvard University)
In eighteenth-century French Louisiana, intermarriage
between Native women and French men was encouraged as
a way to expand the colony’s population. Simul-taneously,
historical documents authored by government officials and
missionaries redound with anxieties regarding the impact of
interracial intimate relations on French men. Given that
these practices were so ordinary, part of the everyday
rhythm of life in French Louisiana; can a discussion of the
material aspects of these intimate relationships be
adequately articulated? What material evidence exists (if
any) regarding how Native men and women changed the
ways in which they clothed, adorned or presented their
bodies in relation to intimate relations with French men?
In this paper, I investigate this possibility by examining
material culture related to the body and bodily adornment
excavated from the Grand Village of the Natchez, an
eighteenth-century Natchez Indian mound and village
complex. I employ theories of embodiment and materiality
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to interrogate the ways in which Natchez Indian people
chose to cover and adorn their bodies with combinations of
familiar and non-familiar material goods as it was here, on
the personal, intimate level that we can begin to understand
how these relationships were lived and materialized.
11:40-12:00pm
Enslavement and Sexual Relations on Nineteenth Century
Zanzibar
Sarah K. Croucher (Wesleyan University)
In historical literature relating to the plantations of
nineteenth century Zanzibar, it is clear that enslaved women
played a key role within planter households. The context of
Omani colonial rule placed sexual relations as a crucial
factor in the creation of changing identities within a society
undergoing massive social upheavals. Powerful men could
have sexual relations with up to four wives and unlimited
concubined women (masuria). Male household heads were
reliant on these women for their reproductive role in
producing direct biological descendants. These children
would in turn strengthen their social standing. Yet
archaeological and historical interpretations of households
on the East African coast have yet to really interrogate how
such relations structured daily life and were enacted within
the material realm. This paper will explore such questions,
and in doing so will attempt to foreground the importance
of including sexual relations and enslavement as central to
the complexities of Zanzibari plantation society.
12:00-12:20pm
'little bastard felons': An Archaeology of (Re)Production
in Convict Era Australia
Eleanor Conlin Casella (University of Manchester)
This paper will examine the archaeology of female labour
and childhood within a mid-19th century British colonial
prison. Established in 1847, the Ross Female Factory
incarcerated transported female felons and their dependant
children in the British penal colony of Van Diemen's Land
(Tasmania), Australia. Termed "Factory" as a contraction of
"Manufactory," the Ross prison enforced a disciplinary
labour regime based on the Victorian era English
workhouse system. While under sentence, convict mothers
worked at laundry, spinning, and sewing contracts,
producing inmate uniforms for the wider network of
Imperial prisons. They also endured limited access to their
infants and toddlers, who were separately accommodated in
a communal Nursery Ward within the penal compound.
Presenting a combination of site survey and excavation
results, this paper considers the materiality of production
and reproduction -- of female sexuality, childhood, and
unfree labour -- that characterised life under British colonial
incarceration.
12:20-12:40pm
Production and Reproduction: Sexual life on the Diamond
Fields
Lindsay Weiss
This paper examines the spatial and material changes on the
Diamond Fields of South Africa over a period of corporate
consolidation in the late 19th century. The rise of a
monopoly on the Diamond Fields gave rise to the
emergence of a closed compound system for the African
workers, while white workers were encouraged to live in
newly built suburban houses. On the mines emerged the
practice of bukhontxana, a way of life in which the male
miners lived in a form of marriage with younger men and
the younger men took on traditionally female roles of
marriage. This spatial remapping of Kimberley, and the
resultant effects on racially differentiated notions of
respective sexualities, were arguably a response to early life
on the Diamond Fields, which had entailed a profound
blurring of these reproductive injunctions.
12:40-1:00pm
Showing, telling, looking: Intimate encounters in the
making of South African prehistory
Nick Shepherd (Centre for African Studies)
Colonialist archaeology is remarkable as much for what it
excludes as for what it allows into the closely guarded
confines of its texts, official accounts, and sanctioned range
of concerns. This is never more so than in the case of the
bodies of colonial subjects, a source at once of fascination,
anxiety, desire, fear, and a site of enactment of much of the
violence of colonial retribution.
As a discipline, archaeology’s particular investment in the
material, sensuous aspects of experience, its close tracking
of bodies – their products, their capacity for work, their
interment and decay – brings the figure of the archaeologist
and the discourse at her/ his disposal into an uneasy,
intimate, haunted relationship with themes of sexuality and
imagination, death and desire. Even as they are fended off,
disavowed in official utterances, they make themselves
felt… as a set of spectral presences, as a kind of presence/
absence. The grave, the archive, the photograph: each is
threaded through by a thematics of death and desire. It is
appropriate, then, that this exploration is based on material
from the archive of the South African archaeologist A.J.H.
“John” Goodwin (1900-1959).
In a largely visually-based presentation I think freely
around questions of imagination and desire in the making
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of colonialist archaeology. Can one identify an erotics of
death and display in colonialist archaeology? What is the
nature of the archaeological gaze, and how does it stage
itself in a colonial context, marked by the epistemic violence
of racism and patriarchy? Is there a way in which forms of
archaeological practice, marked as they are by elisions and
blind spots, with their skittishness around questions of
imagination and desire, allow for new approaches in
understanding the deeper nature and meaning of colonialist
discourse? Conversely, is there a way in which, by surfacing
questions of imagination and desire, we can begin to rethink
the basis of colonialist archaeology?
Material Practice, Identity and Community
Serena Love (Stanford University) &
A. Bernard Knapp (University of Glasgow)
Archaeological discourse typically has sought to theorize
settlements, households and communities as separate
phenomena, recognized through shared spaces, materials
and technologies. Recent considerations of identity and
material practice, in turn, have stressed the ways that people
in the past situated themselves within intricate networks of
other people and things. These research trends, however,
have given less explicit attention to the context of the social
networks and material practices they seek to understand.
This context is the community itself, the conceptual and
physical entity in which individuals dwell. Although
communities are not inextricably attached to or bounded by
a single locale, they are undeniably linked to some tangible
space or place. If we minimize the need to tie communities
to a place and instead situate them in a multi-scalar web of
practices, spaces and shifting identities, then we may
recognize multiple social identities and material signatures
as ‘communities of practice’. Contributors to this session
will address the complex and abstract notion of community
through material practices and notions of identity.
‘Communities’ in this sense are not attached to a specific
place but are considered as an intricate web of practices,
places and identities. Both real and imagined communities
have extensive boundaries where the individual and the
collective, outsiders and ‘others’, may be found. The
objective of this session is to theorize communities in light
of new perspectives on personhood, identity, material
practice and relationality, and so to understand how people
lived together in the past. Papers from any period or place
are invited, but each contribution should seek to engage
with what we see as the three inseparable factors of identity,
material practice and community.
9:00-9:10am
Introduction
Serena Love (Stanford University) and A. Bernard Knapp
(University of Glasgow)
9:10am-9:30am
Local Communities and the Reception of Mycenaean
Imports in Bronze Age Italy
Emma Blake (University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona)
The decision to use foreign material objects, whether in
place of or in association with local material culture, is often
seen as a claim to a particular individual or group identity.
This is certainly the case when Mycenaean vessels and
sherds turn up at Late Bronze Age sites in Italy. Scholars
interested in local agency have treated them as an index of
either emergent social identities (fledgling elites distancing
themselves from local material practices), or of evolving
cultural identities, even of ‘Mycenaeanization’. But the
unevenness in the adoption of these objects belies these
universal explanations. The distribution of the pots in Italy
varies significantly in different regions in terms of vessel
forms, quantities, contexts and time. While this may be due
in part to the vagaries of supply, that cannot explain all the
variability. Recently scholars have emphasized local agency
and indigenous self-expression as propelling these patterns,
suggesting that there are as many different ways of
expressing identity materially as there are individuals. As
individuals are not independent of their context, it is
worthwhile pushing the data further to seek evidence of
local, communal influences in those choices. This paper
proposes that the discrepancies in the patterns of adoption
of Mycenaean goods in Italy may best be understood not in
terms of identities alone, but through community practices
and networks that structured the reception of the foreign
goods and in no small way determined their impact on the
individuals who made use of them
9:30-9:50am
Community Bundles and Bodies in Space
Timothy R. Pauketat (University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois)
Three lines of argumentation follow the proposition that
community is neither a ‘real’ place nor an ‘imagined’ entity
free of place, but a dimension of social experience. First,
community is to be analyzed as repetitive performance.
Second, community is more accurately considered in terms
of the larger social fields or relational networks composed of
variously dispersed nodes or agents (people, places, and
things). Third, community is implicit in certain contexts,
contingent on those nodes or agents. That is, community is
an emergent property of fields depending on the
performative potential of those networks and nodes, which
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in turn are to be understood historically. Certain people,
places, and things gather, bundle, or focus fields of nodes or
agents about them, and hence embody community, owing
to their genealogical and phenomenological qualities.
Explaining community, then, means delimiting the
genealogies of these potential gatherers or the organizing
qualities of these would-be attractors. Vignettes from preColumbian North America illustrate the gathering
properties of certain human bodies, celestial bodies, and
posts as these were bundled together through processions
across landscapes. In the end, I suggest that we consider
bodily movements through spaces as more central to
community than places or ‘sites of community production.’
Both Chacoan and Cahokian communities, for instance,
existed simultaneously at different scales as articulated by
living or dead human bodies, bundled with huge timbers
and ancestral beings-in-the-sky via great pro-cessions along
ceremonial avenues.
9:50:-10:10am
Fuzzy Boundaries and Multivalent Foci: Building
Identities in the Early Northern Iroquoian Village
John L. Creese (University of Toronto at Mississauga,
Ontario)
Boundaries and foci (both material and conceptual)
represent twin organizing principals that become important
in processes of identity formation at various social scales,
from ‘individual’ to ‘community’, within increasingly
sedentary nucleated villages. Perhaps because of a postenlightenment tendency to envision social categories such as
kin, class, gender, or clan as un-problematically bounded
cultural ‘givens’, and a western architectural canon that
materializes such classifications through the ubiquitous use
of durable walls and fences, archaeologists studying the
social implications of spatial organization in non-western
contexts have emphasized the significance of boundary
formation at the expense of other structuring processes. The
‘focus’ is another way of thinking about how daily activities
and social groups are spatially ordered, one that privileges
the accumulation of quotidian practices over planned
architectural divisions. Unlike spaces defined by walls, foci
are more fluid, permeable, ambiguous, and, importantly,
multivalent.
Thus, foci may act simultaneously as boundaries and
centerres; points of integration and segregation at different
spatial and social scales. The articulation of boundaries and
foci into a system that structured the performance of social
identity during the first 450 years of Northern Iroquoian
village development is explored in this paper. Social
identities appear to have emerged referentially, with strong
lineage-based corporate identity developing in response to
challenges of integration at the community level, further
stimulating the spatial classification and organization of
individuals and nuclear families within highly ritualized
domestic spaces.
10:30-11:00am COFFEE BREAK
11:00-11:20am
Affective Communities in Neolithic Britain
Oliver Harris (University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK)
Communities are forged through performative material
practices that cite and recite relational connections between
people, places, animals and things and between the living
and the dead. These connections matter to people; time and
time again in archaeology we see the effort put in by people
to renew the interweaving connections that sustain both
personal and communal identity. Why do they matter?
Because they are affective. Materials, practices and places
evoke and provoke emotional reactions and communities
are the key scale at which these affective connections play
out. Not only do they form the context for the public
performance of emotion, they are in themselves sites for
emotions to play out. The concept of conviviality, lifted
from Amazonian ethnography, reveals the effort that goes
into affect and the emphasis that people place on the
emotive aspects of the relations that sustain sociality. By
considering the affective nature of the material practices that
forged identities, and the efforts put into maintaining
conviviality, this paper will explore some of the relationally
connected communities that occupied Britain in the fourth
millennium BC.
11:20-11:40am
Within You and Without You: Khirbet Kerak ‘People’ in
Levantine Towns and Autonomous Villages
Raphael Greenberg (Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel)
The initial stages of the arrival of Khirbet Kerak ware
producers/consumers in the southern Levant reveal
considerable diversity: some small, previously abandoned
sites seem to be occupied solely by the presumed migrants;
at other sites the migrants appear to take over the sites
gradually, whereas at the large site of Khirbet Kerak itself,
they remain a minority within an extant urban settlement.
In each case, the maintenance of cultural boundaries by the
newcomers requires a different strategy. In this paper, I
attempt to show where these strategies differ, and to
identify evidence for interaction between the presumed
migrant communities in urban and village settings.
7
11:40-12:00pm
The Red and the Black: Shifting Identities, Material
Practices and Social Boundaries in the Upper Euphrates at
the Beginning of the Early Bronze Age
Giulio Palumbi (Università del Salento, Lecce, Italy)
A dynamic process of human relations (single, multiple,
public and private), identity is continuously built, shaped,
changed and maintained. The way we live and die, love and
suffer, eat and work are daily human and social experiences
which define our position in relation to the others. At the
beginning of the third millennium BC, the collapse of strong
political powers in the Upper Euphrates Valley (eastern
Turkey) generated the formation of new communities and
the fragmentation of the former socio-cultural identity. New
villages were built and new ancestral places founded: the
different social practices (economic, cultural and political)
corresponded to different communities in material,
economic and practical terms. This paper examines the
social dynamics, power and economic strategies as well as
the specific historical contingencies that provided the
context of interaction where the social and cultural
boundaries of these communities contaminate, mix and
blur.
12:00-12:20pm
Simultaneously Real and Imagined: The Social
Construction of Community in the Chacoan Southwest
Andrew Duff (Washington State University)
Although they have physical and spatial dimensions,
community exists simultaneously in the minds and in the
actions of community members. Imbued with meaning
through daily routine, the actions of ancestors, communal
events, and personal and collective associations, community
is lived and reframed by individuals daily and over time.
Yet daily living implicates material practice, through which
we can engage the tangible and the imagined of community
in the past. In the southern Cibola region of New Mexico,
substantial constructions (great houses) referencing
buildings in Chaco Canyon (ca. AD 1000-1150) and their
associated residential settlements were built by people with
divergent identities on a physical landscape largely devoid
of previous occupation, providing an ideal setting to explore
the social (re)construction of identity and community
through its material manifestations.
Settlement and excavation data from two neighboring
residential aggregates are used to discuss the material
correlates of subsistence activities, communal construction,
and intra- and intercommunity events—the largely material
evidence of community defined through repeated practice.
Confronting the imagined of the Chaco-era community
requires consideration of extraordinarily meaningful —
albeit likely rare — experiences, such as calendrically-timed
ritual events and pilgrimage. When combined, it becomes
possible to evaluate the relative scale of both real and
imagined aspects of community—the real predominantly
local, the imagined conceptually unbounded—and how this
facilitated development of a larger Pueblo identity.
12:20-12:40pm
Identity Communities and Memory Practices: Logics of
Material Deposition in the U.S. Southwest
Barbara J. Mills & Wendi Field Murray (University of
Arizona, Tucson, Arizona)
People’s identities are based on their participation within
different communities and materialized through practice.
We argue for an approach to past identities that emphasizes
how individuals participated in different identity
communities through memory practices and their logics of
material deposition. We use the rich record of ritual
deposits from the U.S. Southwest to look at different logics
of depositional practices in two archaeological regions:
Chaco and Hohokam. We compare ritual deposition
between these two areas to illustrate how differences in the
content and treatment of deposits, the scale and secrecy of
religious performances, geographies of social networks, and
temporality of ritual were constructed through the memory
practices of individuals who were part of different identity
communities. Our analysis illustrates how ritual deposition
can be used to get at ‘indigenous distinctions’ (Catherine
Bell 1992), produced and practiced by people in the past,
rather than on archaeologists’ superpositioning of identity
categories. Such an approach helps to re-define how
identities are shaped by emphasizing their relational
qualities within different social networks and communities
of practice.
Bell, Catherine, 1992 Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. Oxford,
New York: Oxford University Press.
12:40-1:00pm
Discussion
The Residues of Human Decisions:
Archaeological Applications of Behavioral
Ecology
Brian F. Codding & Douglas W. Bird (Stanford
University)
Since the early 1970’s behavioral ecology has provided a
framework for generating hypotheses about decision
making processes with clear archaeological relevance.
8
Applications from this approach have increased
dramatically since then, addressing a wide scope of
questions about subsistence transitions, life history
evolution, technological variability, colonization, social
organization, material display and symbolic capital. This
session highlights a few recent results from long-term
ethnographic and archaeological projects guided by
behavioral ecology, with a panel discussion of how these
results speak to big problems in interpreting the patterned
residues of ancient decisions.
9:00-9:20am:
Ethnoarchaeological insight on mobile prey acquisition
Douglas W. Bird and Brian F. Codding (Stanford
University)
Archaeological applications of behavioral ecological models
typically rely on proxy measures of prey and patch rank –
particularly common is the use of prey body size as a
correlate to mean post-encounter return rate. However,
recent work with Martu foragers has shown that this
proposed relationship is often swamped by prey mobility,
which is also correlated with prey size, and results in a high
proportion of hunting bouts ending in failure. This
conclusion raises questions about interpretations of
archaeological evidence for high proportions of larger taxa.
Here we combine ethnographic and ecological data to
examine when hunting bout success rates with larger
mobile prey may be more reliable as a function of prey
density. While high prey densities do not mitigate the high
pursuit costs associated with mobile prey, they do increase
the overall certainty of prey acquisition on any given
hunting bout. This has implications for understanding the
meaning of archaeological measures of taxonomic
abundance and their relationship to ecological factors and
human hunting decisions.
9:20-9:40am
Climatic seasonality controls of Late Quaternary
artiodactyl densities in Western North America: tests
using human behavioral ecology
Jack M. Broughton (University of Utah)
The loss of climatic equability that occurred toward the end
of Pleistocene in North America has long been viewed as
one of the critical variables that disrupted late Quaternary
mammalian faunas—playing a possible role in both the
extinction of some 35 genera of mostly large mammals and
tremendous range changes in a host of smaller ones. I
outline here recent research that tests the hypothesis that
this extreme climatic seasonality persisted well into the
Holocene and that it played a major role in controlling the
population densities of surviving artiodactyls (elk, bison,
bighorn sheep, pronghorn, and mule deer) across the
Holocene of western North America. Models from human
behavioral ecology are used to develop indices of transHolocene paleo-artiodactyl abundances from archaeological
faunal and hunting tool assemblages that are then arrayed
against climatic seasonality estimates derived from
Macrophysical Climate Models. The artiodactyl abundance
records show significant correlations with the modelderived seasonality indices and suggest that artiodactyls
occurred in low densities from the terminal Pleistocene
through the middle Holocene—substantial increases
occurred during equable, summer-wet periods of the late
Holocene. The analysis has implications not only for recent
debate regarding the late Holocene ascendance of large
game hunting in western North America, but for the future
management of artiodactyls under scenarios of global
climate change that also project dramatic increases in
extreme climate.
9:40-10:00am
Risk sensitive foraging explains the geographical
distribution of native seed crop cultivation in Eastern
North America
Kristen J. Gremillion (Ohio State University)
Despite their low return rates, small seeds had important
advantages for human populations of the eastern US that
relied on masting species—perennials that reproduce in
synchrony at irregular intervals. Shortfalls of acorns and
perhaps other nuts would have made it impossible in some
years to accumulate adequate winter stores. The cultivation
of annual seed crops, which were robust and reliable
producers with broad environmental tolerance, greatly
reduced the risk of malnutrition over the winter months.
Food production had its greatest impact where long winters
and high variability in nut yields converged. The utility of
seed crops increased further during a millennium of intense
flooding and cool temperatures that caused average nut
harvests to decline.
10:00-10:20am
Historicity: uncovering the past when foraging models fail
Terry L. Jones (Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo)
Two decades of research on the California coast guided by
HBE (primarily optimal diet models) have produced a
number of well-supported explanations for diachronic
variability in subsistence and technology. Attempts to
incorporate a key marine technology ---watercraft-- into
these explanations have on more than one occasion
illuminated patterning that is either poorly supported by or
unimportant to the primary tenets of HBE. Explanations for
the spread and development of watercraft technology
9
require recognition of certain historical contingencies that
are illuminated through comparisons with unmet
predictions of optimization models. While these historic
events are outside the theoretical emphases of the HBE
paradigm (e.g., Polynesian contact with the New World)
they nonetheless seem important to the broad outline of
world prehistory. This raises questions about the relative
importance of paradigmatic frameworks in investigating the
past.
who designed pipes to maximize profits. The model offers
precise predictions about formal patterning in pipe stem
bore diameter distributions in time and social space. These
are evaluated using data from 17th-century Jamestown,
Virginia.
11:40-12:00pm
Good Hunters and Rich Farmers: Is Costly Signaling
Reflected in Material and Faunal Remains?
Karen D. Lupo (Washington State University)
10:30-11am COFFEE BREAK
11:00-11:20am
Behavioral Ecology and the Emergence of Social
Hierarchies in East Polynesia
Douglas J. Kennett (University of Oregon)
Significant population aggregations and institutionalized
social hierarchies developed widely in East Polynesia just
prior to European contact. Localized population growth
often parallels clear evidence for economic intensification
and the emergence of institutionalized social hierarchies. A
multivariate model for group formation is developed in this
paper within the broad framework of Human Behavioral
Ecology. Central to this model are the costs and benefits of
group living that accrue to individuals under changing
ecological and social conditions. The Ideal Free Distribution,
and associated Ideal Despotic Distribution, are employed to
consider the dynamic character of habitat suitability, along
with a suite of demographic and behavioral variables, that
influence the adaptive value of group living. Reproductiveskew theory is used to analyze the effects of the social,
political, and economic negotiations between dominant and
subordinate group members that either promote or deter
aggregation and hierarchical social organization. The
predictions of this model are compared with evidence for
the prehistoric development of institutionalized social
hierarchies on the remote island of Rapa, French Polynesia.
11:20-11:40am
Early-modern commodities as costly signals: the case of
clay tobacco pipes from the seventeenth-century
Chesapeake
Fraser D. Neiman (University of Virginia & Monticello)
Historians of the early-modern Atlantic world use the
phrase "consumer revolution" to denote an increase in the
production and consumption of commodities. Clay tobacco
pipes dating from the 17th and early 18th centuries are
among the earliest examples. Signaling theory offers the
tools with which to model interactions among pipe
consumers, who used certain pipe attributes as unfakable
signals of resource holding potential, and pipe producers
Variability in hunting success is a well-known phenomenon
among contemporary foraging populations. Good hunters
can purportedly accrue a variety of benefits including high
reproductive success, access to younger or harder working
wives, deference in political arena’s, and increased
friendship or ally networks. Certain kinds of costly hunting
opportunities are believed to be one arena in which hunters
can signal underlying qualities to other individuals. Costly
signaling has important implications for the interpretation
of zooarchaeological assemblages and has been recently
used as the theoretical backbone to support arguments for
the rise of prestige hunting in California during the Middle
Archaic. In this paper I use ethnoarchaeological data from
Central African farmers, who conspicuously display their
material wealth, and forest foragers, who sometimes engage
in costly public hunting displays, to explore how costly
signaling might be reflected in archaeological remains.
12:00-12:20pm
Folsom point manufacturing decisions: who gets to play?
Nicole M. Waguespack (University of Wyoming)
The manufacture of Folsom projectile points is notoriously
difficult. Due to the high level of skill and the risk of failure
involved in their production, they provide an ideal case for
examining the potential role of prehistoric hunter-gatherer
lithic craft specialization. Among foraging peoples, craft
specialization tends to emphasize the productive abilities of
specific individuals and groups operating under specific
technological constraints. A model of production
specialization linking raw material constraints and
production risk is developed. Raw material availability and
the relative frequency of Folsom projectile points, bifaces
and associated manufacturing debris from a handful of sites
in the western United States are examined in relation to the
modeled predictions of specialized production.
12:20-12:40pm
Intensive seed exploitation and central place foraging in
the Australian arid zone
David W. Zeanah (Sacramento State University) and Brian
F. Codding (Stanford University)
10
Ethnohistoric accounts suggest that Australian foragers
relied heavily on seeds and promoted their growth by
burning-off climax vegetation. We suspect this was a
strategy necessary for arid zone occupation, because seed
plants are too dispersed to make their collection worthwhile
without using fire to manage seed patches. If so, the
Holocene proliferation of ground stone artifacts signals the
emergence of fire-managed landscapes in the Australian
arid zone. We use central place foraging theory to model the
extent of managed habitat mosaics relative to occupation
sites with the goal of generating testable predictions about
the distribution of ground stone tools.
Iconoclash and the Archaeology of Violence
Toward Images
Severin Fowles (Barnard College/Columbia
University)
Iconoclasm is when we know what is happening in the act of
breaking and what the motivations for what appears as a clear
project of destruction are; iconoclash, on the other hand, is when one
does not know, one hesitates, one is troubled by an action for which
there is no way to know, without further enquiry, whether it is
destructive or constructive. — Bruno Latour (2002:16)
This session builds off the efforts of Bruno Latour and
colleagues (Latour and Weibel 2002; Taussig 1999; Goody
1997) to expand our theoretical understanding of
iconoclasm and representational ambivalence beyond its
traditionally unique association with the religions of the
Book. The central claim is that the tension between
iconophobia and iconophilia, between the destruction and
the creation of images (broadly conceived) is an aspect of
the human experience in all times and places. Hence, the
study of why past peoples periodically rejected or did
violence unto images (why they broke figurines, burned
temples, defaced pictures and the like) is the necessary
compliment to the study of why they made these images in
the first place. How are we to understand the reality that the
destruction of images is itself an act of image production?
What of those acts of defacement that seem to have the
ironic effect of “refacing” the icon, of recreating the fetish
anew? And why, in the end, did some communities indulge
in figurative imagery while others abstained from such
images altogether, and how are we to account for the longterm development of particular representational traditions
in the past?
9:00-9:20am
Archaeology and the Second Commandment
Sev Fowles (Barnard College/Columbia University)
As an introduction to the session, I begin by asking whether
anthropology—and archaeology more specifically—has
been complicit in the division of the world into (1) a set of
Abrahamic traditions within which the power of images as
mediators is theologically contested and (2) a wide array of
non-Abrahamic or pre-modern traditions in which it is
assumed that the power of images is believed naively as a
matter of course. Finding the answer to be “yes,” I proceed
to argue for an expanded archaeological iconology, one that
would view iconophilia and iconophobia as logically
intertwined and that would view image-making and imagebreaking as complementary phenomena.
9:20-9:40am
So, the Idol-Smasher is Doubly Mad
Ellen Morris (New York University)
For Latour, following Freud, Akhenaten is the original
iconoclast, the unacknowledged intellectual patriarch of
both Moses and the Taliban. Akhenaten’s refusal to tolerate
the depiction of other gods beside his chosen god—or even
to entertain the notion that the word “god” could be written
in the plural—supposedly mark this pharaoh as the
architect of the world’s first counter-religion.
While
rejecting any such origin-story for iconoclasm, this paper
seeks to investigate the ambiguities and murky theological
problems—the iconoclash—that followed in the wake of
that bold, simple move of prohibition.
9:40-10:00am
Animal/Inhuman
Brian Boyd (Columbia)
The session organizer asks: “…why did some communities
indulge in figurative imagery while others abstained from
such images…?” My paper will focus on the contrast
between the relative lack of figurative image making in the
Epipalaeolithic Levant and the rich diversity of figurative
image making in the subsequent Pre-Pottery Neolithic
period. Current conventional understanding explains this
contrast in terms of a socio-economic shift to animal
domestication and agriculture. An alternative interpretation
will place emphasis on changing human-animal relations
within a radical ecology, drawing upon recent research in
literary theory and philosophy.
10:00-10:30am
Discussion
10:30-11:00am COFFEE BREAK
11
11:00-11:20am
Cuts, Dissections, and Holes: Consequences of Breaking
the Surface
Douglass Bailey (San Francisco State University)
What happens when one cuts through an otherwise
continuous surface? What happens when the skin is pierced,
when the ground is trenched, when a wall is opened up?
When gaps form, when content is missing, when ellipsis
(and what is missing) becomes more important than what is
present? What are the consequences of creating (or
encountering) negative space? This paper asks these
questions in the context of the Early Neolithic of
southeastern Europe (6000-5500 cal. BC) with particular
attention to what are traditionally understood as pit-houses.
Potential answers push debate beyond function, symbol, or
(even) meaning and explanation.
11:20-11:40am
‘Sweet are the uses of adversity’: peering into the blackboxes of Hopewell mounds
Andrew Martin (Bournemouth University, UK)
Latour’s idea that groups, forms and ideas are opened up
and even changed during controversies or iconoclashes has
huge ramifications for archaeology. Under Latour such
clashes are the few clear nodes through which we can trace
the network of associations – associations that are arrayed in
defense of icons, or their destruction, when they are
attacked. Latour also argues that such a defense often takes
the form of explicit material statements. When a controversy
starts, both sides “end up mobilizing the most
heterogeneous and distant elements, thus mapping for
themselves, for their opponents, and for the observers, what
they value most, what they are most dearly attached to”
(Latour 1987:205). The implication of this for archaeology is
that if they are material, we can follow them. On the other
hand, Latour’s idea that objects and practices become
fetishes outside of controversies means that the meaning of
these objects may not even be cognized by the people who
use them - with associations rarely related or even wrongly
related. This means we face a grave inequality in the data
we possess. A study of Illinois Valley Hopewell mounds
that were destroyed and ‘refaced’ with explicitly contrasting
deposits illustrates that iconoclashes often provide the best
situations for understanding cultural objects and practices.
11:40-12:00am
Killing Mummies
Terrence D’Altroy (Columbia University)
Why bother killing a mummy? This paper explores the
political Implications of Inka views of sentience and power,
in which humans and various forms of consciousness were
inhabitants of the world. People, clippings from their
bodies, and their mummies were seen as living icons of
dividuated personas in which human consciousness
resided. Within this conceptual framework, the Inkas were
highly selective in what could or ought to be represented in
tangible form and thus what could be manipulated
physically or even destroyed. It is argued that the apparent
severity of Inka materiality is explicable because 1) power
was resident in various living forms, and 2) iconic
representations rendered their subjects susceptible to
malign forces."
12:00-12:30
Discussion
Cyber-Archaeology
Maurizio Forte (University of California: Merced)
The virtual ontology of archaeological information, or the
cybernetics of archaeology, refers to all the interconnective
relationships which the datum produces, the code of
transmission, and its transmittability. Because it depends on
interrelationships, by its very nature information cannot be
neutral with respect to how it is processed and perceived. It
follows that the process of knowledge and communication
have to be unified and represented by a single vector. 3D
information is regarded as the core of the knowledge
process, because it creates feedback, then cybernetic
difference, among the interactor, the scientist and the
ecosystem. It is argued that Virtual Reality (both offline and
online) represents a possible ecosystem, which is able to
host top-down and bottom-up processes of knowledge and
communication. In these terms, the past is generated and
coded by “a simulation process”. Thus, from the first phases
of data acquisition in the field, the technical methodologies
and technologies that we use, influence in a decisive way all
the subsequent phases of interpretation and communication.
In the light of these considerations, what is the relationship
between information and represen-tation? How much
information does a digital model contain? What sorts of and
how many ontologies ought to be chosen to permit an
acceptable transmittability? These and many other questions
on related topics take on certain urgency because they relate
directly to the loss of information from understanding,
learning, and the transmittability of culture. Indeed, our
ability to transmit culture depends on a model which
combines on the same axis processes of understanding and
communication. Thus, the questions which we pose in a
phase of bottom-up knowledge (for example, in an archaeological excavation) will influence the top-down phases of
12
-
interpretation, or the mental patterns (for example, a
comparative analysis and reconstruction of models). From
this derives the need to interconnect the top-down processes
with the bottom-up in accordance with a reciprocal systemic
interaction, for example in a virtual space where both
sequences can coexist. If we peremptorily separate
knowledge and communication, we risk losing information
along the way, reducing the relationships that are
constructed
between
acquisition/input
and
transmission/output. Archaeological communi-cation ought
to be understood as a process of validation of the entire
cognitive process of understanding and not as a simple
addendum to research, or as a dispensable compendium of
data.
Topics:
Definitions and theoretical overview
Reconstruction processes
3D Perception and cognitive impact
Relation between interpretation, communication and
representation
3D Communities
Simulation processes
Ontologies and territories of the cyber-space
Knowledge and communication
Cybernetics and interpretation processes
Virtual settlements
Virtual taxonomies
Interactivity and multivocality
Affordances and digital ecosystems
9:00-9:20am
Cyber-archaeology: theoretical overview and virtual
embodiment
Maurizio Forte & Nicolò Dell’Unto (University of California:
Merced)
The ontology of archaeological information, or the
cybernetics of archaeology, refers to all the interconnective
relationships which the datum produces, the code of
transmission, and its transmittability. Because it depends on
interrelationships, by its very nature information cannot be
neutral with respect to how it is processed and perceived. It
follows that the process of knowledge and communication
have to be unified and represented by a single vector. 3D
information is regarded as the core of the knowledge
process, because it creates feedback, then cybernetic
difference, among the interactor, the scientist and the
ecosystem. It is argued that Virtual Reality (both offline and
online) represents a possible ecosystem, which is able to
host top-down and bottom-up processes of knowledge and
communication. In these terms, the past is generated and
coded by “a simulation process”. Thus, from the first phases
of data acquisition in the field, the technical methodologies
and technologies that we use, influence in a decisive way all
the subsequent phases of interpretation and communication.
Thus, the questions which we pose in a phase of bottom-up
knowledge (for example, in an archaeological excavation)
will influence the top-down phases of interpretation, or the
mental patterns (for example, a comparative analysis and
reconstruction of models). If we peremptorily separate
knowledge and communication, we risk losing information
along the way, reducing the relationships that are
constructed
between
acquisition/input
and
transmission/output.
At the University of California, Merced, we are
experimenting different forms of virtual embodiment and
participatory learning. The innovation factor is mainly
based on the principle of “enaction”: A principle employed
by avatar-driven virtual (embodied) communities for
perceiving and constructing information. This neurophenomenologic approach is based on the assumption that
the cognitive activity is “embodied”, i. e. not separated from
the body perception. In these terms it can be correctly
identified and communicated only within its specific
context. It seems evident that embodiment depends on the
level of immersion in the cyberspace: if well implemented
embodied communities should be able to learn and transmit
more knowledge and in a shorter time than traditional textbased “chatting” communities. We distinguish different
types of embodiment (A-B-C) according to levels and
modalities of participatory learning and capacities of
interaction; each embodiment level will focus on a different
kind of interactive learning interface, content target and
group of users.
Embodiment A: Virtual Participatory Museum. In this case
the VR system is planned for interactive platforms (each one
with a mono display) and a large HD stereo display serving
for group display. The users/players interact in a common
3D space, the rest of the audience can watch by stereo
vision. In this way it is possible to obtain a double
participation: one active, between the user/players and one
passive between a larger audience watching the
environment in the large 3D screen. Target users are
museum visitors.
Embodiment B: Simulation Participatory Environment.
(Powerwall, graphics.ucmerced.edu/ research.html). The
primary purpose of this environment is to visualize datasets
in a large and interactive high resolution display capable of
achieving a very high degree of 3D immersion. Within the
Powerwall environment it will be possible to integrate fullbody 3D motion capture devices in order to implement
novel interaction interfaces between immersed users, the
environment, and avatars or autonomous characters
13
simulated in the virtual environment. This environment will
enable the team to develop new humanlike motion interfaces
for collaborative virtual environments, in particular for
achieving seamless human-computer interactions accessible
to non computer experts for programming motions in the
virtual environments. This will allow archeologists to
precisely program the correct motions associated with the
environment and will enable a novel concept of “Motion
Heritage”. Target users are: archaeologists and scientific
community.
Embodiment C: Virtual Communities. Here the destination is
the cyberspace in Second Life where the University of
California, Merced is managing two courses and digital labs
with the students (lower and upper division). Target users:
students, web communities.
9:25-9:45am
From Computable Archaeology to Computational
Intelligence. New
Prospects for Archaeological Reasoning
Juan A. Barcelo (Universitat Autònoma Barcelona, Spain)
The question of whether it is possible to automate the
archaeological knowledge production is of both great
theoretical interest and increasing practical importance
because knowledge and information are being generated
much faster than they can be effectively analyzed. The
approach adopted here is based on a fact that archaeologist
couldn’t evaluate 15 years ago: Computer programs do
work in real science, not only in archaeology. Maybe they
are more successful in other “harder” sciences, but we
cannot deduce from this fact that Archaeology is a different
kind of science. Computable archaeology –if you do not like
the expression “automatic archaeology” is the proper way
of exploring new ways of answering the questions we have
not yet answered.
9:50:-10:10am
VIRTUAL IMPACT: Visualizing the Potential Effects of
Cosmic Impact in Human History*,
W. Bruce Masse (Los Alamos National Laboratory),
Maurizio Forte (University of California, Merced ), David R.
Janecky (Los Alamos National Laboratory), and Gustavo
Barrientos (Universidad de La Plata)
Current models indicate that catastrophic impacts by
asteroids and comets capable of killing more than one
quarter of Earth’s human population have occurred on
average once every million years; smaller impacts, such the
1908 Tunguska impact that leveled more that than 2,000
square km of Siberian forest, occur every 200-300 years.
Therefore, cosmic impact likely significantly affected
hominine evolution and conceivably played a role in
Holocene period human culture history. Regrettably, few
archaeologists are trained to appreciate the nature and
potential effects of cosmic impact. We have developed a
conceptual model for an extensible set of educational and
research tools based on virtual reality collaborative
environments to engage archaeologists and the general
public on the topic of the role of cosmic impact in human
history. Our initial focus is on two documented asteroid
impacts in Argentina during the period of 4000 to 1000 B.C.
Campo del Cielo resulted in an energy release of around 2-3
megatons (100-150 times the Hiroshima atomic weapon),
and left several craters and a strewn field covering 493 km2
in northeastern Argentina. Rio Cuarto was likely more than
1000 megatons and may have devastated an area greater
than 50,000 km2 in central Argentina. We are focusing on
reconstructions of these events and their potential effects on
contemporary hunter and gatherers. Our virtual reality
tools also introduce interactive variables (e.g., impactor
physical properties, climate, vegetation, topography, and
social complexity) to allow researchers and students to
better investigate and evaluate the factors that significantly
influence cosmic impact effects.
10:10-10:30
Discussion
10:30-11:00am COFFEE BREAK
11:00-11:20am
The Irreducible Ensemble: PLACE-Hampi
Sarah Kenderdine (Museum Victoria, Melbourne, Australia)
This
discussion
examines
several
philosophical
considerations (phenomen-ology, embodiment, corpothetics and
mediation) which form powerful interlocking arguments,
whose qualities are prerequisites for building presence and
place in virtual heritage landscapes. The discourse draws
upon
Interpretive
Archaeology
and
Interpretive
Archaeological
Systems
theory
and,
Symmetrical
Archaeology theory provides a basis for understanding
complex emergent narratives in immersive virtual
environments. Firmly rooted in praxis, the argument
explores these issues through research associated with
applications from the PLACE-Hampi heritage projects
(PLACE-Hampi and Hampi-LIVE). PLACE-Hampi is an
embodied theatre of participation in the drama of Hindu
mythology focused at the most significant archaeological,
historical and sacred locations of the World Heritage site
Vijayanagara (Hampi), South India. Using two advanced
interactive and immersive stereographic panoramic display
systems, PLACE and The Advanced Visualization
Interactive Environment, a translation of spatial potential is
14
enacted in the two demonstrators where participants are
able to transform myths into the drama of a co-evolutionary
narrative by their actions within the virtual landscape and
through the creation of a virtual heritage embodiment of a
real world dynamic. Place-Hampi restores symmetry to the
autonomy of interactions within virtual heritage and allows
machine and human entities to make narrative sense of each
other’s actions.
11:25-11:55
Selective fidelity and prosthetics – from the Eighteenthcentury to Cyber-archaeology
Michael Shanks (Stanford University)
Key components of a cyber-archaeology paradigm can be
tracked back to the eighteenth century and the European
antiquarian tradition. This paper will focus on issues of
modeling and simulation, performance and narrative in
relation to questions of representation and fidelity in virtual
and augmented realities. It will argue that we are still
addressing the same nexus of epistemological and
ontological problems, but that there was actually more
experiment in some quarters of the antiquarian tradition
that is highly pertinent to the dynamic modeling of past
socio-cultural systems. A case will be made for a deeply
selective fidelity in simulation that remains tightly
connected to the chracteristics of the real and substantive
"archaeological record". Examples will be drawn from the
antiquarian tradition as well as from its geneaological
descendants in contemporary media art and as exemplified
in the Presence project (http://presence.stanford.edu).
12:00-12:20am
The Fallacy of Reconstruction
Jeffrey T. Clark (North Dakota State University)
The idea of reconstructing the past has been part of
archaeology almost since its inception as a discipline. In the
mid 20th century, the “reconstruction of culture history” and
the “reconstruction of past lifeways” explicitly guided the
work of many archaeologists. Even those who considered
themselves “new archeologists” typically stuck with the
idea of “reconstructing” cultural process. In the realm of
virtual archaeology, or virtual heritage, the notion of
“reconstructing” some ancient building or cultural setting is
dominant. Papers at professional conferences dealing with
virtual archaeology (e.g., CAA, VSMM, VAST) along with
publications discussing specific projects or general concerns
related to virtual archaeology almost invariably use the term
“reconstruction” in reference to the at least one project
objective. It is the contention of this paper that the notion of
reconstructing the past is not only a misnomer but one that
has been detrimental to the discipline. This holds true for
conventional archaeology as well as virtual. We should
only be talking about “constructions” of the past and rarely,
if ever, about reconstructions. We are always constructing
models—whether verbal, mathematical, or graphical—
which are tools for understanding, not statements of reality.
The idea that somehow this is a more significant problem
for virtual models (reconstructions) than verbal is both false
and has hindered the acceptance and use of virtual
archaeology by the larger professional community.
12:25-12:45am
Exploring cognitive landscapes: toward an understanding
of the relationship between space/time conceptualization
and cultural material expression
J. Van der Helst (University of New Mexico, USA)
Placenames,
or
toponyms,
that
were
collected
th
ethnographically during the early 20 century in the
Northern Rio Grande region for the Tewa world are
analyzed and presented in this paper, in order to gain
insight in the relationship between cultural material remains
and the conceptualization of space/time of the Tewa
speaking people.
Geospatial technologies, which are employed to explore
those relationships, have developed based on the idea that
human spatial cognition is universal. However, it has been
shown in recent studies in linguistics that significant
differences exist between language groups in this
fundamental cognitive domain, warranting research into
how space/time is perceived and represented across the
human population. For instance, speakers of different
language groups, e.g. Indo-European, Uto-Aztecan, may use
a different frame of reference. Similarly, the general
assumption that universal spatial categories exists, such as
‘mountain’, ‘river’ is not supported by this research;
different spatial ontologies are evident and are likely based
on (perceived) affordance and cultural ideas. These findings
have enormous implications for future development of
geospatial technologies and the use of these technologies in
archaeology.
Space/Time conceptualizations are expressed by humans in
natural language as well as in other languages, such as
visual and morphic languages. Archaeological research
primarily deals with visual and morphic representations
(2D, 3D), for example iconography, architectural design etc.
It is assumed within this paper that space/time
conceptualization underlies natural language expression
and visual and morphic expressions in similar ways,
therefore linguistic research can aid in the creation of
interpretive frameworks in archaeological research.
15
12:45-1:00pm
Discussion
Path Dependence: Archaeological Perspectives
on a Contemporary Issue
Michelle Hegmon (Arizona State University)
Path dependence describes a situation in which initial
conditions establish a trajectory, making changes or reversal
increasingly difficult. The concept was developed, and has
been studied, primarily in contemporary contexts and in the
fields of economics, political science, and science and
technology studies. This work has suggested factors that
may contribute to path dependence, including large set up
costs, coordination effects, and power asymmetries.
Archaeologists often discuss similar concepts, including
historical contingency and trajectories, and technological
traditions; and the long-term of the archaeological record
provides an ideal setting for examining path dependence.
This session explores the applicability of the path
dependence concept to archaeology, and draws on
archaeological cases to develop the concept.
The session will begin with an introduction that defines the
concept of path dependence as well as salient variables and
dimensions, and more formal theoretical discussion by
Hegmon and Bolin that develops comparisons and
syntheses among various perspectives. These will be
followed by six papers that describe apparent cases of path
dependence in the archaeological record, Cameron and Duff
and Nelson, Kintigh and Abbott describing two sets of
alternative trajectories in the US Southwest, Striker
examining historical trajectories and conflict in the Eastern
US, Goodman-Elgar on agriculture in the Andes, Ferguson
on monumentality in Europe, and Wattenmaker focusing on
state building in Mesopotamia. Then, after the break, we
will have a roundtable discussion focused on how to best
apply path dependence in archaeology, and considering
how archaeology may be able to contribute to the
contemporary issue.
9:00-9:15am
Introduction
Michelle Hegmon (Arizona State University)
9:15-9:30am
Path Dependence: Theoretical Comparisons and Synthesis
Michelle Hegmon & Bob Bolin (Arizona State University)
The intransigence of structures (both social and material),
and the need for change, is all too obvious in the world
around us. The concept of path dependence was developed,
primarily in technology studies, political science, and
economics, as a way of describing and explaining this
phenomenon of intransigence. Although history matters in
almost all cases, the analytical and theoretical utility of the
concept of path dependence is enhanced by adopting a clear
definition that specifies in what cases it does, and does not,
apply. Among the characteristics – and causes – of path
dependence are the importance of initial conditions;
increasing returns, self-reinforce-ment, and positive
feedback; large set up costs; and coordination effects. This
paper serves as an introduction to the case studies that
follow. It (1) explains these characteristics; (2) explores
ways in which they might be assessed archaeologically, and
whether archaeology might suggest other characteristics; (3)
considers implications for general social theory, especially
the relationship of structure and practice.
9:30-9:45am
History Matters: Divergent Paths in the Post-Chaco
Southwest
Catherine Cameron (University of Colorado) & Andrew
Duff (Washington State University)
Two patterns characterize the late prehistory of the northern
Southwest (twelfth to fourteenth centuries): abandonment
of the Mesa Verde region to the north and aggregation of
population into large villages in the Cibola region to the
south. Three initial conditions, evident as early as the
Pueblo I period (A.D. 700-900), established trajectories in
each region that resulted in different paths. These initial
conditions were: 1) the strength of ties with the regional
center at Chaco Canyon during its expansion and collapse,
which implicates demography; 2) the importance of the
household as an independent social unit, and 3) the
development in the north of a primate center, Aztec Ruins,
and the lack of such a center in the Cibola region. The
concept of path dependency is used to explore initial
conditions and trace their effect on the trajectory of
development in each region. While not discounting social
and environmental explanations for aggregation and
abandonment in the northern Southwest, we show that
different initial conditions and resulting historical processes
caused differences in the ways people organized themselves
and used their landscape, processes difficult or impossible
to reverse. That the earliest European explorers found
abandoned cliff dwellings in the Mesa Verde region and
bustling villages in the Cibola region—that endure today—
was in part a product of different initial conditions in these
two regions resulting in their divergent paths through time.
16
9:45-10:00am
Examining Historical Trajectories of Inter-group Conflict
in the Protohistoric Eastern Woodlands
Sarah Striker (Arizona State University)
This paper explores the application of the concept of path
dependence to the well studied case of Iroquois
involvement in the North American fur trade. The Iroquois
occupation of key Great Lakes waterways at the time of
European contact set the stage for their unique and
transformative role in developing European and Native
relations. In exchange for the furs they provided, Iroquois
groups received European material resources and greater
regional power, a process that, at least initially, can be
described as involving increasing returns, one of the key
characteristics of path dependence. However, the political
and economic successes enjoyed by the Iroquois exacerbated
pre-existing political and cultural conflict between the
Iroquois and their Native and European neighbors. As the
beaver and other preferred sources of fur became rarer, the
costs of participation in this once lucrative industry began to
outweigh the benefits. The political, economic, and cultural
ramifications of deep involvement in European commerce
resulted in difficult conditions for the Iroquois, as well as
severe ecological consequences for beaver populations. The
complex change associated with this involvement created a
situation of social and economic “lock-in,” such that the
Iroquois did not have the flexibility to alter their course,
despite its compounding disadvantages.
10:00-10:15am
Agriculture, Landscape Architecture and Path Dependence
Melissa Goodman-Elgar (Washington State University)
The long-term impacts and accretionary nature of
agricultural landuse suggests that path dependence will be
a productive approach to its study. Farming systems utilize
technology at different scales with variable degrees of
flexibility to change and different temporalities.
For
instance, stone hoes are relatively easy to make and their
forms can vary without compromising functionality making
them easily replaceable or reversible. In contrast, landscape
architecture (e.g., field wall, terracing, irrigation) has high
labor and environmental set-up costs. Once established,
coordination effects for field architecture are pronounced,
particularly for terracing as walls adjoined by stacking
upward or extending laterally have lower set-up costs.
Replacement or renovation at a landscape scale is also costly
and landscape modifications are often impossible to reverse.
These long-term impacts may favor selective use of such
technologies in order to maintain future landuse flexibility.
In addition, field architecture materializes land tenure
conventions based on fixed boundaries.
As a result, it arises under social conditions that favor land
enclosure. This may initiate path dependence towards
increased land enclosure amongst subsequent generations
seeking to secure resources, especially if such mechanisms
have been institutionalized.
These dynamics will be
explored by comparing indigenous farming strategies in the
Peruvian Andes between the highly modified Upper
Mantaro Valley and the Cajamarca Valley, where landscape
architecture is quite limited. These regions share a basic
range of technology and were both developed by the Inka as
administrative centers.
Yet, they demonstrate widely
different landscape architecture. Moreover, the trajectories
established in prehistory continue to effect farmers in both
regions today.
10:30-11:00am COFFEE BREAK
11:00-11:15am
Early Medieval Monumental Re-use in the British Isles:
Reinterpreting the Evidence through Path Dependency
Christopher Ferguson (University of Oxford)
This paper will examine how theories of path dependency,
emergent within political science and economics over the
past decade, can be applied to the study of archaeology and
archaeological events. Through this, the Annalist
interpretation of the longue dureé can be refined to account
for the archaeological event, allowing the interpretation of
different temporal scales within one framework. The
interpretation of early medieval mortuary sites within the
British Isles will be used as a case study.
Monumentality and place within the occupation of the
landscape has been the focus of much discussion within
early medieval archaeology (Semple 1998; Williams 1998). In
particular, the re-use of prehistoric sites within early
medieval mortuary contexts has received much comment.
Documentary sources, such as Beowulf and The Wife’s
Lament highlight the importance attached to prehistoric
mortuary sites by early medieval society. The re-use of
prehistoric barrows, and the subsequent movement to
Christian churchyard burial can be understood through the
development of a path dependent analysis. Theories of path
dependency may offer the archaeologist an alternative
approach to the interpretation of temporal change, space
and monumental re-use within early medieval archaeology
and the discipline as a whole.
11:15-11:30am
Path Dependence, State-building and the Urban Process in
Ancient Mesopotamia
Patricia Wattenmaker (University of Virginia)
17
Urbanism in ancient Mesopotamia in the fourth and third
millennia
entailed
profound
and
far-reaching
transformations in the ways people interacted with one
another, relations between neighboring settlements, systems
of production and exchange, and inter-polity dynamics.
These changes took place at an unprecedented pace, and
involved the formation of new social institutions far larger,
more intricate, but also more fragile, than those seen in the
past. This paper draws on the archaeological evidence from
the ancient Middle East to delineate some of the key
changes in cultural values, social institutions and interpolity relations that took place as settlements expanded
dramatically and their populations increased in both size
and density. Path dependence theory, including concepts of
lock-in and increasing returns, provides the framework for
examining linkages among changes in cosmologies and
sociopolitical institutions that accompanied urbanism, the
ways that the urban process apparently enhanced the social
inequalities that initially helped set it in motion, the new
political landscape that led urban societies to risk their
survival by exploiting resources on an unsustainable scale,
and the persistence of the urban way of life long after it
proved to be unstable and its many drawbacks became
known to city dwellers and rural residents alike.
11:30-1:00pm
Roundtable discussion
Theorized Dwelling: Archaeology at Historic
Homes
Christina J. Hodge (Harvard University) &
Christa M. Beranek (University of Massachsetts
Boston)
At a TAG conference two decades ago, dwellings were
hailed as "arguably the single most important artefact for
reconstructing past societies" (Samson 1990:2). Inspired by
the persistent centrality of houses to archaeology and our
own professional experiences, session participants reflect on
the intersection of public and civic agendas, heritage
management, and archaeological theory at historic homes
and house museums. Archaeologists are implicated in the
politics of the past, but to whom and how are we
accountable as we engage in history-making? What
mediates the essential interplay of stakeholder and
professional values?
The session attends to dwellings as compelling sites of
collective and individual memory-making that afford a
powerful, organizing presence. We explore intersections of
progressive archaeological agendas and the sometimes
conservative realities of historic home sites through on-theground, in progress, and personal case studies.
Samson, Ross. "Introduction," in The Social Archaeology of Houses,
edited by Ross Samson. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press
(1990).
9:00-9:10am
Introduction
Christina J. Hodge (Peabody Museum, Harvard University)
& Christa M. Beranek (University of Massachusetts Boston)
9:10-9:30am
Founding Narratives: Revolutionary Stories at Historic
Houses
Christa M. Beranek (University of Massachusetts Boston)
Two Revolutionary War era homes, now historic houses and
sites for archaeological research, in Lexington and Concord,
Massachusetts, serve as starting points for a consideration of
memory, narrative, and history. These are both sites where
early 19th-century women “made history,” mapping the
political and military history of the American Revolution
onto the domestic fabric of their homes by telling the stories
of their recent ancestors, naming rooms, and preserving
furnishings. In their preservation efforts, these women may
not have been primarily focused on telling their own stories,
but they made an important statement on the role of
domestic spaces in national history and for their own power
as history makers. As these women and many other
ordinary citizens used houses to create prospective memory,
they developed a body of very resilient popular history and
myth that often outlasted the physical presence of the
houses themselves. Like other bodies of evidence, these
founding
narratives
both
enable
and
constrain
archaeological research: they frequently bring archaeologists
to a site, yet archaeological research interests or results may
not articulate well with them. As writers of archaeological
narratives, however, we can learn from the efficacy of these
earlier stories, especially since we work with many of the
same materials: intimate, personal histories, tangible objects,
and domestic landscapes. While adding an archaeological
dimension to the stories of historic homes, we build on the
memory-making that these women began and tell the
stories of the story-tellers.
9:30-9:50am
Working from Home: Tensions over Depicting a Feminist
Past at a Historic House Museum
Kim Christensen (University of California Berkeley)
Feminist theory has encouraged the study of the mundane
and small-scale, and many archaeologies of households
have succeeded in examining the lives of a site’s occupants
18
and their connections to the broader social arena. At the
same time, given the typical focus of historic house
museums on showcasing the material culture of past lives,
adopting the goal of showing ‘what life was like back then’
can clash with a desired emphasis on the decidedly nonnormative legacy of a particular historic figure. Specifically,
this paper explores the tensions involved in creating an
interpretive plan for a feminist historic house museum
located in upstate New York. The house in question was the
nineteenth-century home of the Gage family, whose most
famous member, Matilda Joslyn Gage, was prominent on
both the state and national front in the effort to gain woman
suffrage (among other reform efforts). Excavations
conducted on the property have uncovered a rich array of
material culture that can be attributed to the Gage
household and shed light on the family’s daily practices.
The museum’s board of directors, however, is reluctant to
include information on the family as a whole and their daily
lives as part of the site’s interpretation, fearing that such
inclusion will obscure the focus on Gage’s work and reify
existing gendered stereotypes regarding ‘the domestic
sphere.’ This paper thus focuses on the perceived tensions
between ideas and things within the historical context of
house museums in general and the context of a politically
conscious museum-in-the-making specifically.
9:50-10:10am
Our Site is Alive, Intimate, and Discomforting! Digging
on Private Property with Descendants
Kaitlin Deslatte, Caroline Frank, and Krysta Ryzewski
(Brown University)
Theoretical questions should inform interpretations of
dwelling spaces as much as archaeological practices. The
practical challenges posed by working with descendants on
their lived landscape typically involve issues of dirt, the
mess, and inconveniences of sustaining a small army of
excavators while conducting one's life in the space. During
of our surveys and excavations on the property's
homesteads, we constantly needed to negotiate. But what
happens when the archaeologist works with descendants,
on their land, in dwelling spaces that have belonged to their
ancestors for centuries, that they continue to own, and the
questions owners and archaeologist pose seem to diverge?
Who owns the past? In speaking about work with
indigenous peoples, George Nicholas and Kelly Bannister
state: "the ultimate risk to both sides is the loss of control of
knowledge." As the archaeologist gradually assumes some
control of this lived-in space, a contest emerges. Referring
again to indigenous peoples, Meg Conkey points out that
"One need not be a social scientist to understand that the
very cultural integrity of Indigenous peoples is inextricably
dependent upon their control of cultural knowledge." The
question we pose in this paper is doesn't this assertion hold
true for many groups of stakeholders, not only those who
archaeologists have identified as disadvantaged. With over
five years of collaboration with "Greene Farm" descendants,
we will use our experience to focus on current questions of
decolonization.
10:10-10:30am
Discussion
10:30-11:00am COFFEE BREAK
11:00-11:20am
Families and Things: Social Relations and Materiality at
the Boston-Higginbotham House
Teresa Dujnic (University of California Berkeley)
In recent research, memory work has been discussed as
encompassing both the work done by past people with
respect to their own history and also the present–day
practices of archaeologists, historians, descendant
communities and other groups. This paper will focus on the
latter, specifically addressing the ways that in present-day
contexts stakeholders undertake memory work through
commemoration and everyday practices to create a place
from which they can speak about their relationship with the
past. Memory work at historic houses, including both
practices of remembering and forgetting, is tied in powerful
ways to the materiality of extant buildings, antiques, and
artifacts. Memory work is also underwritten by the political
and social contexts of the present. This paper will explore
some of the memory work undertaken by stakeholders at
the
Boston-Higginbotham
House
in
Nantucket
Massachusetts. The house is owned by the Museum of
African American History and represents the future site of a
visitor’s center that will be part of a black history trail on
Nantucket. The role of the extant house and the
archaeological process in practices of remembrance at the
house will be discussed as well as the potential avenues for
forgetting that allow groups to position themselves in
relation to perceived pasts.
11:20-11:40am
Recollecting the Old Homestead: Memory, Place,
Nostalgia
Christina J. Hodge (Peabody Museum, Harvard University)
This paper considers processes of memory-making at the
Elihu Akin House, a historic site in a New England coastal
village. Since the late eighteenth century, the house has been
a place of dwelling and selective recollection via narratives
of history, identity, and place. The site has long fostered
19
nostalgic engagements with the past, understood as
entanglement in a present-past or longing for an idealized
and unattainable future-past. The once-"forgotten" property
was recently purchased by the town and subjected to
architectural preservation and archaeological study. As the
house is reinvested with significance, it has been exposed
and destabilized: valued by some, dismissed by others. The
place, its history, and its future are, simultaneously, being
remade. How do agendas of remembering and forgetting
intersect with the uses of heritage? Who controls the
production of knowledge? When practicing archaeology,
how do you honor multiple stakeholders and the "public
trust" when priorities are misaligned with, or run counter to,
each other? As a material/emotional discourse strongly
implicated in memory-making and the values of heritage,
nostalgia informs practice at the Akin House as at so many
historic homes. Material culture can create nostalgic
recollection. And—importantly for those in heritage and
allied professions—nostalgia is susceptible to manipulation.
Nostalgia has implications for the way the Akin House is (or
is not) developed into an educational center serving local
and regional interests, as well as the interests of
archaeological heritage management.
11:40-12:00pm
Finding a Place for Archaeology at the Wilbor House in
Little Compton, Rhode Island
Katharine M. Johnson (University of Massachusetts Boston)
The Wilbor House in Little Compton, Rhode Island has been
a fixture in the community for over fifty years; functioning
not only as a headquarters for the Little Compton Historical
Society, but as an historic home and gathering for social
events. The house itself was built in the 1690s and stayed in
the Wilbor family until the early 1900s when it was sold,
occupied by various tenants, and then eventually given to
the Historical Society in 1955. Because the primary function
of the Historical Society is to be actively involved with the
community and its history, it would not be beneficial to
divorce the archaeology of this site’s past residents with
those of its present or future. Recent archaeological
excavations undertaken at the site have provided new
information about the past occupants; but in what ways can
this process and information be integrated into the site
history? This paper deals with how the archaeological
process at the Wilbor House has been and will be conveyed
to members of the general public, and the ways in which
this process has complemented and changed the historical
interpretation of the house itself.
12:00-12:30pm
Discussion
Theory of Assemblage
Ewa Domańska (Poznan University/ Stanford
University)
Assemblage is one of these “bridging concepts” that connect
various disciplines while retaining their specificity.
Commonly used in geology, paleontology, archaeology and
art, recently it regains popularity in different fields (political
sciences - Manuel DeLanda, science studies – Bruno Latour,
cultural studies - Brian Massumi). This process of
reappearance of the concept is accompanied by serious
attempts to theorize assemblage mainly by reference to
Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of the term (French
agencement).
The panel “Theory of Assemblage” will gather scholars
from various disciplines in order to discuss a non- or adisciplinary approach to the concept of assemblage. From
the understanding of assemblage as an equivalent term to
Foucault’s epistemes, Kuhn’s paradigms, or Callon, Law
and Latour’s actor-network-theory, to its popular definition
as “a group of objects of different or similar types found in
close association with one another”, the purpose is to
problematize this concept from the point of view of
comparative studies in theories of human and social
sciences. Due to the course of discussion, the idea is to
falsify and transgress modernist and postmodernist
considerations on assemblage understood as a structure-like
surrogate, or in terms of the idea of the always-emerging,
the state of becoming, emergence, and production of
difference and heterogeneity. In this sense, assemblage
might serve as a “disturbing concept” that shows the
limitations of its present understandings, on the one hand,
and its potentialities for transgressing them, on the other.
The idea is to focus on material rather than discursive
assemblages (however, they cannot be separated) in order to
consider the complexity of human-nonhuman and organicnonorganic relationships (assemblage vs companion species
vs actor-network-theory, etc.); to discuss a performative and
agentive aspect of assemblage (what it does and how it
functions rather than what it means), associations and
symbiotic relations as basic elements of analysis (relational
materialism), the problem of territorialization and
deterritorialization as factors of assemblage’s “identity”
(and space as created by assemblage).
9:00-9:10am
Introduction
Ewa Domańska (Poznan University/Stanford University)
20
9:10-9:40am
Secondary Particles: “Everything is always already readymade”
Hayden White (Stanford University)
In this presentation I will attempt to address the so-called
Argos problem as a way of identifying the ontological
presuppositions underlying all constructivist theories of
reality. Rejecting for the moment any distinction between
material and discursive agencements, I will suggest that the
paradox which attracts “assemblers” to the strategies of
“assemblage” is that of (one version of) the Argos paradox
how to make a new thing by putting together a congeries of
old ones.
9:40-10:10am
Strange Assemblages
Geoffrey C. Bowker (University of California: Santa Clara)
“Ontology” has become an oddly pervasive term across a
number
of
fields.
Frequently,
builders
of
cyberinfrastructures to enable work across multiple
disciplines to treat complex issues (such as biodiversity and
climate change) ask the poor domain scientist: What is your
ontology? While this question is generally greeted with a
mixture of hostility and benign indifference, it is a
significant one that reveals tensions about the degrees to
which we already know the objects that make up our world
and
by
consequence
constitute
our
computer
representations of it. The concept of “assemblages” is a
perspicuous one for exploring new ways in which selves,
species and the world can (and should) be explored outside
of the boundaries of a single predefined ontology.
10:40-11:00am COFFEE BREAK
11:00-11:30am
Hawking meets Hawking. The Ethnographic Study of a
Statue
Hélène Mialet (University of California: Berkeley/Harvard
University)
I begin by drawing your attention to a special, but at first sight
merely curious feature of the notion of doing something, or rather
of trying to do something. In the end I hope to satisfy you that this
feature is more than merely curious; it is of radical importance for
our central question, namely, what is le Penseur doing?
- Gilbert Ryle
What was for the philosopher a pure thought experiment
has been fleshed out for the ethnographer into an
improbable scene: the meeting of Stephen Hawking, the
man with Stephen Hawking the statue. The scene takes
place in Hawking’s office. A statue representing Hawking
has been presented for approval before its definitive version
is made. Hawking, his assistants, his colleagues, the sculptor
and the ethnographer are present. The paper describes the
interaction between these different actors. It also wants to
take seriously the role of the statue as an actor. In taking
into account the materiality of the statue, its circulation, its
presence and what it allows, I will follow the mise-en-scène,
the articulation and shaping of an identity—the Thinker
(Penseur). Where is Hawking? Where is the original, where
is the replica? Who is who? Who is what? And what is
Hawking—the Thinker, the man/the statue—doing? These
are some of the questions I will address through a thick
description—to use Geertz term, which, as we will recall,
was inspired by Ryle’s “What is le Penseur doing?”—of an
assemblage.
11:30-12:00pm
Re-assembling the archaeological assemblage
Ana Bezic (Stanford University)
The notion of an assemblage has always been present in
archaeology and remains to act as a classificatory tool par
excellence. What would archaeology look like if assemblage
were no longer used as a term meaning “a group of
different artifacts found in association with one another”?
What if archaeological assemblages were no longer meaning
based structures? The concept of assemblage I am proposing
here is inspired by two ideas. The first one is from Latour’s
idea of the collective, and the second comes from DeLanda’s
theory of assemblages. By incorporating these views, the
assemblage could then be seen as a result of the assembling
of people and things (objects and processes) and in need of
tracing their continual interactions rather then being defined
by their associations. I propose an assemblage for
archaeology for which every assembling is a unique ‘event’,
a transformation rather than a combination.
12:00-12:30pm
General discussion
Discussant:
Michael Shanks (Stanford University)
21
Abstracts
Saturday 2nd May
Afternoon sessions
Figurines in Action (cont)
John M. Matsunaga (University of California:
Berkeley) & Peter Biehl (SUNY Buffalo)
2:00-2:20pm
The Materiality and Performativity of Classic Maya
Figurines
Christina Halperin (University of Illinois, UrbanaChampaign)
Classic period (AD 300-900) Maya curated and cached
figural objects are frequently
considered as non-human agents whose magical and
supernatural essences complicated human/subject material/object dichotomies. These capacities are linked
with their mimetic properties in addition to their
archaeological recovery in caches and burials. In drawing
on recent materiality and performance theory, this paper
expands on the active role of curated or cached objects to
consider Classic Maya figurine-ocarinas, many of which are
found archaeologically within middens. While earlier Maya
figurine studies have often focused on semiotic
interpretations, I include in this investigation an
examination of their social contexts of disposal and use,
their scale, and their musical or noise-making capacities in
order to highlight their affective and animating roles. I
underscore objectification processes between humans and
the material world and discursive relations between
different social actors in the constitution of ancient
performances.
2:20-2:40pm
Ancient Mementos: Life Histories of Collected and
Curated Figurines from Central Mexico
Lisa Overholtzer (Northwestern University)
This paper reconstructs the life histories of ancient figurines
that were collected and curated at Postclassic Xaltocan,
Mexico in order to study their materiality, i.e. the mutually
constitutive relationships between people and objects. A life
history approach also allows us to study the production of
Xaltocan as a place as it is structured by the movement of
these figurines on the roads leading into the site. To do so, I
incorporate chemical provenance analysis of the figurines
and stratigraphic evidence of their discard and build upon
previous research on their embodied household ritual use.
(1pm-6pm)
What emerges from this reconstruction is a view of Xaltocan
as connected to or enchained to a network of ancient people,
specifically people from Classic period Teotihuacan,
through the collection and curation of artifacts or "pieces of
places" from the already ancient site.
2:40-3:00pm
Person, Practice and Superego: The Function of Figurines
in Ancient Teotihuacan, Mexico
Warren Barbour (SUNY Buffalo)
When the ancient Teotihuacan state collapsed whole
categories of figurines disappeared while others were
modified or continued relatively unchanged. Examining
groups of Teotihuacan figurines and their trajectories after
the collapse reveals what functions they may have served
within the state and how they may have changed function
in domestic and public religious practice from the city's
beginnings to the creation of myth and memories of the
ancient city hundred of years later.
3:00-3:20pm
No More Figurines: Questioning Homologies Between
Present and Past
Rosemary Joyce (University of California: Berkeley)
What is a figurine? By now, the term is so naturalized
within archaeology that it carries with it a plethora of
givens: figurines are relatively small (less than life scale,
certainly, and perhaps necessarily small enough to hold in
the hand); in many contexts, figurines are archetypally fired
clay objects (so that other small anthropomorphic sculptures
demand
a
qualifier,
"bone
figurine",
but
the
unqualified/unmarked form unambiguous-ly means
"[ceramic] figurine"); they are understood to focus on
human subjects (again the unmarked subject "figurine",
against the marked "animal figurine"). Yet many recent
studies have profitably worked across the lines between
figurines and other things, asking such questions as, "when
does an anthropomorphic image become large enough to be
called a sculpture and not be eligible to be described as a
'figurine'?"; "how can we abstract human subjects from a
wider array of depicted things and animals?"; and "does the
medium matter, and if so, what do different media do?"
22
In this paper, I take these kinds of arguments - my own
previous work included - one step further, and ask whether
we need to dismiss "figurines" entirely as a subject-- while
retaining contemporary figurine studies. What might we do,
if we did not take for granted that when we abstract a subset
of material things in the present based on scale, medium,
and subject matter, we are reproducing a meaningful
category of the past? What is a figurine if it is not, in fact, an
object of past contemplation?
3:20-3:50pm
Discussant
Lynn Meskell (Stanford University)
3:50-4:20pm
General discussion
Intimate Encounters, Postcolonial Engagements
(cont)
Barbara Voss (Stanford University) & Eleanor
Conlin Casella (University of Manchester)
2:00-2:20pm
Kinsey does Peru: Moche ceramics and the limits of pure
description
Mary Weismantel (Northwestern University)
In the 1950s, Peruvian archaeologist Rafael Larco Hoyle and
American sexologist Alfred Kinsey attempted to collaborate
on a scientific project of great mutual interest: a
comprehensive study of ancient Pre- Columbian ceramics
with a sexual theme. Both men believed in the power of
empirical science: although the temporal and cultural
distance between the twentieth century Americas and the
first millennium was great, accurate description could
provide a first step towards eventual analysis. This project
was never completed, but it left a complex legacy that
includes not only publications about and photographs of the
Moche ceramics, but also the convoluted personal history of
Kinsey himself. Looked at today, this record demonstrates
several things: the power of the empirical ideal; the
difficulties inherent in achieving it; and the multiple
colonialisms that govern relations between Latin America
and the U.S.; between elite Latin Americans of European
heritage, like Larco Hoyle, and the indigenous Americas;
and even between the present and the PreColumbian past.
2:20-2:40pm
Fetishizing the Body Ancient: metaphor, body politics,
and the DNA revolution in archaeology
John Norder (Michigan State University)
One of the mainstays of essentialized archaeological
research has been the body. By itself or as a focus of the
attentions of past societies, it has been considered to be one
of the most critical sources of data for archaeological
research. It is considered the key to understanding
everything from individual health to concepts of social
status and cosmological insight. In many ways, the body is,
literally, a temple, something to worship through the
imagination of archaeologists and biological anthropologists. This paper explores the past and present
fetishism of the body as an object of continued colonial
domination in Native North America. Beginning with the
American Indian critique of archaeology that resulted, in
part, in the passage of NAGPRA, I will examine the shifting
landscape of body politics within this arena. Case studies
such as Kennewick Man and the DNA revolution, which
has grown, sometimes shockingly and tragically, with the
support of American Indian communities, demonstrate that
this fetishism continues to grow and challenges efforts at
decolonization of the discipline.
2:40-3:00pm
General discussion
Material Practice, Identity and Community
(cont)
Serena Love (Stanford University) &
A. Bernard Knapp (University of Glasgow)
2:00-2:20pm
Making Objects, Making Selves: Material Reflections on
Identity and Community
Almudena Hernando (Universidad Complutense, Madrid,
Spain)
Archaeology has traditionally ignored the fact that concepts
such as ‘economy’, ‘society’, ‘ideology’ or even ‘material
culture’ are not realities that exist apart from the people
who produce them. Following the positivist and
evolutionist bias of our discipline, archaeol-ogists often
seem to forget that these manifestations are only expressions
of the kind of relations that people established among
themselves, and therefore of the ways of being of those
people. The consequence is that if archaeology wants to
approach past societies more accurately, issues of identity
need to be considered. Based on the standard western
definition and conception of the person, several authors
have isolated two different kinds of identity, the collective,
relational or ‘dividual’ versus the individualized one.
In this paper, by contrast, I suggest that: 1) identity is
constructed through a much more flexible, subtle and
23
complex process of intertwining collective (‘relational’)
features with individualized ones; 2) ‘community’ can be
understood as that social context where ‘relational’ features
are
dominant over the individualized ones in selfperception; 3) historically, the identities of men and women
have gone through different procesess of transformation in
that combination, which means that issues of gender also
need to be considered; 4) all such processes of
transformation are structurally associated and therefore
materially expressed not only in changes in the relation with
space or time, technology, and so on, but also in the
diversity of types of material culture and in the
homogeneity or heterogeneity of each one of these types.
Therefore it should be possible to draw some general
approach to the type of community (more or less divided or
socio-economically complex) and the kind of identities
sustaining it in each historical moment of the past through
the analysis of its material remains.
2:20-2:40pm
The Practice of Maintenance Activities: Material Culture
and Identity in the Funerary Ritual of Argaric
Communities
Sandra Montón-Subías (Universitat Pompeu Fabra,
Barcelona, Spain)
The term maintenance activities encom-passes a set of
practices that involve the sustenance and welfare of all the
members of a social group. Usually related to care giving,
feeding and food processing, weaving and cloth
manufacture, hygiene, public health and healing,
socialization of children and the fitting out and organization
of related spaces, these activities comprise the basic tasks of
daily life that regulate communities’ life courses and help to
stabilize social life. Originally undertaken by everyone who
formed part of human communities, progressively, and for
historical reasons, they became an integral part of women’s
heritage in many traditional and historical societies. Because
they form part of the construction of identity in social
interactions (‘we are what we do’), maintenance activities
foster specific abilities and qualities, and confer on their
performers a particular understanding of the self, of the
surrounding world and of the way of being in it. Paramount
to approaching the sense of community in the past is to
visualize how this type of identity, usually defined as
relational, articulates across the social spectrum. In this
study, I propose to consider the relationship between
maintenance activities and identity within the Argaric
communities of southeast Iberia (ca. 2250-1450 Cal BC),
beginning with the study of the material aspects of
maintenance activities in the funerary record and
continuing with analysis of its structuration within other
spheres of social life.
2:40-3:00pm
Identities, Communities and Mortuary Practices in
Mesopotamia
Karina Croucher (University of Manchester, Manchester,
UK)
Issues of identity and community lie at the very heart of
everyday practice, influencing how people interact, relate to
material culture, and to each other. We often assume that
senses of community and identity are related to place,
assumptions that are particularly strengthened by the
location of the dead: this relationship between living spaces
and mortuary places forms the focus of this paper. What
exactly is the relationship between the spaces of the living
and the dead? What are the choices made by the living
through the exchanges and deposition of material culture
surrounding mortuary events? How are mortuary practices
related to the concept of community? This paper discusses
these issues in the light of ongoing research on the ‘Royal
Cemetery’ at Ur (Mesopotamia, ca. 2600-2400 BC),
examining contextual evidence, mortuary practices,
identities and the communities responsible for the
deposition of some 660 people, including 16 ‘Royal Graves’,
as well as the potential sacrifices suggested by the material.
It also examines how concepts of identity and community
are bound up in material practices at Ur, investigating the
realms of the living and the dead.
3:00-3:20pm
How To Be an Exceptional Neighbor in the Ancient Near
East
Benjamin Porter (University of California, Berkeley,
California)
Leviticus’s demand that we love our neighbors as ourselves
suggests that the person who embodies this category is
neither family nor stranger, but rather somebody whose
relationship to us is irresolvable and problematic. In the
spirit of those recent thinkers who have returned to the
problem of the neighbor, this paper explores that notion in
the ancient Near Eastern milieu where the Leviticus
injunction was first expressed. I first reflect on how notions
of the neighbor drawn from text-artifacts potentially
complicate rigid structural visions of Near Eastern social
life. Then, drawing on a collection of early Iron Age
agricultural communities in central Jordan, I demonstrate
how neighboring households both cooperated and
competed for subsistence and surplus wealth in a semi-arid
marginal environment. I pay particular attention to how
relationships between households are expressed in the built
environment and through material culture. I conclude by
discussing how it was possible for neighbors to build wealth
so that they as well as their households might have achieved
a state of exception in social life, a position from which they
24
could determine the community’s fate. By returning to these
early iterations of the neighbor in the Near East, I not only
seek to re-envision the ‘communal’ in ancient societies, but
also to improve on discussions of the neighbor in
contemporary critical thought.
3:20-3:40pm
Discussion
3:40-4:00pm
Situating Potting Practice and Learning Community on the
Taraco Peninsula, Bolivia
Andrew P. Roddick (University of California, Berkeley,
California)
Our understanding of community boundedness is often
entangled with notions of settlements and increasing
sociopolitical complexity. This is particular-ly the case for
the Late Formative Period (200 BC–250 AD) of the Lake
Titicaca Basin, prior to the spread of the Tiwanaku state.
Titicaca Basin archaeologists take a ‘bird’s eye perspective’,
defining community boundaries — religious, political or
ethnic — by the presence and density of particular ceramic
design styles across the landscape. This approach is suspect
in many cases, unproductive for more fine-grained social
questions, and ineffective for the ‘design-light’ ceramics of
the Late Formative Period. In this paper I suggest that a
focus on learning is a useful conceptual bridge to a more
dynamic perspective of community; learning is central to
the cycles of social reproduction. Jean Lave and Etienne
Wenger’s (1991) seminal work on ’communities of practice‘
offers a dynamic framework of situated knowledge with
useful conceptual tools to consider crafting traditions.
Pottery production is a tacit and embodied knowledge that
is, like any form of social practice, learned in a community
of practice. I use ideas from Lave and Wenger, and the
greater situated learning literature, to investigate Late
Formative communities of potting practice on the Taraco
Peninsula, Bolivia. I track shifting technological choices and
bodily practices by examining ceramic attributes and
compositional data from a large ceramic assemblage
excavated by the Taraco Archaeological Project. Lave, Jean,
and Etienne Wenger 1991 Situated Learning: Legitimate
Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
4:00-4:20pm
Communities of Practice and Political Organization in the
Classic Maya Countryside
Jason Yaeger (University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin)
Communities can be productively under-stood as a
confluence of people, place, and premise, following John
Watanabe. Defined thus, the community is a flexible
construct that focuses our attention on specific spatial
frames, people’s interactions within those frames, and ways
that ideation and identity shape and are constituted by
those interactions. Communities do not exist sui generis;
they are constructed through practices, ranging from
quotidian activities to marked practices that occur during
more salient events. People belong to multiple communities;
some are nested in a scalar fashion, others are cross-cutting.
In this paper, I discuss three very different communities that
existed in the Classic-period Mopan River Valley of western
Belize: the small, agrarian hinterland community of San
Lorenzo; the larger, imagined political community of
Xunantunich; and the elite community that was
discontiguously distributed throughout the polity’s hamlets
and larger centers. I focus on the distinct sets of material
practices through which these communities were
constructed, and the venues in which those practices
occurred. The members of each shared a salient identity,
despite the high degree of internal heterogeneity in each
community. I chart changes in these communities and the
material practices through which they were constituted
from the Late Classic to the Terminal Classic period, a time
of significant population decline, environmental change,
and political fragmentation. I close with a more speculative
discussion of how people in different subject positions
would have been affected by these larger changes, and how
their shifting strategies contributed to the changing nature
of these communities.
4:20-4:40pm
The Historical Archaeology of Sexual Communities
Barbara L. Voss (Stanford University, Stanford, California)
Sexual ideologies, sexual policies, sexual relationships, and
sexual practices all shape the ways that communities are
formed. Some communities even come to be defined or
known primarily through their sexual practices or sexual
identities. Archaeological interpretations of historical
communities, and archaeological engagement with living
communities, need to consider the sexual politics of
community life past and present. Using examples from
several archaeological sites in California – as diverse as a
Spanish-colonial military presidio, an urban Chinese
immigrant neighborhood, and a 19th century brothel – this
paper explores methodological and theoretical issues in
archaeological research on the sexual dimensions of
community.
4:40-5:30
Discussant (and General Discussion)
Ian Hodder (Stanford Unviersity)
25
The Residues of Human Decisions:
Archaeological Applications of Behavioral
Ecology (cont)
Brian F. Codding & Douglas W. Bird (Stanford
University)
2pm-5pm
Panel Discussion
Discussants:
Robert L. Bettinger (University of California: Davis)
Michael A. Jochim (University of California: Santa Barbara)
James F. O'Connell (University of Utah)
Stephen Shennan (University College London)
Bruce Winterhalder (University of California: Davis)
Steven L. Kuhn (University of Arizona)
Iconoclash and the Archaeology of Violence
Toward Images (cont)
Severin Fowles (Barnard College/Columbia
University)
2:00-2:20pm
The Numismatic State: Iconolcash and its Subjects during
the First Century of Islam
Darryl Wilkinson (Columbia University)
It has been suggested that there is no archaeological
evidence for the first Muslim state until some 70 years after
the initial Islamic conquests because until that time, no such
state (in the sense of a centralized, bureaucratic
government) actually existed. Seeking to address this
puzzling lack of material evidence, this paper considers a
specific moment in the emergence of the first Muslim state
(during the late 6th Century AD) when the pre-existing
Byzantine and Sassanian coinages were modified to
conform to a more 'Islamic' form. This moment is discussed
as one which produced new kinds of political subjects
through individuals' efforts to shape and regulate the
material manifestations of the state. Iconoclash is therefore
considered as a site for the creation of new ideologies that
relate to shared understandings of political and religious
subjectivity, rather than merely an expression of preexisting iconoclastic or anti-idolatrous sentiments.
2:20-2:40
Material Practice and the Semiotic Metamorphosis of a
Sign: Early Buddhist Stupas and the Origin of Mahayana
Buddism
Lars Fogelin (University of Arizona)
From at least the 3rd century BCE, Buddhist ritual focused
on stupas, stylized replicas of the mounds of earth in which
early Buddhists interred relics of the Buddha. Beginning in
the 2nd century BCE, Buddhist monks in Western India
began manipulating the physical shape of monastic stupas
to make them appear taller and more massive than they
actually were. These manipulations were intended to assist
in asserting monastic authority over the Buddhist laity.
Employing theories of practice, materiality, and semiotics, I
argue that intentional manipulations of the shape of stupas
by Buddhist monks unintentionally led to the progressive
detachment of the primary signs of Buddhism from their
original referents. Where earlier stupas were icons of the
Buddha encased within indexes of his presence, later stupas
were symbols of the Buddha and Buddhist theology. This
change in the material practice of Buddhism reduced
stupas’ emotional immediacy in favor of greater intellectual
detachment. In the end, this shift in the meaning ascribed to
stupas created the preconditions from which the Buddhist
image cult and Mahayana Buddhism emerged in the 1st
through 5th centuries CE. The development of Mahayana
Buddhism and Buddha images signified a return to iconic
worship of the Buddha.
2:40-3:00pm
Corpses and Ghosts: The African Burial Ground
Nan Rothschild (Columbia University)
The bodies of the dead are especially significant actors and
their treatment is encompassed within aspects of iconoclash,
handled with respect or trangressed and degraded at
differing times in their trajectory. As their reality fades their
power may increase. The African Burial Ground in lower
Manhattan, NYC is an exemplar of such conflicting
representations. In the 18th c. dead Africans were buried
carefully; in the 19th c the cemetery was built over,
forgotten and disrespected. Late in the 20th c, these bodies
were relocated and had become ghosts, subjected to wildly
divergent attitudes and behaviors by a Federal agency, the
African-American community / communities and
archaeologists.
3:00-3:20pm
Discussion
26
3:20-3:40pm
A breaking of boundaries: the iconoclasm of English
witchbottles
Zoe Crossland (Columbia University)
Iconoclasm stages the act of breakage as one which
expresses a negative moral valuation. Iconoclash opens up
the possibility to deepen and widen our understanding of
why people make and break objects. This paper turns to 17th
century England to discuss the breaking of apotropaic
devices made from common and mass-produced Bartmann
or 'Bellarmine' jugs. These 'witch bottles' demonstrate the
power of the broken image to articulate anxieties over
bodily integrity in the context of the coming into being of a
bounded sense of self. They also remind us of the domestic
background to 17th century conceptualizations of the 'fetish'
and complicate its association with the exotic and 'other'.
3:40-4:00pm
Intercessory Images of Inter-ruption
Angie Heo (Barnard College, Columbia University)
This paper will examine the political-theological
implications of divine images in circulation, made
perceptible through the commemoration of founding acts of
violence - the truth confession of a martyr saint by torture
and the territorial disruption of a body politic by war. Its
point of contemporary access is a dynamic of Coptic
Orthodox images of saintly and clerical intercession in 19678 - the relics of St. Mark, the pilgrimage shrines of
Jerusalem, the apparition of the Virgin Mary - during a
moment in which an Egypt unified was reckoning with the
mournful remembrances of the Arab-Israeli war. As I plan
to suggest in the paper, this triplet emergence of images
marks a co-constitutive convergence of body-rupturing
events in which strands of nation-state sovereignty become
entangled in the modern institution of the papal-theological
seat of earthly power in the Coptic Orthodox church. The
aim is to invite conversation with those interested in the
nature of sovereignty (church and state), territorial
displacement and war, imperial expansion, the
indeterminate status of a body politic, and the
communicative force of images in movement.
4:00-4:20pm
Decontextualization and defacement: Joel Meyerowitz's
post-9/11 photography
Zachary Hooker (Columbia University)
Joel Meyerowitz was the only 'freelance' (i.e., non-forensic)
photographer allowed on site at the World Trade Center
immediately after the towers had fallen. During months of
photographing the ruins and clean-up effort at the site,
Meyerowitz produced nearly 10,000 negatives. This paper
comparatively examines two productions that resulted from
this endeavor: the first was a globe-trotting 27-photo
exhibition curated and organized by the US Department of
State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs , which
opened in mid-2002 with the title "After September 11th:
Images from Ground Zero"; the second was a volume of
photographs organized by Meyerowitz himself and
published as Aftermath: World Trade Center Archive and
published by Phaidon in 2007.
Via analysis of these two productions (and the press
releases, interviews, and publicity that surrounded them),
this paper first considers the State Department's
de/recontextualization of these images as a form of
defacement or politically productive iconoclasm. This view
is then contested through an emphasis on the autonomy of
the 'image-in/for-itself' – the inevitable inability of any
image to control its contexts. From this viewpoint, the
possibility of a redemptive quality within the autonomous
image is considered, a quality that coalesces the context of
its production despite subsequent defacements or
decontextualization. However, such a redemptive reading
of images may be contingent on particular styles of reading,
particularly allegorical reading, conceived as a process of
redemption by which mythologized images (or, 'screen
memories') can escape the hegemonic contexts that frame
them and provide truly historical material with which one
can accurately analyze and critique a particular images
found context.
4:20-5:00pm
Discussion
Cyber-Archaeology (cont)
Maurizio Forte (University of California: Merced)
2:00-2:20pm
Virtual Landscapes at Cerro Baul, Peru
Patrick Ryan Williams (Field Museum of Chicago)
We explore the use of virtual worlds for modeling changes
in ecology and ideologies of landscape around the Wari
(600-1000 AD) center of Cerro Baul, Peru. This was a
dynamic period in Peruvian prehistory, with the Andes' first
empires expanding into new regions and radically altering
the environments with irrigation works, monumental
architecture, and new forms of urbanism. On the border
between the two prominent highland states, Wari and
Tiwanaku, this transition included the conversion of a
sacred mountain into a ceremonial and administrative
center by the Wari.
27
Our research has used virtual environments to investigate
architectural alignments and perceptions of space that
enhance our understanding of ancient ideologies of place. It
also has permitted us to recreate the vast network of
irrigation works and agricultural production. Ongoing
research is using ecological modeling based on these virtual
worlds to assess the environmental changes brought on by
imperialism in ancient Peru.
12:25-2:45pm
Valuing Simplicity: Archaeological Field Documentation
and Less Formal Approaches toward Semantic
Interoperability
Eric C. Kansa (University of California: Berkeley)
Web-based scholarship can be far more rapid, cost-effective,
conversational, open, and transparent than print-based
publication. However, despite the success of popular Web
2.0 systems for informal information sharing, much
archaeological field documentation and analyses still see
little dissemination in collaborative online environments. To
meet archaeological data-sharing needs, some advocate
highly formalized “Semantic Web” approaches that
integrate vast collections of data by referencing common
disciplinary ontologies (formal conceptual systems). In
contrast, this paper will argue that, even though useful
Semantic frameworks such as the CIDOC-CRM exist, the
primary barriers to data sharing are social and practical, as
well as theoretical. Elaborate and formal semantic
structures, while indeed facilitating efficient data exchange
and interoperability, can sometimes constrain meaning and
interpretive possibilities. In contrast, a more “mashuporiented” approach with simplified and less elaborate
semantics, while being less ambitious from a technical or
Semantic Web point of view, may be more justifiable from
the perspective of archaeological interpretation and theory.
2:50-3:10pm
Cyber-archaeology: Steering Beyond the Artifact towards
Situated Understanding
Erik Champion (Massey University, New Zealand)
When we talk of cyber-archaeology, it is possible to think of
digital
archaeology,
archaeological
methods
that
incorporate digital technology. Yet this term is too generic to
convey the recurring issue of communicating conflicting
accounts of the past to a wide variety of audience. We
require a term that inspires the participant to move past the
contemplation of artifacts as singular objects, and to
conserve the situated processes and ways in which this
knowledge has been retrieved. When archaeology is used to
communicate artifacts and events of historical significance
to the wider public, we may also be reminded of virtual
heritage. Despite its succinct nature, this term is,
unfortunately, an oxymoron. Are we attempting to almost
convey the importance of preservation and conservation? I
proffer this definition: cyber-archaeology is the complicit
capacity of digital media to allow the visitor to be immersed
inside archaeological findings and approaches, way-finding
their way through alternating and even conflicting
viewpoints. Such way-finding necessitates meaningful
participation for the visitor to truly engage with the
experience, not the superficial personalization or
widespread destruction of commercial game-worlds. To
bring life back to virtual worlds for the enjoyment of the
spectator,
we
require
more
understanding
of
communication design, specifically, interaction design.
While commercial games offer ready-made environments,
tools, and genres, more interrogative and critical media is
required, that is reflection-friendly, and not just triggerhappy. The potential of counter-factual worlds, thematic
interaction, and virtual worlds as constrained socially
participative media will also be discussed as methods to
improve situated under-standing.
3:15-3:35pm
3D Cybermaps of the Western Han Tombs
Nicolò Dell’Unto, Fabrizio Galeazzi & Paola Di
Giuseppantonio Di Franco (University of California,
Merced)
This project of the Virtual Museum of the Western Han
Dynasty is a joint research between UC Merced and the
Jiaotong University aimed to the digital documentation of
archaeological sites, artifacts and cultural relics of the
Western Han Dynasty. The outcome of this process will be
the creation of a virtual museum, based on collaborative
environments, dedicated to the Western Han Dynasty and
able to integrate new archaeological datasets coming from
the fieldwork activities (most part of them unpublished),
monuments, and famous collections of artifacts of the Xi’an
archaeological museums.
One of the most important archaeological examples in Xi’an
is represented by the mural paintings of the monumental
tombs of the Western Han Dynasty. Despite their
importance they risk to be lost because of the critical
conditions of plasters and colours. They show a very rich
repertory of subjects such as scenes of daily life, rituals and
ascension to heaven. These examples of mural paintings
contain a very complex interpretation code explaining the
relations between life and death during the Western Han
dynasty. A simple description of the subjects and also the
3D virtual reconstruction of the tombs are insufficient for
approaching a correct cultural interpretation. In this paper
we present a preliminary case study on the semantics of the
tomb M 27’s iconography (excavated in Xi’an in 2004 and
documented by laser scanning) obtained through 3D virtual
28
cybermaps. The use of virtual-cyber mind maps stresses the
interpretation of the spatial, religious and symbolic
connections (affordances) of the different subjects and
images decorating the vault and the walls of the tomb.
Through this simulation process the potential semantic
recomposition of the tomb creates new metaphors of
learning and communication.
3:40-4:00pm
General discussion
An Island View of Theory: Archaeological
Thought in Hawaii, Past, Present, and Future
James Flexner (University of California:
Berkeley)
This session will explore the various theoretical frameworks
that have shaped and continue to shape archaeological
thought in Hawaii. Archaeological theory has followed a
unique developmental trajectory in Hawaii, with emphases
on culture history, historical anthropology, evolutionary
ecology, and historical ecology, and with less explicit
emphasis on so-called post-processual archaeologies when
compared with certain strands of scholarship in North
America and Europe. There has also been increased
emphasis in recent years on public archaeology and
indigenous archaeology in the Islands. It is not a goal of this
session to focus exclusively on the application of various
'post' theories (postmodernism, postcolonial theory, postprocessualism) in Hawaiian archaeology, though a
discussion of these bodies of theory is welcome. Rather, the
goal will be to highlight a variety of approaches to and
influences on archaeological theory in Hawaii.
Hawaiian archaeologists do not often get together to "talk
theory" per se, but the discipline of archaeology in the
Islands is host to vibrant, relevant theoretical debates. It is
worth discussing the kinds of theories that shape
archaeological thought in Hawaii in a wider forum, both to
contribute the unique viewpoints that have developed
among archaeologists working in the Islands to the
discipline at large, and to engage with theoretical influences
from other parts of archaeology.
Papers are invited for this session which explore the history
of archaeological thought in Hawaii, which highlight
theoretical orientations now prominent in Hawaiian
archaeology, and which may suggest future directions for
theory in Hawaiian archaeology. The geographical focus for
this session is Hawaii, but papers should present broader
theoretical discussions that will be relevant for the discipline
as a whole.
2:00-2:10pm
Introduction
James Flexner (University of California: Berkeley)
2:10-2:30pm
Traditional Ethnohistory and Archaeological Evidence:
Seeing beyond the Royal Court of the Kamehameha
Dynasty in Kawaihae, Island of Hawai‘i
Mike T. Carson
Archaeological investigation at the royal court of the
Kamehameha Dynasty in Kawaihae, Hawai‘i Island,
presents an unequaled opportunity to compare traditional
ethnohistory with archaeological evidence. A critique of
cultural traditions and historic accounts suggests that they
were shaped by the ruling elites, suppressing other potential
voices in history and moreover over-writing the past.
Beneath the surface, earlier occupation layers pre-date the
historic royal precinct of the A.D. 1790s through 1820s.
Archaeological excavations provide the means to place the
stratified cultural deposits, occupational horizons, and
activity areas in the context of depositional history,
environmental transformation, and changing social
circumstances over the course of several centuries. The
resulting long-term and material-based perspective
compares and contrasts with the ethnohistoric view of local
and regional cultural history.
2:30-2:50pm
Where Archaeology Ends, When History Begins:
Theories from Hawaii
James Flexner (University of California: Berkeley)
Time
Archaeology and history, constructed at the broadest
possible scale, are both concerned with the same thing: the
human past. Yet the approach the two disciplines take to
the same topic can be very different, especially given
archaeology's connection to anthropology in North
American settings. Time plays an important role in the
ways that archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians
construct the human past. For historians, time is generally
taken as a given element, a progression of years against
which the course of history can be measured.
For
archaeologists, time had to be discovered, through creative
ways of arranging artifacts, and through emerging
technologies, radiocarbon dating being the most widely and
rapidly adopted example in the discipline. At the same
time, the material record of archaeology contains one of the
most direct means to assessing a broad spectrum of details
concerning daily life in the past, while the written records
with which historians often concern themselves may focus
on particular events or individuals, remaining relatively
mute about the day-to-day patterns that formed the
backdrop of those phenomena.
In situations where
29
archaeology and history overlap, scholars are provided an
opportunity to construct a detailed picture of the past, using
the different kinds of information available in the
archaeological and written records.
To explore this
framework, Hawaiian archaeology will be used as a case
study, in which there is widespread use of ethnohistoric
data for the interpretation of pre-contact material, and a
rich, growing tradition of post-contact archaeologies in the
archipelago.
think about how we view, analyze, interpret, and represent
the spatial component of the archaeological record. These
theoretical developments permeate the discipline and shape
both our research questions and designs. In addition,
methodological developments in spatial technology have
also impacted core archaeological practices including how
we find and record archaeological remains, manage data,
and investigate the historical relationship between our
species and the world around us.
2:50-3:10pm
Spatial patterning and social structure in traditional
Hawaiì
Julie Taomia
In this paper I review the progress and continued challenges
archaeology faces as we integrate more sophisticated
notions of space and place in our research and come to have
a greater reliance on spatial technology. I begin by
presenting a case study of spatial analysis and technology in
the archaeology of the Hawaiian Islands to reveal larger
trends in the discipline. In this review, I highlight two
themes that are mainstays in research on Hawaiian
prehistory and Pacific Island archaeology in general:
human-environment relationships and monumentality. Not
only are these common to research in other regions of the
world, but they are useful to the discussion of how to move
spatial archaeology forward.
Archaeologists have long recognized the significance of the
spatial distribution of material remains to interpreting past
cultures. However, models that have been used to interpret
archaeological remains are often based in the knowledge
base of the archaeologists, which are based in their own
cultural concepts. Using language and cognitive studies,
Lehman has noted the applicability of a mathematically
derived explanatory model to social and spatial
conceptualizations of speakers of Austronesian languages,
including Polynesians (see Lehman & Herdrich 2002). This
model posits a concept of a powerful point with radiating
fields of influence. Boundaries to the field of influence are
established where the field encounters a field of another
power point. The power of the point is conceived of as
crucial to life, but is also dangerous and must be controlled.
Lehman and Herdrich demonstrate the pervasiveness of this
concept in Samoan language and culture. Their analysis
includes terms that are found across Polynesian languages
with the same or very similar semantic meanings, including
tapu (kapu), mana, noa and mata (maka). In this paper I will
explore the manifestation of this model in Hawaiian
material culture.
3:30-3:50pm
Ideas set in stone: archaeological theory and ancient
Hawaiian monumental architecture
Jesse W. Stephen (University of Hawai'i at Manoa)
3:10-3:30pm
Questions of Space and Place: Progress and challenges for
spatial archaeology
Mark D. McCoy (San Jose State University)
The archaeological record of Oceania demonstrates
remarkable achievements in architecture, exemplified by the
remains of monumental constructions that supported
activities from athletic competitions to agricultural harvests.
This paper addresses the shape and trajectory of
archaeological theory through the lens of extant
monumental architecture in the Hawaiian Islands.
Beginning with a historical review of monumental
architecture and its engagement by archaeologists in
Hawai‘i, this discussion offers a baseline for the study of
ancient architecture and its relation to archaeological theory
across the archipelago. In turn, this paper takes a broader
theoretical viewpoint, with emphasis placed on 1)
distinguishing conceptual trends and associations in
research conducted in the Islands and beyond; and 2)
assessing future directions that focused studies of
monumental architecture by archaeologists may help to take
us – and how Hawaiian examples can offer an invaluable
point of departure.
Spatial archaeology is a diverse, evolving field that
contributes to fundamental method and theory in
anthropological archaeology. Rooted in settlement pattern
and regional archaeology, more recent approaches centered
on landscape and historical ecology have challenged us to
3:50-4:10pm
The Maka`ainana Transformation in Hawai`i:
Archaeological Expectations Based on the Social Effects of
Parliamentary Enclosure in England
Tom Dye
Lehman, F.K. (F.K.L. Chit Hlaing) and David J. Herdrich.
2002. On the relevance of point field for spatiality in
Oceania, pp. 179-197 in Giovanni Bennardo, ed.
Representing Space in Oceania: culture in language and
mind. Canberra Pacific Linguistics.
30
Property is a social relation defined by rights that are
universally contested and negotiated. Societies differ across
space and through time in their emphasis on one or the
other of two broad classes of rights. Rights of person--rights not to be excluded from uses and enjoyments---are
contrasted with so-called rights of property---rights that
exclude others from those same uses and enjoyments.
Archaeological theory and research indicates that Hawai`i
began a shift from rights of person to rights of property
around the fifteenth century. Archeologists have just begun
to explore the nature, timing, and scope of social changes
associated with the re-definition of property in traditional
Hawai`i. It is argued here that the well-documented effects
of Parliamentary enclosure in eighteenth century England
yield hypotheses that can be tested against the Hawaiian
archaeological record. Suggestions for implementing some
tests are offered.
4:10-4:30pm
The Emergence of Primary States in Ancient Hawaii.
Robert J. Hommon
The multi-disciplinary study of the rise of competing
indigenous Hawaiian kingdoms, the last and perhaps most
thoroughly documented example of primary state
emergence, is well suited both to apply and to contribute to
state-formation theory. The emergence of the Hawaiian
states appears to have been a broad spectrum
transformation of traditional Polynesian society whereby
social rank sharpened into socio-economic class distinction;
ascribed, sacred status was eclipsed by secular political
achievement as the basis for rulership; control of land
passed from traditional lineage to governing faction;
government was radically simplified by the invention of
stratified control hierarchy, a structure of bureaucratic
offices built on the template of the ranked hierarchy of
chiefs; customary giving of gifts and offerings became a
taxation system; a state religion, controlled by a professional
priesthood and political leaders, grew out of community
ritual; and warrior kings routinely waged true conquest
warfare to expand their realms by capturing, incorporating,
and governing political units complete with their
populations of resident producers.
Factors implicated in the emergence of Hawaiian states
include the immigration of high ranked chiefs from East
Polynesian archipelagoes and the introduction of the sweet
potato and other crops during the Late Voyaging Period (ca
A.D. 1200-1400) followed by the onset of food shortages and
competition for wealth in pigs and other goods as
agricultural expansion approached limits on reliably
productive agricultural lands, ca A.D. 1550.
4:30-4:50pm
Biocomplexity Theory in Hawaiian Archaeology: Islands
as Model Systems
Patrick V. Kirch (University of California: Berkeley)
This paper takes the position that archaeology in Hawai‘i
(and elsewhere in Oceania) may benefit from developments
in biocomplexity theory, which is concerned with the
dynamic and often non-linear coupling between natural and
cultural systems. In particular, I argue that Oceanic
islands—of which Hawai‘i is perhaps the best known
exemplar—offer outstanding “model systems” for
investigating and understanding past human ecodynamics.
In a model system, fundamental variables can be readily
identified, and the mechanisms of interaction among them
tested. While model systems are by definition simple, they
nonetheless contain all of the essential elements found in
more complex systems, or in systems that operate on a
larger scale; hence, their widespread application and utility.
Polynesian islands, including the Hawaiian archipelago,
offer a set of contrastive model systems for human
ecodynamics due to a small number of well-defined “state
factors” that display especially clear properties. Natural
state factors in Hawai‘i include biogeochemical gradients as
a function of time and geological development; strongly
orthogonal variation in climate; and, disharmonic and
highly endemic biotic components. Key cultural state factors
include: relatively late colonization of a previously
uninhabited set of islands; a short, well-controlled time scale
for cultural evolution; isolation of the cultural group after
initial colonization; significant demographic transitions;
and, significant transformation in the scale of sociopolitical
complexity. A further degree of cultural control stems from
the application of a phylogenetic model for Polynesian
cultural evolution, allowing discrimination of homologous
retentions from subsequent innovations or adaptations.
4:50-5:10pm
Fencing the Field: The Ins and Outs of Theory in
Hawaiian Archaeology
Cynthia Van Gilder (St Mary’s College of California)
By definition, theoretical approaches provide frameworks
that enable certain kinds of questions, while excluding
others. Fencing the field of archaeological inquiry thus
creates areas that are seen by practitioners as "in," while
others are perceived as "out." This paper provides a brief
overview of some of the lines that have been drawn in the
theory and practice of archaeology in Hawai’i. Axes for
comparison include: unit and scale of analysis;
epistemology; dimensions of difference; and the role of
ethnohistoric sources. Observations are proffered regarding
the relationships between these different theoretical
perspectives, the sociopolitics of archaeology, and, in
31
keeping with the TAG 2009 conference theme, “the future of
things” in Hawaiian archaeology.
5:10-5:30pm
General discussion
Discussant
Kent Lightfoot (University of California: Berkeley)
Producing Subjectivity: Archaeologies of
Capitalism, Modernity and Social Action
Bryn Williams (Stanford University) and Lindsay
Weiss (Columbia University)
In today's world, transnational flows of people and capital
seem to pass over the power dynamics of national and
colonial regimes of old. Global capital, what some would
term Empire, is imagined to be a shadowy and
indeterminate presence that is perpetually in flight. In its
wake, and perhaps in opposition to this new state of affairs,
the category of the multitude has been raised, a radically
heterogeneous social formation bringing with it an
emancipatory ability to constantly exceed and surpass the
oppressive capacities of Empire.
national and cultural heritage. Through these discussions in
local publics, the perception of freedom reconstitutes
subjectivity through resistance to larger international forces
and efforts to contend with the histories of internal disputes.
Such narrow fields of interaction (physically, mentally, and
emotionally) have given voice to particular forms of
discourse that index altered value systems and shifted
relationships to the past. In some instances, that move has
rearticulated colonial frameworks related to international
imperial impulses in the form of globalized markets,
rendering (not for the first time) archaeological material
culture as commodity. Within that fluctuation however,
there are some local groups that are re-appropriating the
concept of commodity as a form of resistance. In an effort to
amplify that slight shift within which resistance might be
articulated, this paper will look at the 'selling of heritage' as
constituting new subjectivities emerging from discourses of
liberation and new forms of social change.
2:20-2:40pm
Caribbean Complexities
Marc Hauser
The emancipatory hope being invested in these new social
formations suggests the need for a historical genealogy of
multitudes, past and present. We suggest that
archaeologists working in the trails of fragmentary and
shadowy networks have always straddled the ruins of
various multitudes over the centuries and grappled with
constant
shifts
between
deterritorial-ization
and
reterritorialization. This session invites participants to
examine these past and present multitudes. What kinds of
subjects and subjectivities are produced on the margins of
capitalism and colonialism and to how do these subjects
simultaneously evade, rework, and create these same power
structures? Is this sort of indeterminacy, also reflected in the
archaeological record, part constitutive of the modern
world?
In eighteenth century english imperial formations, the kinds
of quotidian documents written at the margins of empires
can reveal significant information about everyday colonial
life, but it also reveals anxieties and concerns of
parliamentarians in London and assemblymen in Jamaica.
In this paper I attempt to illustrate on the one hand how
empires and colonialism works, and on the other how
people took advantage of social and geographic spaces
overlooked and set aside to create and transform the
landscapes of their enslavement and labor. I examine the
disjunctures between imperial interests, the refraction of
these interests in the practices of administrators in the
colonies, and the everyday lives of the enslaved. Through
my analysis of material culture I illuminate both the
incomplete articulation of imperial interests in the colonies,
and the ways in which the everyday practices of the
enslaved both enabled but also exceeded imperial
prescriptions.
2:00-2:20pm
Selling My Heritage to the Highest Bidder; this is the Price
of Freedom
Uzma Rizvi (Stanford University)
2:40-3:00pm
'WHERE ARE THE PEOPLE?'
Multitudes in Empires
Reinhard Bernbeck
Inspired by a quote from an Iraqi entrepreneur on the topic
of national heritage, this paper will investigate the
reformulation of post-War heritage discourse in
contemporary Iraq. This will include an evaluation of
systems of governance that incorporate facets of late
capitalism and a neo-liberal agenda with the export of
democracy on a country's effort to reclaim and redefine its
Archaeology ought to be a practice concerned with people,
past to present. But as an academic discipline, archaeology
has deep roots in projects of classifying people and their
artifacts as "cultures", "societies", "traditions" in order to
dominate. Conceptualizing past and present peoples as
multitudes can provide a way out of this foundational
dilemma without deleting at the same time people's power
32
to act. I use a comparison of the U.S. empire and ancient
Assyria to show the possibilities of an archaeological reconceptualizing of power relations. Ideological and
repressive means of control let unruly multitudes appear in
the interstices.
3:00-3:20pm
Far Out West: Frontier Subjectivities in New Mexican
Hippie Communities
Kaet Heupel
At the frontier, things that are “outside” of capital are
altered, becoming commensurable with the commodityform. New Mexico has long been seen as a geographical
frontier, beginning with the first European expansions into
the Americas ? however, the moments at which things are
revalued and recirculated as they cross frontiers that are not
necessarily just spatial needs to be better analyzed. From the
1960s Taos offered a new kind of frontier for the production
of (indigenous) cultural capital, just as it had once been a
frontier for the capitalization of land and labor. This paper
thus approaches capitalism as more than a distinct set of
structural inequalities and ideological formations,
suggesting that it might be better understood as a certain set
of material reconfigurations as human subjects at capital’s
frontier are called to perform the work of transforming noncapital into capital. These processes, which occurred at the
level of the everyday, material practices of the hippie
pioneers in New Mexico, allow us to consider capitalism
within a more appropriately archaeological framework.
While hippies sought, ostensibly at least, to avoid the
reaches of capital, their lived experiences at the frontier
were deeply entangled with the emergence of new forms of
indigenous cultural capital that became open to
commodification in ways that had previously not been
possible. By taking capitalism to be a series of frontier
effects, this paper discusses the way in which frontier
processes in the Taos area of northern New Mexico worked
to produce transformed hippie subjects in the 1960s and
1970s.
3:20-3:40pm
Cultivating Marginality
Bryn Williams (Stanford University)
California underwent a rapid re-territorialization during the
19th century as it was politically and economically integrated
into the United States. This process of re-territorializaiton
was marked by its uneven application. Specifically, some
places and spaces within the physical boundaries of the
state were characterized as marginal to the new regime. This
marginality was manifested as an imagined exclusion from
the economic and juridical workings of State and National
government.
This paper focuses on one of these “marginal” spaces – the
Point Alones Village in Pacific Grove, CA. To what extent
was this marginality a rhetorical strategy? To what extent
was it experienced in practice? Is the cultivation of marginal
places a necessary component of imperial domination and
domestication? And finally, what can discussing the history
of a hundred year old “marginal” place tell us about the
“new” regimes of uneven sovereignty engendered by the
spread of globalization?
3:40-4:00pm
Discussion
4:00-4:20pm
The Heirs of the Ancestors in a New and Hyper-real
Modernity
Dante Angelo
Modernity, it is been said, was above all an allencompassing project, which based its principles in a set of
goals, values and notions of social, economic and cultural
structures. However, whereas the envisioned future of
modernity was a programmatic projection of society as a
whole, its program has split and developed a shape-shifting
nature – interpreted by some as multiple modernities
(Eisenstadt 2000) – in which a myriad of subjectivities have
emerged. Most of the tensions arisen by the ubiquitous
power of global capital, which has been theorized as elusive
and flowing (Appadurai 1996), nonetheless, relate the
struggle for resources, be they cultural, natural or other, as
expressed in (new) debates concerning heritage, identity,
and political and cultural citizenship.In this paper I argue
that not only archaeology sheds light and inform on the
formation of these new subjectivities but also, and mainly,
it is/was instrumental in the articulation of many of these
subjectivities. Based on ethnographic and archaeological
fieldwork in northwestern Argentina, I contend that
material culture offers the opportunity to trace the
articulation of subjectivities, both regarding hegemonic and
counter-hegemonic discourses. Strategies of legitimation on
the part of these new social formations involve textual,
visual and mental representations usually informed by and
heavily rooted in material culture, and the past. Thus, I
conclude, archaeologists are attending to a peculiar
reconfiguration of the modern world in which, our relation
to material culture and things, can offer a nuanced
perspective about how this process shapes new
confinements and cores of power.
4:20-4:40pm
Where, in the multitude, does freedom lie?
Lindsay Weiss (Columbia University)
33
The story of the Diamond Fields in late 19th century South
Africa was a story about the superfluous people of
modernity; men and women who migrated globally to a
diamond rush site where dreams of fabulous riches fueled
their daily labors. Traditionally, this historical moment has
been carved up according to the traditional narrative of the
rise of monopoly capital. However, by tracing the routes of
stolen diamonds across the diamond fields, an entirely
different landscape reveals an entirely different set of
dynamics at work at this moment.
What is relevant to consider about this somewhat more
heterogeneous and less monolithic reading of the events on
the diamond fields is the double challenge it presents-firstly it challenges the assumption that within such
heterogeneity resides an innate emancipatory potential and
second, it suggests that the careful examination of just such
heterogeneous social formations of empire is crucial for
better understanding the political dynamics at work. For
the diamond fields, diverse groups of people came together
and enacted unprecedented dimensions of social hybridity,
and at the same time, the communal presumption of being
?outside? of any monolithic political form enabled the
imposition of a series of tremendously illiberal constraints,
ultimately leading to segregation.
4:40-5:00pm
The Archaeology of Empire in Nineteenth Century
Zanzibar
Sarah K. Croucher (Wesleyan University)
Historical archaeology is particularly well suited to the
study of ‘multitudes’ within empires due to the manner in
which material remains direct archaeologists attention to
quotidian practices. Yet rarely do we take this opportunity
to question taken for granted historical narratives about the
nature of Empire. In this paper I draw on case study
material from nineteenth century Zanzibar to explore the
relations between imaginings of colonial populations and
the everyday local practices through which Empires were
understood.
5:00-5:20pm
When Empires Collide:
The
Internment Camp
Bonnie Clark (Denver University)
Archaeology
of
an
In the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor,
approximately 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry were
removed from the West Coast of the United States. These
were people caught between two warring empires, set adrift
both politically and economically. Throughout the Spring of
1942, individuals and families were in a state of upheaval,
forced to decide which of their possessions to take with
them in the two parcels allowed each family member. With
bank accounts frozen, such decisions were critical. Do you
bring your warmest coat or your wedding presents? Do
you leave behind or destroy objects that call attention to the
ancestry for which you are being imprisoned? And what do
you do once you are in camp? How do you obtain good
and materials? How do you transform a militarized setting
into something even marginally habitable? Oral histories
shed light on many of these decisions, but recent
archaeology at the Granada Relocation Center (better
known as Amache), provides evidence of an even wider
suite of strategies. The tangible history of the site reveals
small rebellions, expressions of cross-cutting identity, and
overwhelmingly, a need to reclaim a sense of self through a
sense of place. As physical evidence of the often very
personal cost of “national security,” these remains retain a
particular vibrancy, serving as touchstones in current
debates about today’s empires and multitudes.
5:20-5:40
Between Nation-state and Empire: Babylon and beyond
Slobodan Mitrović (Graduate Center, CUNY) and Karen
Holmberg (Columbia University)
In the volumes Empire and Multitude: War and Democracy in
the Age of Empire, Hardt & Negri theorized that emerging
contemporary phenomena are encompassed in the absence
of a single empire that exerts power in a colonial sense;
rather, the global system itself connects into the new
geopolitical order of Empire. Most archaeological projects
are comprised by what could be seen as its own multitude
of researchers from myriad nationalities. The nation-state is,
however, still by far the predominant recipient and owner
of archaeological artifacts excavated by sanctioned projects.
In this paper we draw from examples that range from the
Metropolitan Museum of Art’s recent Beyond Babylon exhibit
to archaeological excavations from the Balkans and Panamá
in order to explore how objects, people, and the practice of
archaeology fall betwixt and between easy definitions of
nation-states and Empire. Objects that could be considered
ecofacts can at times fall into a less territorialized domain
and are in many cases more easily moved over national
borders. Looted materials from unsanctioned excavations
traverse national borders in exchange for capital far more
fluidly. Museum exhibitions can at times draw together
both looted and officially excavated artifacts in fascinating
temporary conglomerations of objects and representations
of their identity. These exhibits require permissions and
loans from myriad nations, yet reconfigure the identity of
those objects in terms far outside national boundaries – in
turn both dissolving and reifying national borders.
5:40-6:00pm
Discussion
34
Sunday 3rd May
Morning sessions
CHAT @ TAG: Symmetry and Diversity in
Archaeologies of the Recent Past
B. R. Fortenberry (Boston University) & Adrian
T. Myers (Stanford University)
Archaeologies of the recent and contemporary pasts are
messy, complicated affairs - for practitioners of these
archaeologies, gone are the days when data and
interpretations could be put into neat categories. As
historical archaeology and contemporary archaeology
increasingly find a place within the academy, the number of
researchers practicing such archaeologies, and the diversity
of their views, both continue to increase. This healthy, ever
increasing multi-vocality, is highlighted yearly by the
Contemporary and Historical Archaeology in Theory
(CHAT) conference series. CHAT has occurred in the British
Isles since 2003 (past events were held in Bristol, Leicester,
Dublin, Sheffield and London), providing a forum for
archaeologists to present new and exciting work
unhindered by traditional academic rubrics. It was
established “to provide opportunities for dialogue to
develop among researchers in the fields of later historical
archaeology and the archaeology of the contemporary
world”, and aims to be a “dynamic forum for innovative
critical discussion that seeks to challenge and push the
limits of archaeological thinking.” This session then, offers
papers that follow the spirit of the CHAT conferences, that
is, papers that push theoretical and methodological
boundaries in their focus on the recent and contemporary
pasts. The session aims to both showcase the diversities, but
also tease out the symmetries, between the wide array of
archaeological projects and understandings that fall under
the larger, common project, of archaeologists' investigation
into the recent and contemporary pasts.
9:00-9:10am
Introduction
BR Fortenberry (Boston University) and Adrian T Myers
(Stanford University)
9:10-9:30am
Respectability and Razzle-Dazzle: Consumption,
Recreation and Class in Turn-of-Century San Francisco
Eleanor Conlin Casella (University of Manchester)
What is the materiality of class aesthetics? How do objects
become identified as 'refined'? Or as 'trashy'? Studies of
class relations have traditionally emphasized the power of
elite-designed landscapes to produce and regulate social
(9am - 1pm)
identity. This paper will examine a late Victorian
recreational venue on the edge of San Francisco, California
to consider the simultaneous existence of parallel class
identities. Established by Adolph Sutro in 1894, the
Gardens and Baths of Sutro Heights were intended as an
elegant philanthropic gesture, providing San Franciscans
with a refined yet affordable venue for seaside recreation.
However, while describing his venue as a "land of cultured
groves and artistic gardens, the home of a powerful and
refined race," Sutro filled it with lowbrow amusements and
kitsch spectaculars designed to attract the paying punters.
This paper will consider how this landscape of elite
intention and aspiration became actively reshaped by the
parallel tastes and recreational interests of working-class
urban San Francisco.
9:30-9:50am
Commodity Fetishism and the Historical Archaeology of
the Atlantic World
Frederick H. Smith (College of William and Mary)
In his influential book Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar
in Modern History, the celebrated anthropologist Sidney W.
Mintz investigated the social and symbolic meaning of
sugar and used it as a prism through which to view the
political-economic processes that connected different
societies in disparate regions of the emerging Atlantic
world. Mintz’s commodity-based approach serves as a
model for historical anthropologists seeking to explicate the
forces that have shaped life in the modern era. Soon after its
release, Kathleen Deagan, in her thoughtful commentary on
“questions that count” in historical archaeology, foresaw the
potential value of Mintz’s work for historical archaeologists.
Deagan, recognizing the need for historical archaeologists to
grapple with broad issues of colonialism, capitalism, and
slavery, wrote that one could “conceive of archaeological
studies along the lines of Mintz’s study of sugar, tracing
material mechanisms by which economic and class
structures are reinforced and maintained.” Yet, despite
Deagan’s foresight, historical archaeology has been slow to
fully appreciate the value of Mintz’s work and to embrace
commodity-based studies. Inspired by the work of Mintz, as
well as the ideas of Caribbean scholar Eric Williams, this
paper argues that historical archaeologists should seek to
understand how the political-economic structure of
particular commodities shaped the social relations in the
emerging Atlantic world. This is especially true for
historical archaeologists working in the Caribbean, where
exotic commodities, and the people who produced them,
reveal insights into the seeds of modern consumerism.
35
9:50-10:10am
Of Other “Scapes”: The Heterotopology of Fascist Sicily
Joshua Samuels (Stanford University)
Using the extensive agricultural land reforms and building
programs undertaken by Italy’s Fascist government in Sicily
between 1926 and 1943 as a case study, this paper critically
examines Foucault’s concept of “heterotopia” in the context
of archaeological landscapes. Archaeologies of the recent
past are well-suited to examine these heterotopologies:
blurring the line between past and present while
juxtaposing archaeological, archival, and ethnographic data,
we draw attention to the gaps, contradictions, and alternate
orderings that make up the world around us. However,
although Foucault’s heterotopia has been broadly appealing
across the humanities and social sciences, I describe its
limitations to the archaeological analysis of material culture,
space, and power. Putting recent scholarship on the
archaeology of colonialism and labor relations into dialogue
with complementary research in critical human geography,
I argue that an archaeologically-informed ‘spatiality’
presents a more productive avenue to appreciate the
landscapes of Fascist land reform, in the past and on into the
present.
10:10-10:30am
Multi-Sited Ethnography and its Relevance to
Archaeology: Trials, Tribulations, and Trajectories
Krysta Ryzewski (Brown University)
Multi-sited ethnography, the research method outlined by
anthropologist George Marcus in 1995, but also rooted in
earlier anthropological critiques of enthnographic writing
and representation, has found recent application in
historical archaeology. As a research design, multi-sited
ethnography is well-suited for examining the "circulation of
cultural meanings, objects, and identities in diffuse timespace" (Marcus 1995:96). In archaeological practice, multisited ethnography or, more specifically, multi-sited
archaeology, entails the creation of comparative
frameworks, which are variably flexible in the scales and
spaces of contextualization that they allow. The "successful"
application of multi-sited ethnography to archaeological
studies requires developing appropriate sets of comparisons
between sites with genuine, traceable historical or
archaeological connections (e.g. kinship, material culture,
natural environmental features, exchange networks)
(Beaudry 2005:308). While appealing as a vehicle for
establishing connections and networks that potentially
bypass neatly bounded temporal, technological, or social
foci, where does this vehicle take actually us? Is multi-sited
archaeology a truly useful methodological and theoretical
tool? How is multi-sited archaeology "successfully" applied?
Are there limits in its applicability? These questions are
critically examined through a case study of the humanmaterial relationships involved in the colonial iron industry
of Rhode Island.
10:30-11:00am COFFEE BREAK
11:00-11:20am
The Paradox of Inside/Outside: Archaeology and the 2003
Bam Earthquake
Leila Papoli Yazdi (Buali University, Iran)
How do contemporary Iranians balance the pressures of
society with their individual desires? What are the material
representations of this delicate balancing act? This case
study
addresses
these
dual
questions
through
archaeological investigations at the city of Bam, in South
East Iran. Bam was largely destroyed by a powerful
earthquake on December 26th, 2003 – tragically, more than
half the population was killed. Many mud brick houses and
concrete buildings alike were flattened. Five years after the
disaster, a contemporary archaeology project was conducted
in Bam and archaeologists excavated six houses destroyed
in the earthquake. The research revealed that the difference
between pressures of society and individual desires make
people behave paradoxically – but this behavior would not
be apparent in their daily, public lives. In this case though,
the excavations reveal how life in Bam is divided in to the
two general spheres of inside/outside. Ultimately, the data
demonstrates the differences between the residents’
traditional lives lived outside of their homes, and their
private lives lived inside their homes.
11:20-11:40am
Beyond Human Proportions: Towards an Archaeology of
the Very Large and the Very Small
Matt Edgeworth (University of Leceister)
It used to be the case that archaeological features and
artefacts were principally on a human scale. But that
familiar world is changing fast. As archaeology extends its
range of focus further forward in time its subject matter is
moving beyond human proportions. Developments in
macro- and micro-engineering mean that artifacts are no
longer limited in size by physical limitations of the body.
Artificial features can be thousands of times smaller than
the eye of a needle, or as vast as undersea salt caverns
hollowed out to serve as storage containers for reserves of
natural gas. As scale and impact of material culture extends
outwards and inwards in both macroscopic and microscopic
directions, contemporary archaeology needs to change in
order to keep track of it. This paper explores the
36
implications of the archaeology of the very large and the
very small.
11:40-12:00pm
Transitional Living in Post-Industrial England: An
Archaeological View
Sefryn Penrose (Oxford University)
Since the day Mr Toad gave up his canary-colored caravan
for a shiny red motor car, some of the most evocative names
of English industry have been associated with transport:
Morris cars, De Havilland planes, Swan Hunter ships.
However, the later 20th century saw companies merged,
collapsed, or subsumed, and production consigned to the
industrial past. In Oxford, the Morris Minor housing estate
and the Oxford Business Park take the place of car
manufactories; in Wallsend, Swan Hunter's symbolic
shipbuilding cranes were dismantled and sent to the Bharati
shipyards in India. How does this changing economy and
the lives of its workers manifest in the archaeological record
when the post-WWII period is characterized by not just the
overlaying of strata, but its excision? This paper offers an
archaeology of a de-industrialized English landscape – the
ruinations and resurrections of the past – as they are remade
for an uncertain post-industrial future.
12:00-1:00pm
Discussant:
Barbara L Voss (Stanford University)
theory construction. We note the centrality to both historical
archaeology and broader archaeological theory of a suite of
concepts-- memory, materiality, identity, space, practice,
and discourses-- that are handled with great subtlety in
contemporary historical archaeology, studies not generally
included among genealogies of contemporary theory. We
ask whether there are interesting substantive reasons for
this, and whether, given the blurring of many of the ways of
discriminating between historical archaeology and
archaeology as a broader pursuit, work from the historical
corpus is entering or will begin to enter the canon of
archaeological theory proper.
9:10-9:30am
Theorizing Space in Historical Archaeology
Stephen A. Mrozowski (University of Massachusetts,
Boston)
This paper explores the use of spatial theory in Historical
Archaeology with an emphasis on the production and
symbolic quality of space. Drawing on a variety of case
studies from North America and Britain this paper outlines
spatial production in both rural and urban contexts. It
presents a multi-scaler interpretive framework that argues
for the simultaneity of material, social and culturalhistorical space. This interpretive framework draws its
theoretical inspiration from the writings of Henri Lefebvre,
Susan Zukin, David Harvey, Edward Soja, and Arturo
Escobar as well as the work of archaeological theorists
focusing on materiality, the body and nature.
Histories, Identities, Theories
Laurie Wilkie & Rosemary Joyce (University of
California: Berkeley)
9:30-9:50am
Dialogic Analysis and Social Fields: Documents in
Archaeology
Russell Sheptak (University of California: Berkeley)
Historical archaeology is one of the sources of sophisticated
contemporary theory in archaeology, particularly rich in
approaches to the creation of ongoing historical identities
and the lived experiences of difference. The participants in
this session will foreground their engagements with diverse
theoretical approaches and contribute to emerging
discussion of the role of theory in historical archaeology,
and the role of historical archaeology in theory construction.
Historical archaeology continues to have an uneasy
relationship with documents, despite the incontrovertible
fact that documents, as a specific kind of material remains,
pragmatically define the boundaries of the approach under
any definition, however restricted or wide. That is, all
historical archaeologists have the potential to work with
documents produced during the period of time in which
they are interested. Like any other form of archaeological
materials, documents demand the use of appropriate
methods that will allow them to be used in the manner
appropriate to specific analytic approaches. Approaching
documents from perspectives of practice theories in
archaeology, I outline here a general methodology that
treats these forms of material culture as active in creating
specific social relations, for which they may often be the
only remaining material trace. I illustrated this with
examples from my work on colonial Honduras.
9:00-9:10am
Histories, Identities, Theories: Taking Stock
Rosemary Joyce and Laurie Wilkie (University of California:
Berkeley)
In this introduction to the session, we present an overview
of the state of the art in the relationship between "theory" in
historical archaeology, and of historical archaeology in
37
9:50-10:10am
Thinking about Identity in Bioarchaeological
Investigations of Health and Disease
Sabrina Agarwal (University of California: Berkeley)
Bioarchaeology offers unique evidence with which to
consider and recreate the identity of historic people.
Traditional biocultural models have long been used to infer
temporal, geographical and within-population differences
in health and disease in the past. However, the exploration
of dualistic aspects of identity such as sex/gender,
ontogeny/childhood, and senescence/social aging in the
study of archaeological skeletal remains is still fairly
uncommon. The study of bone (micro)morphology from
archaeological remains can be used to examine patterns of
bone maintenance and loss in past populations. These
(micro)morphological indicators of bone maintenance are
an exceptional bony medium with which to consider the
construction of identity during life as they literally reflect
the lived experience of the body crafted at cellular level
through bone remodeling. Using two case studies in
historical bioarchaeology, from Medieval England and
Pioneer Canada, this paper will consider the role of gender
and aging in the interpretation of biological age- and sexrelated patterns of bone maintenance and bone loss.
Patterns in bone maintenance and loss that differ within and
between historical and modern populations suggest that
patterns in morphology are the result of gendered
influences acquired over the life course of individuals. The
combined use of historical and biological data, and critical
interpretation of patterns of bone maintenance in historical
populations, dramatically changes our understanding the
aging human skeleton and etiology of postmenopausal bone
loss in modern populations. Further, these interpretations
forward our understanding and study of bone morphology
(in both healthy and diseased states) as the product of
hybridity, as both a biological and a cultural entity, that can
contribute concrete evidence to dialogues of individual and
social identity in archaeology.
10:10-10:30am
Discussion
10:30-11:00am COFFEE BREAK
11:00-11:20am
The Author in the Archaeology, or “Pay attention to the
man behind the curtain”
Bonnie Clark (Denver University)
Historical archaeologists who engage with the lived
experience of difference share not just an approach to the
archaeological record but typically also an approach to
writing about that record. As authors, such practitioners
make consistent use of first- and even second-person
pronouns. This style of presentation acknowledges that
both archaeologists and their audiences, like past actors,
have contingent and changing identities. One’s engagement
with the past, like one’s engagement with the present, is a
part of an arc of life experience. To pretend otherwise, in an
attempt to make the work appear more scientific or
objective actually makes it less so, because it obscures the
locus of knowledge production. This belief, so radical not
so long ago, is common among the most recent generation
of historical archaeologists, who have been enculturated in a
world where archaeological writing has been subjected to
theoretical scrutiny. To us, the first person comes naturally
and thus seems unproblematic. However, embracing the
“I” is an act that separates us from our cousins in history,
who with few exceptions, continue to mask their voice.
Informed by Rosemary Joyce’s The Languages of Archaeology,
this paper draws from personal experience and the writings
of other junior scholars to locate the author in the
archaeology.
11:20-11:40am
Occulted diaporas: approaches to ambiguous identity in
historical archaeology
Katherine Hayes, University of Minnesota
Identity, as complex constructions of subject, is a line of
study to which historical archaeology is extraordinarily
well-suited. This is so because we employ combinations of
material traces relating to (for example) discursive,
embodied, and memory practices. To what extent may our
studies serve as models to non-text-aided archaeologies of
identity? I offer a cautionary example from my research at
Sylvester Manor, in which the illustration of African-Indian
entanglements could only be accomplished by reference to
broader histories of racial discourse, and social memory and
forgetting. I will explore how some community histories are
not merely muted or faintly represented, but additionally
are structurally occluded.
11:40-12:00pm
Memory and the Appropriation of History: Legend and
Landscape in a Colonial New England Village
Heather Law (University of California: Berkeley) and Guido
Pezzarossi (Stanford University)
In the local histories of Grafton, ample mention is made of
the impoverished nature of Sarah Boston and her living
environment. Recollections emphasize the marginal space
that she occupied within the colonial community. Since the
bulk of these local histories were produced anywhere from
70-100 years after Sarah Boston died and left her home
38
empty, this discourse is probably being influenced by and
directed at the physical remains of her home in some stage
of decay. The actual homestead (while visible on the
landscape until the 1920's in the form of a door stone and a
cellar hole) became diffused and in a sense further obscured
by the physical reuse of the landscape over time. We argue
that the diffusion and obfuscation of the physical place Sarah
inhabited has caused it to become primarily a conceptual
space loosely tethered to the landscape of Keith Hill by the
old legends of Sarah's presence. In this case, the
unexcavated hillside has the potential for just as much voice
as the excavated farmstead, with the benefit of more
momentum. Left untested and unchallenged, the eastern
slope of Keith Hill could still be marshaled to retell the
stories that the old legends depicted: stories that echoed and
supported the racist characterizations of the early 20 th
century. History's unknowns and inaccuracies would leave
the landscape vulnerable to these kinds of appropriations, in
which problematic projections would be allowed to blanket
the landscape, thereby conceptually re-colonizing keith hill
and linking the present directly to the colonial past. Using
maps, drawings, local histories and material culture, this
paper will discuss the ways that social memories are
"inherited, inhabited, invented and imagined through the
landscape"(Holtorf and Williams 2006:237).
12:00-12:20pm
Outside Looking In: Scaling Spanish colonial buffer
practices
Jun Sunseri (University of California: Santa Cruz)
A multi-scalar approach allows archaeologists to address
the potentially situational nature of community
membership in pluralistic society. If applied within a
practice theory framework, such an approach is an aid to
exploration of how frontier communities may have
expressed various aspects of their identities in different
contexts and at different scales of social performance. This
case study of a historic buffer settlement (LA 917) on the
northern frontier of Colonial New Mexico uses multiple,
complementary lines of evidence of varied types and spatial
scales including: 1) analyses of archaeological ceramic and
faunal assemblages related to domestic foodways and 2) GIS
analysis of remote sensing, survey, and excavation data to
recognize patterning of the tactical and engineered
landscapes of the study site. In this way, New Mexican
archaeological sites that have long been dichotomized as
"Spanish" or "Indian" are revisited in a more nuanced and
textured exploration of colonial ethnogenesis.
12:20-12:40pm
Death and Cricket: the non-modernist history of 19thC
cremation
Andrew Martin (Bournemouth University)
How do you conceive of a past without a culture/nature
divide when all of our techniques, tools, theories and
philosophical assumptions are based upon such a divide? A
glance at how Latour has been used in archaeology so far
indicates it is virtually impossible to apply Latour’s nonmodernist concept of objects to ‘religious’ things without
grafting it onto some modernist social theory and
perpetuating the divide. Historical studies of science have
helped to illustrate how enmeshed culture and nature are in
the process of scientific development and thus have enabled
archaeologists to understand the process of their
archaeological practice. But it has been more difficult to
apply the other ramification of Latour’s conclusion – that
past religions were also enmeshed integrations of culture
and nature – since so few Latourian studies have been done
of historical change in ‘religious’ knowledge and practice to
illustrate it.
This paper presents a brief history of the gradual adoption
of cremation in 19th Century Britain which threatened the
Christian practice of burial – a practice central to Christian
theology. This colorful and messy history illustrates the
profound problem with attributing ‘cultural’ change to
universal social or functionalist theories, but points to
Latour’s conclusion that groups are defined and changed
through dissent over multifaceted local issues. Using
Latour’s methodology to follow actors (human and nonhuman) through controversies, it is shown that such a
technique could be useful in archaeology to uncover local
networks of significance and the heterogeneous actors
(including in this case Cricket!) used to establish them.
12:40-1:00pm
Discussion
The Color of Things: Debating the Role and
Future of Color in Archaeology
Alexander Nagel (University of Michigan)
According to David Batchelor, author of Chromophobia (2000)
color, though bound up with the fate of human culture has
been systematically marginalized and degraded in academic
studies, does not easily fit into current intellectual debates
on social constructs, has become increasingly antidisciplinary. On the other hand, anthropologists,
conservation
specialists
and
archaeologists
have
increasingly realized that pigments and dyes constitute an
integral part of the environment of both, early and modern
societies. This session will discuss the need for theoretical
39
frameworks when integrating color in material culture
studies. How does our current thinking about color reflect
and prejudice our understanding of the past and present? Is
color a useful tool to reconstruct patterns of identity,
interaction and influence? Are colors detectable in the
material record and how far do colors and colored artifacts
materialize voices? Our session seeks to explore a wide
range of current approaches to color, and demonstrate how
results achieved through interdisciplinary research can form
an integrative part of general science. Papers focus on
examples from the ancient Near East, Central Asia, Egypt,
and the Mediterranean Europe, though comparative studies
will be included. Short video clips will introduce
institutions important for researchers interested in color
archaeology.
9:00-9:10am
Introduction
Alexander Nagel (University of Michigan)
9:10-9:30am
Color, Perception and Value: New Perspectives on Early
Glass
Chloe Duckworth (University of Nottingham)
The Late Bronze Age in Western Asia and in the east
Mediterranean witnessed an explosion in the use of vitreous
materials and the first widespread production of glass. The
unique properties of glass rapidly came to the fore, most
notably in vessel production. The perception of glass itself
was, however, intimately bound up in its color and
brilliance, reflecting early links with attributed properties of
semi-precious stones. Archaeometric studies thus far have
focused on the chemical and isotopic composition of early
glass in order to compensate for lack of evidence of
production sites and provenance. However, archaeologists
have not previously been able to answer vital questions
about the origins of the various colorant-opacifiers. This
paper introduces the application of ToF-SIMS, an analytical
technique capable of identifying the colorant-opacifiers
added to ancient glass. Case studies from Egypt,
Mesopotamia and Greece will be introduced, contrasts
analyzed in the light of epigraphic and archaeological
evidence for the value of glass, its color, visual properties
and relationship with other materials. It emerges that color
was a vital factor in the inception and development of glass
as a material; initially in terms of the impetus behind
production and later as the unique properties of glass
became appreciated. The framework of analysis presented
will be useful to developing wider methods of considering
color and its role in the perception, value and production of
artifacts, having wider resonance in improving our
understanding of technological choice and social value of
materials, in particular new or artificial ones.
9:30-9:50am
Color Symbolism in the Ancient Near East: The Royal
Tombs of the Cemetery of Ur
Martina Zanon (Università Ca' Foscari, Venezia, Italy)
The symbolic meanings of colors have been studied for a
number of modern and pre-modern cultures, but only rarely
for those of Ancient Near East. This paper focuses on
various classes of colored artefacts from Mesopotamia from
the 3rd to the 1st millennium BCE: mural paintings and
glazed materials, but also inlays of pieces of jewellery. I will
first examine the existent Mesopotamian literary texts, in
order to try to ascertain possible symbolic meanings
attributed to different colors. The 242 composite jewellery
finds excavated in the sixteen Royal Tombs of the Cemetery
of Ur of mid-3rd millennium BCE are made of cornaline
(red), lapis-lazuli (blue), ivory (white), glazes (red), shell
(white), limestone (white) and bitumen (black), and are
differently combined with metals such as gold, silver,
electron and bronze. Blue and red (lapis-lazuli and
cornaline) are frequently coupled in the jewellery. Were
they representing the union of different opposites: feminine
and masculine gender (creating the concept of fertility), or
the two fundamental elements of Mesopotamian culture: the
divine and the human worlds, elite above all, the royal
power beneficiated by god that mediate the two worlds?
These two colored stones are frequently associated with
gold and silver. Brightness of colors is an aspect that needs
more attention and investigation. Luminous colors, as
metals or precious stones, are synonymous of holiness,
pureness, beauty, so they can be assimilated to the divine
world. The blue/red/metals triad corresponds to the
prehistoric basic triad black/white/red, where black is
substituted by blue that we consider a kind of dazzling
black, and metals can be considered the substitute for
luminous white (or even red).
9:50-10:10am
An Archaeology of the Aesthetic: Examination of the
Güzel Taş from Fistikli Höyük
Jayme L. Job (State University of New York, Binghamton)
An analysis of the güzel taş (“beautiful stones”) from the
Early Halaf site of Fistikli Höyük in southeastern Turkey
present an opportunity to explore concepts of cognitive and
color archaeology. As naturally-occurring manuports, the
stones merit collection and consideration by archaeologists,
although their recognition within the archaeological record
is itself a matter of investigation. The majority of the
colored stones feature no evidence of use, and appear to
40
have been collected by the nearby Euphrates River and
transported to the site for purely aesthetic reasons.
Likewise, suggestions of ad-hoc usage of many of the stones
imply that traditional Western models of a strict functionalaesthetic dichotomy do not appear to apply to this early
Near Eastern society. Cognitively, both archaeological
recognition and early classifications concerning aesthetic
and functional value are involved in both past and present
treatment of the stones. Conversely, by employing models
of color archaeology, the idea of an archaeological aesthetic
is both questioned and maintained.
10:30-11:00am COFFEE BREAK
11:00-11:20am
Colorful Images of the Greek Neolithic
Stella Katsarou-Tzeveleki (Hellenic Ministry of Culture,
Ephorate of Palaeoanthropology-Spelaeology of Southern
Greece)
In this paper I discuss the variability of color in Greece in
the 6th and 5th millennia BCE. In this period we witness an
increased contribution of color to the formation of material
culture, ranging from the careless monochrome pottery
surfaces to the shiny polished and homogeneously
monochrome pots, and to the polychrome patterned
surfaces. Color serves here as both, a critical chronological
and cultural marker: the Middle Neolithic man prefers light
red monochrome surfaces and red-on-light patterns, while
his successors change towards dark shiny monochromes
and white- or polychrome-patterned dark backgrounds.
Equally, the designs are chronologically and geographically
variable: Middle Neolithic red designs vary from central
Greece (weaving-inspired) to southern Greece (abstract
linear) and the Aegean islands (weaving-inspired linear),
while variations of colorful designs on dark backgrounds
are more generally homogenized over the southern Greek
peninsula in the next period. To what degree, however, had
the availability of raw substances and firing procedures
influenced the formation of color aesthetics? Why were
monochrome vases chosen on one occasion and a
polychrome of the same shape on another? Since colored
designs are a kind of material ‘script’ and color is the means
of writing this script and visualizing the material ‘language’
of symbols, how does color complement or strengthen the
meaning of a visual code?
11:20-11:40am
Seeing Red: Color as a Ritual Cue on Egyptian Female
Figurines
Elizabeth A. Waraksa (University of California, Los
Angeles)
At least six standardized types of nude female figurines,
ranging in date from the New Kingdom to the Late Period
(ca. 1550-664 BCE), have been excavated by the Johns
Hopkins University from the temple precinct of the goddess
Mut at Karnak. These figurines, with their characteristic
torso-level breakage, frequent refuse context, and
conspicuous red coloring, have been recently identified as
components of magico-medical rites to protect and heal.
This paper will detail the materials and techniques used to
produce female figurines like those found at the Mut
Precinct, focusing in particular on the red pigment present
on many figurines. This red coloring is a trait not previously
investigated for this class of object and, indeed, is one that
frequently goes undetected or un(der)reported. This paper
will also address the terminological issues that arise when
one attempts to gather data on the coloration of Egyptian
ceramic figurines. Lastly, the implications of this color study
for our understanding of the ritual function of Egyptian
female figurines will be discussed. Using archaeological,
textual, and material data, it is argued that these objects,
formerly typically identified as votive “fertility figurines,”
had a wider and more active magico-medical use, and that
the red hue of the figurines signaled that the objects – at a
crucial stage of their use – were malevolent and ultimately
to be destroyed.
11:40-12:00pm
Polychrome: More Than (One) Color
Susanne Ebbinghaus (Harvard University)
Recent research on the coloration of ancient Greek and
Roman marble sculpture and architecture has finally
restored color to the domain of Classical art, popularly
perceived as perfectly white. The degree to which these
monuments were colored, however, is still disputed. At
issue is not color but polychromy, no hard and fast category
but a relative term defined by current norms and values.
With the ready availability of colors in the 19 th and 20th
centuries, the colorful came to be seen as cheap and
commercial. Understanding the rationale behind the
coloration of ancient monuments requires consideration of
ancient views of polychromy, which may be reconstructed
in part on the basis of written and visual evidence. As in
other cultures, the ancient Greek term for “polychrome” or
“variegated,” poikilos, was used like a color term, to describe
animal skins, scales, and feathers, and colorful, often
Eastern dress. Figuratively, the term had both positive and
ambiguous connotations, denoting dazzling craftsmanship
as well as a cunning mind. In Greek sculptural
representations, a high degree of polychromy appears to
have been the preserve of deities, Archaic aristocrats, and
Eastern barbarians. Contrary to the Greek cliché, Neo-
41
Assyrian and Achaemenid Persian sculpture also shows
carefully measured, status-conscious application of
polychromy, with highly patterned garments reserved for
the king and other outstanding figures. While the Greeks
apparently did not invent white sculpture, they may be
credited with inventing the prejudice against the overly
colorful as part of the trope of oriental decadence, long
influential in Western thought.
12:00-12:20pm
Reading Between the Figures: Colored Words on Athenian
Vases in the 20th century
Amy C. Smith (University of Reading)
Graffiti and letters incised or scratched onto the pots played
an important role in the decoration of Archaic and Classical
Athenian vases from ca. 580 to 340 BCE. They are relatively
well studied and understood as evidence of economy and
society. But the vast majority of words on Athenian vases
are painted onto the surface with the same red, brown, black
or even white clay slip that was applied before the firing of
the vase. Some dipinti are illegible or meaningless
('nonsense inscriptions'), but the vast majority comprise
artist signatures, 'kalos' names, character labels, and speech
bubbles.
The recent exhibition Colors of Clay has brought overdue
attention to the widespread use of added color in the
ceramic arts of Athens. Yet even in that context the painted
words are almost ignored. This paper considers the reasons
for the relative inattention of 20th century scholars to dipinti
on Attic vases. It will also investigate the artist's choices
with regard to colored text. Were letter colors and forms
chosen to improve legibility, the perceived value of each art
work, or simply the efficiency of the artist's work flow?
How did the placement of dipinti in relation to the overall
composition affect the product and the viewer's experience
of it? What do changing styles (especially with regard to
color choices) tell us about the relative importance of such
words in the society that created them?
12:20-12:40pm
The Polychromy of Iberian Sculpture and the Conflicting
Presentation in Archaeology
Dirk Paul Mielke (German Archaeological Institute, Madrid)
As all pre-modern sculpture ancient Iberian sculpture was
polychrome. However, the study of polychromy concerning
Iberian sculpture has been of only minor importance thus
far, although the masterpiece of Iberian culture, the
enigmatic Lady of Elche, discovered by chance in 1897,
bears abundant traces of paint residues. If considered at all,
the existence of polychromy was stated, yet there was
hardly any reflection about the significance of the
coloration, both in archaeological publications as well as in
exhibitions. Here, the view on Iberian sculpture
concentrates on a monochromatic dimension, in connection
with a major focus on the form. In this context, Iberian
sculpture obtained novel relevance attaching more
importance to modern sociological aspects, therefore
differing from the original signification. In order to study
the integration of sculpture into sociological processes of its
period, this paper will focus on both the context and the
original presentation of ancient Iberian polychrome
sculpture.
12:40-1:00pm
Discussion
Bridging Subjects and Objects in the Near
Eastern and Mediterranean World
Stephanie M. Langin-Hooper & Benjamin Porter
(University of California: Berkeley)
This session explores the entanglement of persons and
objects in Near Eastern and Mediterranean societies. Papers
will investigate this relationship from a variety of
perspectives including evocative practices of making and
destroying, displaying and decorating, using and reusing.
We are interested in exploring how notions of individuals,
communities, and polities become manifest in material
forms, and in turn, how objects broadcast meanings to the
societies in which they circulate. We will approach this
issue from two sets of questions. How do objects, as actors
possessing agency, shape societies by constructing a range
of possible human-object interactions – thereby controlling
human actions? When and how does language play a role
in determining the meanings, functions, and limitations that
objects adopt? In light of these inquiries, we will also
contemplate a second set of questions: those concerning the
relationship between the subject and society. How did
people categorize themselves and create divisions within
their societies? When is it possible to investigate, or even
challenge, essentialized categories (such as gender and
profession) as a way to describe the ancient subject? How
can we use objects – and, in particular, the subject-object
relationship – to better understand categories and
conceptions of social difference?
Participants are encouraged to dialogue with two recent
works from the archaeological literature, Adam Smith’s ‘The
end of the essential archaeological subject’ (2004) and Chris
Gosden’s ‘What do objects want?’ (2005). Case studies that
42
are supported with robust data sets and positioned under
theoretically nuanced lenses are especially encouraged.
9:00-9:20am
Introduction: Connecting the absent subject and the
passive object in Near Eastern and Mediterranean
archaeology
Benjamin W. Porter and Stephanie M. Langin-Hooper
(University of California: Berkeley)
This introduction sets out a genealogy of the ways in which
Near Eastern and Mediterranean archaeologists have
conceived of subjects and objects, and the relationships
between them. What is striking about this genealogy is that
it does not unfold evenly across time or geography, but
rather, is linked to tensions between disciplinary epistemes
and critical inquiry. The writings of Smith and Gosden
inspire us to respond to these disjunctures. We offer several
comments urging that 1) arguments insisting that the
category of the individual did not exist in antiquity should
be replaced with the question: how was personhood
constituted through historical and cultural contingencies? 2)
objects be understood as unstable signs whose meanings
and powers shift while circulating through new regimes of
value, and 3) that objects and subjects participated in
recursive relationships that produce entanglements often
visible in the historical and archaeological records. These
ideas will be briefly explored in case studies drawn from
Hellenistic Mesopotamia and the Iron Age Levant.
9:25-9:45am
Promiscuity and Identity: The Role of Ivory Seals within
the Changing Social Landscape of Early Second
Millennium Crete
Emily S. K. Anderson (Yale University)
It is traditionally understood that the island of Crete
underwent
significant
changes
in
socio-political
organization and interaction at the turn of the second
millennium BCE, as it transitioned to its first “palatial”
social formation. Following Gosden (2005), with this paper I
approach this transition from the perspective of objects, in
order to consider how changes in the object world could
have created “social beings with new sensibilities and forms
of relatedness.” In particular I investigate a contemporary
group of seals fashioned of imported hippopotamus ivory.
These seals were among the first on Crete to be engraved
with differentiated seal-symbols, and also presented the first
discrete glyptic stylistic/iconographic group, which
canonically incorporated representations of lions—a beast
not native to Crete. These aspects of the seals acted through
two distinct social venues: First, as objects worn on the
body, their distinctive material and form would have been
directly associated with the social identities attached to
acting human seal-owners. Second, when reproduced in
clay impressions fixed on objects, the differentiated sealsymbols facilitated a new mode of social interaction on the
island in which social identities could be construed for a
seal-owner—through manifest impressions—in contexts
separated from the corporeal human seal-owner himself. I
discuss how these objects functioned not merely as material
culture tools of socio-political change, but as dynamic actors
which shaped, directed, and enabled a new type of human
experience on Crete, which was visibly, sensibly, and
temporally/spatially different, and which moved and
related humans in new ways. Thus I suggest how the
“promiscuity” of the ivory seals, incorporating imported
elements within a new Cretan object-type, can be newly
appreciated as having held a distinct socio-symbolic role
within the changing Cretan landscape.
9:50-10:10am
Is there No Balm in Gilead?: The Power of Liminal
Landscapes and Contested Boundaries as Cognitive
Artifacts in Iron Age Northern Jordan
William Zimmerle (University of Pennsylvania)
Recent surveys of the archaeological evidence from Iron
Age Jordan have failed to evaluate the northern region of
the country known from the Hebrew Bible as Gilead,
focusing instead on the more southern polities of Edom,
Moab and Ammon. Gilead, a fertile region with neither
definable borders nor a kingdom in the Iron Age, was listed
as marginal and frontier in both the textual narratives and
historical inscriptions of the ancient Near East. In this paper,
I draw on Near Eastern historical sources as well as
archaeological data in order to recover the value of this
neglected landscape. Through a matrix of texts and tells,
and guided by Adam Smith’s categorization scheme of the
subject-object relationship, I will highlight how Gilead
transformed the ethnic identity of its subjects and
neighbors—from nomads to kings—in the early state
formation of the first millennium BCE Levant.
Anthropological studies on marginal communitas in light of
nineteenth and early twentieth century travel narratives will
contribute to a political typology of Gilead’s spatiality in the
Iron Age.
10:30-11:00am COFFEE BREAK
11:00-11:20am
Re-evaluating the Mediated Self: The Making,
Manipulation and Meaning of the Early Bronze Age
Figurine Corpus from Umm el-Marra, Syria
Alice Petty (Stanford University)
43
Previous visual, spatial and functional analyses of a corpus
of Early Bronze Age figurines from the site of Umm elMarra, Syria indicate that these objects were signifiers for a
desired magical act, and were thereby used as vehicles for
sympathetic magic. Magical thinking assumes that the will
of an individual can be expressed or enacted via a mediating
object. But what is the relationship between that magical
object and its individual maker or user? In one respect, it is
a tool; however, a consideration of Gosden’s 2005 article
“What do Objects Want?” raises an alternate perspective
from which to approach this question, suggesting that the
object may take a more active role. More than a tool, these
objects may be understood as a prosthetic extension of
individual attention (or intention) thus blurring the
distinction between the non-corporeal self and artifact
(between subject and object). Drawing upon the scholarship
of Zainab Bahrani, this paper argues that the line between
subject and object is blurred due to the nature of
representation in Near Eastern images and image-making.
Specifically, the role of images that represent aspects of the
self other than the body, in anthropomorphic form. The
conclusion of this argument, which engages the concept of
the salmu in ancient Near Eastern art, suggests that while
the act of making and manipulating such objects can be
understood as a prosthetic act, the objects themselves are
not prostheses but consciously rendered, dependent
representations of a present and active self.
11:25-11:45am
Bedrock of Place, Springs of Being: Anatolian Rock
Reliefs as Event-Places
Ömür Harmansah (Brown University)
This paper explores the complex set of located practices at
places where human engagement with the mineral world
and its geological wonders are most pronounced. Imagined
in this case are caves, springs, sinkholes and rock outcrops
of mountainous landscapes, which are almost always drawn
into the realm of cultural imagination through the stories
anchred to their “bedrock”. This work is inspired by the
growing interest in archaeology in the socio-symbolic
implications of the mineral world, the rise of the concept of
“place” in the humanities and social sciences, but most
importantly a Heideggerian understanding of the nature of
an eventful place-world. Using the case of Late Bronze and
Early Iron Age rock reliefs of Anatolia (Hittite/ Luwian/
Phrygian), I will argue that the monumental inscription of
landscapes are only late appropriations by the imperial elite
of specific places of human practice that are always already
rich in their social significations and cultural associations, as
part of a lived place-world. The making of rock reliefs
themselves and the production of their monumental
inscriptions both derive from and displace such located
practices, through the state-sponsored colonization of places
in a program of creating subjects of the state. In Pierre
Nora’s terms, places of memory are replaced by sites of
official history and spectacles of the state. I will further
speculate that as “objects” of such colonizing gestures, the
geologically wondrous places and the subtle everyday
practices associated with them merge into a single corpus
that can be called an “event-place”. Event-places are
therefore powerful loci that hold agency on the long-term
shaping of landscapes and often resist political interventions
(Gosden 2005).
Following Adam Smith's (2004) critique of the creation of
archaeological subject, I argue that archaeological
landscapes are constructs as "homogenized social worlds"
that locate the archaeological subject to a clearly delineated,
distant past. This cutting away of ancient environments
from contemporary landscapes is a modernist gesture that
highlights the rupture between pre-modern and postindustrial landscapes. In this scenario, the spatial practices
of the contemporary dwellers in archaeological landscapes
are rendered essentially irrelevant and ontologically
disjunctive. Rock reliefs and sacred springs, in contrast, are
transhistorical localities of human interaction, places of
memory that relate to all episodes of landscape history
rather than archaeologically essentialized categories such as
"Hittite". Such sites remained in existence as practiced, lived
places over time and were exposed to varied social
interactions and cultural imaginations. It is suggested that
ethnohistorical and ethnographic accounts of archaeological
places may indeed reveal much about their material agency
on long-term landscape processes.
11:50-12:10
Active Body: The Role of the Body in constituting
Masculine Elite Identities in Sasanian Rock Reliefs
Maryam Dezhamkhooy (University of Tehran, Iran)
The body has been the subject of human deliberation and
pictorial art since antiquity. Individuals experience the
living world and engage in social practices via the body.
Indeed, the body as both the subject and object of praxis
plays a key role in shaping personal and social identities.
This paper investigates the role of bodily practices and
interactions with material culture in defining masculine
identity for elite audiences during the Sasanian period (224650 CE), an era characterized by empire. More than thirty
rock reliefs from this period are found in western and
southwestern Iran such as Tagh-e Bostan, Naghsh-e Rostam
and Tang-e Choagan. The main subject of most reliefs is the
ceremony of the Sasanian king’s investiture. In addition to
investiture, these reliefs represent Sasanian elite ideals about
masculinity. In constituting masculinity, emphasis is placed
44
on the body without visual reference to sexual organs. The
body appears as object and subject at the same time. On the
one hand, the body is the object of elite gaze and
representation -- the observers of this representation are
exclusively Sasanian elites. On the other hand, the body
participates in shaping the concept of masculinity for elites
and presents an ideal representation of masculinity. In this
model, the vigorous and skilled body plays a key role in
constituting Sasanian masculine identity.
12:15-12:35pm
Contexts and Objects: The Rise of the Athletic Sanctuary
in Ancient Greece and the Creation of Mainland Greek
Male Ideals in the Greek Archaic (ca. 700-500 BCE)
David Small (Lehigh University)
Gosden (2005) refers to an agency of objects, and the effects
they have on people. If we are referring to the effect of
objects on individuals, a good place to look is the ancient
Greek athletic sanctuary, such as Olympia. It was within
these contexts that men (I am gender specific here)
interacted, not only with the landscape, but with the
materials within this landscape to form a concept of male
identity. Objects in this sense were buildings, such as
temples, or exercise yards; statues of victors in games, or
statues of those who cheated; or votives, such as helmets
which were worn in victorious battles. It was through the
temporary participation in this context that several of the
ideals of ancient Greek manhood were fashioned. This
paper explores the way in which men were affected by these
objects. It will also look at the recursive nature of this
relationship, as men were to create new objects for this
context, and new objects of related form and possible
genealogy for their own social contexts with the ancient
Greek polis.
In many ways, Greece presents us with an excellent case for
this type of study. We have a very good understanding of
the genealogy of Greek materials. Forms and assemblages
can be traced back to the early Iron Age (ca. 1000 BCE). We
are assisted in this work by the relatively good
chronological control archaeologists have at their disposal in
ancient Greece, both in understanding the evolution of
different materials and their assemblages, and in
understanding broader chronological changes as given by
historical sources.
12:35-1:00pm
Discussion
How Archaeology Makes its Subject(s): Groups,
Things, and Epistemic Injustices
Berkeley Archaeology Group - Meg Conkey
(University of California: Berkeley)
Archaeologists have long used objects as defining
characteristics of what they suppose to be more-or-less
bounded social groups, people who are presumably
connected through what we perceive to be a shared material
culture. We have a long legacy of characterizing such
groups as “cultures”, often labeling them as the people of a
certain pottery type (e.g., Bell-Beaker Culture), architectural
or other technological style. While this may appear to be a
harmless sort of classificatory strategy, there are numerous,
often deeply problematic issues that it can generate. Not
only does such a characterization tend to reduce the inquiry
into the dynamics of how social and cultural entities
develop, form, and engage with their social worlds because
an “identity” is already pre-determined, but, as we can see
in numerous cases in the contemporary world, such labels
of identity can often lead to troubling epistemic injustices
(to use a term of Fricker 2007) of static identities and hence a
resulting discrimination, among many other possibilities
and actualities. In this session, papers are invited that
address various aspects of this interesting dilemma, ranging
from those papers that might explore the long standing and
on-going ways in which archaeologists in specific settings
make their subject(s), as well as those that explore the
epistemic practices that can lead to specific cases of
injustice(s) in the contemporary world or historical past.
9:00-9:10am
Introduction
Meg Conkey (University of California: Berkeley)
9:10-9:30am
Archaeological Groups, Things and Interpretations
John M. Chenoweth (University of California: Berkeley)
Groups, while never stable or static, are certainly enduring;
yet the material culture associated with them may vary
widely across both space and time. Social identities -understood as groups of people -- provide ground for
further debate and potentially for further clarity. This paper
will consider recent theory concerning both “things”
(materiality) and “groups” (social identities) in order to
interrogate what shared material culture actually means for
those who share it, and how archaeologists might begin to
examine it. This question has far-reaching implications for
archaeological interpretation, for instance in understanding
how we define archaeological „cultures” or “identities”
through material culture and what this means certain
45
people shared in the past. But it is also central to the
modern practice of archaeology, as we must consider the
potential results of normalizing certain conceptions of
groups, the kind of generalizations of people our
interpretations invite, and the potential for “epistemic
injustice” which may result from our formulations.
9:30-9:50am
Credibility, Horizons, and the Changing Nature of Groups
in the Ancient Andes
Matt Sayre (University of California: Berkeley)
The question of who writes the past has long preoccupied
archaeologists and others concerned with social history,
however the power issues behind classically defined
archaeological cultures can be opaque even to
archaeologists attempting to question their own doxastic
biases. While the powerful tend to have a solid framework
of data to draw upon the powerless are more likely to have
knowledge that can appear opaque or disjunctive at initial
glance to the outside observer. These issues of credibility
and prescribed notions lead to cases of epistemic injustice,
not solely in the archaeological reconstruction of the past
but also in the lives of modern people. The resulting
creation of defined cultural groups, often times associated
with broadly and oddly defined ceramic styles, have a long
and continued history in the Andes. This paper will
examine the continued use of a broadly defined
archaeological horizon that is connected to a pottery style
and a people and analyze the epistemic injustices and static
identities that arise from this practice.
9:50-10:10am
Making Subjects Out of Nothing: The Materiality of Maya
Class Construction
Chelsea Blackmore (University of California: Berkeley)
Equating a single cultural group to a classificatory scheme
has implications for not only how archaeologists develop
the concept of cultural “identity” but how we investigate
and theorize about internal social dynamics within that
same society. For the ancient Maya, social organization
remains largely understood as a two class system—that of
commoner and elite. The material remains used to mark
these categories are based largely on objects and materials
associated
with
wealth—monumental
construction,
elaborate burials, polychrome ceramics (particularly fine
wares and vases) and long-distance trade items like jade,
obsidian, and marine shell. Elite identity is marked by the
identification of these things, but also in their quality and
diversity. Commoners, on the other hand, have no unique
material signature. Rather, they are defined as a material
negation of elites—a static representation of social, political,
and economic domesticity. Even though gendered and
household archaeologies have added significantly to our
understanding of commoner daily life, rarely do we
contextualize commoners as active political subjects. This
paper examines how commoner material culture, even in its
most fragmentary form, can be used to reframe discussions
of ancient Maya society as an internally diverse and
dynamic culture.
10:10-10:30am
Discussion
10:30-11:00am COFFEE BREAK
11:00-11:20am
How my premises make me to close my eyes to objects:
Ignorance of Prehistoric sites in Bam (SE Iran)
Omran Garazhian (Buali sina Department of Archaeology,
Hamadan, Iran)
The wind is blowing and replaces the sands. Land surface is
covered by the sand hills; the scattered bushes can be
observed on the dried river basins. On some heights, the
black stones can be observed. All the landscape is desert.
Despite of 21th century technology, only few palm gardens
are located here; it is the landscape of Darestan and Bam, SE
Iran. I visit this landscape as archaeologist and I search an
object. Several archaeologists have visited Bam district,
Stein, Caldwell, Karlovsky, Madjidzadeh, and tens of
archaeologists who have attended the annual conference of
"the history of architecture ". They may have only visited
Bam citadel, the huge brick made structure that is registered
by World Heritage, too. In the several written texts about
prehistoric of SE Iran, only three sites of Chalcolithic and
late Neolithic are pointed. None of the archaeologists has
thought about the survey of western Loot desert. Can the
desert be the context of prehistoric settlements?
Furthermore, most theories of Neolithic discussed about
western parts of Near East and not the eastern parts.
I find the object: there are fourteen PPN and PN sites and a
PPN settlement with 5/7 hectares extension and in situ
architectural remains. About seventy prehistoric sites (from
PPN to Bronze Age) are all located in a 40×60 km extension
in Darestan, an archaeologically ignored area. What has
been ignored, the subject or the lack of the object? This
paper discusses about the archaeologists blindfolded minds
and some suggested reasons of it: contemporary natural
landscape, archaeologists’ subjectivity and their premises of
objects conditions in a region, with the case study of new
excavations and surveys in Bam, Darestan.
11:20-11:40am
46
Constructing Epistemic “Realities” in a Conflict Zone:
Salvage Archaeology in Southeastern Turkey
Laurent Dissard (University of California: Berkeley)
Salvage
excavations
have
been
undertaken
by
archaeologists since the 1960s in southeastern Turkey before
the construction of large dams on the Tigris and Euphrates
rivers. My research looks at the history of these excavations
and the contributions they have made to Anatolian
archaeology. In the summer of 2008, I observed
archaeologists at work on 12 different sites threatened by
the Ilısu Dam and studied this “history in the making.” I
witnessed the specific techniques archaeology uses in order
to transform a mound of earth into the scientific laboratory
of archaeology. But, as accepted knowledge about the past is
produced; as archaeological “groups” are created from the
ground, multiple processes of inclusion and exclusion
simultaneously occur. This paper will attempt to go beyond
these epistemic questions however, and reflect upon my
experience as an ethnographer of archaeology in this region.
Southeastern Turkey, the country’s poorest area, has been
the stage for the military conflict between Turkey’s army
and the P.K.K. (the Kurdish Workers’ Party) for over 25
years now. What larger role does archaeology play in the
politics of this region? What are some of the unjust
ramifications of archaeology’s epistemic “reality” in this
conflict-ridden zone?
11:40-12:00pm
Contemporary Socio-Politics and Construction of Cultural
Categories in South Asia
V. Selvakumar (Tamil University)
Constructs are like the courses of river: very powerful. The
river water cannot escape the course and the final
destination--the ocean! Construction of archaeological
cultures marked the larger part of 19th and 20th century
archaeology in South Asia. Similarly, contemporary groups
of India were grouped into various categories such as
'Aryans,' 'Dravidians' and 'primitive tribes' based language,
region and physical features, primarily by the colonialists.
Origins for many of the archaeological cultures/identities
were searched outside South Asia. These identities, which
still remain the focus of many researchers, have played
multiple roles in the contemporary socio-politics and
popular arena. Dominant contemporary social groups
perceive themselves as descendants of these constructed
identities/cultures and there have been claims and
competitions to ownership to civilizations/cultures (e.g.
Harappans). Contemporary groups use such constructed
identities to legitimize their action or status in the society
treat others as 'migrants' and 'outsiders. Epistemic injustice
is observed in the perception of groups such as the 'dalits'
('untouchables') or 'primitive tribes' as static and
unchanging entities. This paper explores the various
dimensions of impact of the constructed cultures and
identities in South Asian Archaeology on the contemporary
society.
12:00-12:20pm
Tsimologo ya ntlha: “They are still old-fashioned”
David Cohen (University of California: Berkeley)
Critical engagement by archaeologists has revealed the
potential power of our epistemological output, positive and
negative. Understandings of how archaeological practice
and interpretations, via the ethnography of archaeology, are
in no way outside of politics has created the necessity for us
to be more aware of and engaged in the trajectories of the
knowledge we create. Archaeology has created its subjects
to serve its own means, and it is time for more effort to be
put toward means of bringing about epistemic justice in
what we do. This paper examines anthropological practice
in southern Africa and suggests ways that we can become
more critically engaged in our writing of the past through
interfaces with social justice, group politics, and
transparency.
12:20-1:00pm
Discussion by Participants:
Facilitated by Meg Conkey and Doris Maldonado
(University of California: Berkeley)
Musealizing Indigeneity: Heritage, Ethics and
the Tourist Audience
Madeleine Douglas & Rachel King (Stanford
University)
This session will address how indigenous cultures represent
themselves and are represented by others for a tourist
audience. Topics to be addressed include: how the presence
of a tourist audience shapes the media and content of
display; the impact of tourism on local culture and
economy; how tourism shapes culture as commodity;
collaboration and ethics in the museum or cultural heritage
site setting, including national parks and monuments; and
role of international agencies (UNESCO, ICOMOS).
Bushmen and Bushmen Paintings: A History of Heritage
Tourism at the Tsodilo Hills
Rachel Faye Giraudo (University of California, Berkeley)
The San (Bushmen)* of Southern Africa and the rock art
imagery attributed to them catapulted into Western
47
consciousness in the 1950s through popular tourist
accounts, literature, and media. Sir Laurens van der Post
was one author who brought worldwide attention to the
San and their rock art beginning with his BBC television
series (1956) and book (1958), both titled, The Lost World of
the Kalahari. The enigmatic Tsodilo Hills, located in
northwestern Botswana, was van der Post’s destination on
his 1955 expedition, and this rock art site subsequently
became an iconic link between rock art and living San
people.
Based on two recent years of ethnographic fieldwork as well
as primary and secondary historical sources, this paper
examines the history of heritage tourism at the Tsodilo Hills.
From adventurers and researchers to safari operators and
self-drive tourists, the presence of rock art and living San
people together continues to be the most important tourist
attraction the Tsodilo Hills offers, especially for those in
search of “Bushmen.” The Ju/’hoansi San living nearby the
Tsodilo Hills have participated in the heritage tourism
industry – though, solely at the local level – for several
decades due to the international community’s enduring
fascination with San culture past and present. This case
study demonstrates how heritage tourism became a
subsistence strategy for the Ju/’hoansi San at the Tsodilo
Hills during an era in which they lost their traditional
hunting rights.
*The title of this paper uses “Bushmen” to refer to Khoi-San
speakers who are now known collectively as “San,” a name
members of various Khoi-San language groups decided to
use during a historic 1996 meeting. I am using the older and
more informal term “Bushmen” because this paper
addresses an essentializing understanding of San cultures
through popular representations and heritage tourism.
The Dilemma of the Included Past: Archaeological
Education in the New South Africa
Rachel King (Stanford University)
Since 1994, the democratic government has sought to re-cast
the role of heritage in education as a discourse of
multiculturalism,
recognition,
and
social
justice.
Archaeological education (AE) emerged to answer this call
with an emphasis on the multivocality of the past and the
material representation of archaeological practice in the
social and economic lives of the new South Africa’s citizens.
Despite the explicitly created space for AE in school
curricula and projects created by parastatal organizations,
however, AE has struggled to actualize itself. In all but selfcontained, privately-funded programs, AE is constantly
placed under the heading of environmental education and
becomes incorporated with themes of conservation, which
are ill-equipped to deal with the complex role of material
heritage in South African social imaginings.
This paper seeks to address the question of why
archaeological education is often subsumed under
environmental education in South Africa. Why do the
tropes of conservation and the interconnectedness of
ecology appear so easily applicable to the concept of
material heritage? What are the impacts of this on the lived
experiences of archaeological education? I argue that the
answers lie in incompatibilities of the state-led invocation of
heritage simultaneously as a dynamic representation of
South African expression, and as a solid, unmoving
foundation for progress and modernity.
Identity-Making and Native American SelfRepresentation in the Museum Setting
Madeleine Douglas (Stanford University)
This paper is a comparative case study analyzing the
strategies four museums across the United States employ in
the representation of Native people and groups. Topics to
be addressed include how authorship and thus identitymaking is determined within the museum context; how the
demographic of the museum visitors is or is taken into
account in the formation of these exhibits; and differences
between exhibitions that includes the consultation of Native
people versus Native authorship.
Exploring 'the religious' at Çatalhöyük: An
Interdisciplinary Dialogue
Ian Hodder (Stanford University)
The aim of the work reported on in this session was to
implement an interdisciplinary study of the role of religious
ritual in the emergence of complex societies, involving a
group of natural scientists, archaeologists, anthropologists,
philosophers and theologians in a novel field-based context.
Through the period of the project from 2006 to 2008,
members convened at Çatalhöyük for a week each summer,
and also met in seminars at Stanford University. At the site
they talked with the field team and spent time in the
specialist laboratories discussing ways in which the data
from the site could inform the main questions being
addressed by the project. The papers in this session result
from this experiment in bringing scholars from diverse
backgrounds to work with archaeologists ‘at the trowel’s
edge’ at Çatalhöyük.
48
9:00-9:20am
Introduction: the Templeton project at Çatalhöyük: its
goals and outcomes
Ian Hodder (Stanford University)
of the environment. In the Neolithic wild animals may no
longer have been seen as provided by the environment and
its spirit world but as provided by ancestors or human
mythic figures.
This paper introduces the site of Çatalhöyük and the work
of the interdisciplinary group. It outlines the four questions
considered by the group. (1) How can archaeologists
recognize the spiritual, religious and transcendent in early
time periods? (2) Are changes in spiritual life and religious
ritual a necessary prelude to the social and economic
changes that lead to ‘civilization’? (3) Do human forms take
on a central role in the spirit world in the early Holocene,
and does this centrality lead to new conceptions of human
agency that themselves provide the possibility for the
domestication of plants and animals? (4) Do violence and
death act as the foci of transcendent religious experience
during the transitions of the early Holocene in the Middle
East, and are such themes central to the creation of social life
in the first large agglomerations of people?
9:40-10:00am
Why should ethnographic analogies help?
Çatalhöyük and house based societies
Maurice Bloch (London School of Economics)
9:20-9:40am
The symbolism of Çatalhöyük in its regional context
Lynn Meskell & Ian Hodder (Stanford University)
The aim of this chapter is to situate the symbolism and ritual
at Çatalhöyük into the wider context of the Neolithic of
eastern Turkey and the Middle East. Four general themes
seem to recur and to underpin the symbolic repertoire at
Çatalhöyük and sites such as Göbekli in southeast Turkey.
The first theme is surprising in that it has long been
assumed that early agricultural societies in the Middle East
were associated with the image of the nurturing female or
mother. In fact there is much quantitative evidence for a
phallocentrism at many sites, especially in Turkey. A
second, but closely related, general focus is on dangerous
wild things. Many symbolic representations and practices
focus on wild animals, but especially on the hard,
dangerous, pointed parts of wild animals. This symbolism
seems partly related to the memorialization of animal kills
and feasts, but it also has dimensions that focus on the
piercing of flesh. Body manipulation and the piercing and
remaking of the flesh constitute a third general theme. The
practice of severing, circulating and passing down heads at
Çatalhöyük is an important part of the construction of
history houses and the long-term temporalities they
embody, and related practices may occur elsewhere. The
final general theme concerns the focus on symbolic
elaboration on the house. Throughout the Middle East the
house established continuities and histories as subsistence
economies increasingly involved delayed returns for labor.
But the placing of wild animal imagery inside houses may
have had another dimension linked to changing conceptions
The paper will consider the use of ethnographic analogies
by archaeologists trying to interpret the distant past. It will
concentrate on how far and how little social and cultural
anthropologist's concept of "house based societies" can
illuminate the Catalhuyuk remains. Under what conditions
can analogy be causal? Is it because contemporary people
living in certain "house based societies" regularly consider
the world in similar ways that it is reasonable to suggest
that the Neolithic people of Catalhuyuk shared these ideas?
Particular attention will be paid to the way houses create
continuities in time. How they are more stable and longer
lasting than the lives of the people who live in them. How
houses therefore become "transcendental". What does this
mean for our understanding of "religion"? Finally, I shall
examine the possible significance of the use of wild animals
in house decoration in terms of a wider theory of the
"transcendental".
10:00-10:20am
Modes of religiosity at Çatalhöyük
Harvey Whitehouse (University of Oxford)
This paper seeks to reconstruct certain features of ritual and
social organization at Çatalhöyük by combining a general
theory of ritual transmission with interpretations that we
and others have made of the archaeological evidence. Our
theory relates aspects of ritual performance (especially
emotionality, frequency, and exegetical thinking) to social
morphology (especially the scale, structure, and
cohesiveness of cults at the settlement). We argue that from
comparatively fragmentary information concerning the
nature of prehistoric rituals at Çatalhöyük we can infer a
surprisingly rich picture of how religious knowledge was
constituted, transmitted and transformed over the lifetime
of the settlement and how ritually based coalitions formed,
interacted, and changed.
10:30-11:00am COFFEE BREAK
11:00-11:20am
The materiality of ‘religion’ at Çatalhöyük
Webb Keane (University of Michigan)
49
How should we identify religion as something distinct from
the more general category of culture? If we accept that
some speculation, or what Peirce called “abduction,” can
help open up the evidence, we must still be wary of the
tendency in religious speculation to project the author’s
particular preoccupations onto prehistory, prematurely
eliminating what Hodder has called its “strangeness and
‘otherness,’” and indulging in teleological thinking. And
yet science should include the abduction of likelihoods, if it
is not to be mired in narrow empiricism. In my discussion
of the evidence at Çatalhöyük, I will propose elements of a
polythetic definition of religion that respond to these two
demands. I sketch out some general consequences of
attending to the materiality of religion as we know it in the
ethnographic record. A discussion of the evidence from
Çatalhöyük will focus on the marking of some domains of
experience for special attention, and the play of absence and
presence.
When is magic? That is, when does an act or thing become
magical if it does so at all? Leaving the difficult discussion
of what constitutes the religious or spiritual at Çatalhöyük
to the other participants in this session, I will instead focus
on what might constitute the magical domain at
Çatalhöyük. These two themes are no doubt related. Indeed,
before one can ‘look’ for magic in a Neolithic context, one
must have a somewhat clear idea of the material forms and
practices that religion encompasses first. After briefly
discussing the archaeology of the religious domain, I will
then discuss a few possible magical valences at Çatalhöyük,
focusing on certain materials and their qualities, mixed
deposits, and their specific locations and temporalities.
11:20-11:40am
The Neolithic cosmos of Çatalhöyük
Paul Wason (The John Templeton Foundation)
This paper argues that archaeological evidence can provide
longer-term perspectives on how religiosity develops in
relation to economy and society, and that interpretation
needs to be sensitive to the specificity of material contexts.
Van Huyssteen accepts that the hiding and revealing that
took place in the Çatalhöyük houses had a religious
dimension. Looking back in time, the Palaeolithic cave
paintings in Europe indicate an embodied symbolic process
in which the non-visible could be codified - thus providing
the basis for the earliest forms of religiosity. He uses work
based in neuroscience to argue that altered states of
consciousness played a role, in contextually specific ways, in
the production of the symbolism in the houses at
Çatalhöyük, and links are drawn to imagistic modes of
religiosity. In thinking about religion or spirituality in the
Neolithic we should not expect to discover some clearly
demarcated, separate domain that we could identify as
'religion' as such. A neurological bridge allows us to
understand some dimensions of the ways in which religion
was embedded in daily life at Çatalhöyük, but for van
Huyssteen the more important point is that the neurological
capacity for different forms of consciousness is linked to the
human ability to remember, imagine, and symbolize.
Human spiritual and religious experience can thus be
understood as an emergent consequence of the symbolic
capacity in humans.
Ideas about the basic nature of the universe, what I am
calling our cosmology, permeate what we think about
everything else and influence how we live. For example,
although where we came from does not really determine
who we are, where we believe we came from does affect how
we imagine our capacities and so what we are willing to
become. Scientific discovery has done much to revise and
enrich our own cosmology over the past century, but
throughout history, and even now, ideas about what and
who is out there and about agency and causation -- how it
all works and why things happen -- have more often been
religious and philosophical ideas. In this paper I attempt a
preliminary exploration of what we might learn about the
cosmos inhabited by the Neolithic people of Çatalhöyük.
This is relevant to the four core questions of this project,
because cosmology is related to religion, but allows me to
avoid, for the moment, issues of what religion is.
Topics covered include understandings of time (time and
change in general, the past, and the future), understandings of
space (the shape of the cosmos at large, houses and floor
plans, and a place to live), and humans and other beings. This
is simply an initial study and I will end by mentioning other
elements of cosmology which should be considered in
future work.
11:40-12:00pm
Magical deposits at Çatalhöyük: a matter of time and
place?
Carolyn Nakamura (Stanford University)
12:00-12:20pm
Coding the Non-Visible: Possibilities and Limitations in
Understanding Symbolic Behavior at Çatalhöyük
Wentzel van Huyssteen (Princeton Theological Seminary)
12:20-12:40pm
Temporalities of religion at Çatalhöyük
Peter Pels (Leiden University)
This essay tries to contribute to the interpretation of
religious practices at Çatalhöyük by employing a systematic
distinction of time-scales for analysis. Using an empirically
50
grounded conception of the ‘religious’ as that which
appears in the archaeological record as specially marked or
articulated, the essay outlines the different temporalities
that Çatalhöyük people may have been aware of, and uses
this analytical scheme to discuss different interpretive
possibilities and narratives. In conclusion, it suggests that
Çatalhöyük may not have been a particularly ‘religious’
society, and that we may profitably study transcendence in
the Neolithic by attending to the points in the evidence
where we see that different time-scales overlap or are
articulated on each other.
12:40-1:00pm
Discussion
Archaeologies of the Transient and Intangible:
What Gets Valued and Why?
Kenneth Aitchison (Institute for Archaeologists),
Karina Croucher (University of Manchester),
Hilary Soderland (University of California:
Berkeley) & George Smith (South East
Archaeological Centre)
Concepts of value and worth usually underlie many of our
activities as archaeologists, whether consciously or
otherwise. The ways in which these are manifested in
practice can be both obvious and more subtle, and context
dependent.
Physical monumental remains are open to direct, immediate
and apparent (e)valuation, whether social, intellectual or
economic, but the transient and intangible past has value
too, constructed through the memories and meanings that
become attached to locales.
In this session we would like to explore how concepts of
value are constructed and contested, how they can be
applied to intangible pasts, and the methodologies of
measuring value, discussing the value of social and shared
meaning, memory and identity as applied to concepts such
as the cultural value of sites of trauma, the archaeology of
commemoration, transient archaeologies of the immediate
past, shared senses of place and identity, and the physicality
of social memory.
9:00-9:20am
Intangible past: transient present. A case study of value
and how it is assigned
Fay Stevens (University College London & University of
Notre Dame)
Visiting the site of Stonehenge (Wiltshire, UK) today is an
experience many people consider to be intangible and
transient. Drawing upon the experiences of international
students taking a course in archaeology and ethics at the
University of Notre Dame (London Programme), this paper
considers how value is defined and assigned by these
students in their experience and understanding of the site
and its environs. Issues raised include rights of ownership,
political and moral viewpoints, multi-vocality, and how
these are articulated. This approach positions the students’
understanding through the critical lens of the value of
cultural perceptions of sites/landscapes and encourages an
awareness of issues of identity, individual and social
responsibilities and professional conduct. As such, a
consideration of value (in this context) and how it is
assigned can be seen to engage students with the very
notion of an intangible/transient past/present and the
resulting development of intellectual ideas in the discipline.
9:20-9:40am
Building a past: the construction of early Neolithic
identity and structures
Jolene Debert (University of Manchester, UK)
The phenomenon of the early Neolithic timber structure has
intrigued, divided and sparked much debate as to its role
within early Neolithic life in Britain. With a refinement in
dating, the transition into the Neolithic is becoming clearer
though muddied with countless contradictory theories and
interpretations. The intangibility of their function and
meaning has stunted work.
In an attempt to remove this barrier to understanding their
nature, I have looked directly at the material evidence of
these large structures, specifically the flints, investigating
the construction of memory and its association with a place.
These large timber buildings were the first monuments built
in the early Neolithic in Britain. It is clear that their meaning
was pivotal for the development of the new identity of
people invoking these changes to their lifeways.
9:40-10:00am
Exposing tangible heritage in correlation with a system of
values and concepts within Mexican archaeologies
Lilia Lizama Aranda (EMCSA), Julio Hoil (CIESAS), Harlen
Tuz (University of Yucatan/EMCSA) and Susana Echeverría
Castillo (University of Yucatan)
Mexican local concepts as to what gets valued and why are
specifically oriented in economics within a global age. This
means that cultural heritage moves on a platform on which
value is ascribed in terms of economic gains. We will
explain cases in which archaeological sites, our first
51
platform, are in themselves categorized within a staircase of
economic importance based on their physical features,
setting aside intrinsic perspectives of value: political, social,
and technological. On the other hand, we have a platform of
concepts that consciously surrounds specialists’ activities;
concepts that include inhabitants’ desires to help protect
and promote a cultural site for their own benefit. This
platform should have a balanced set of values and concepts
to include binding heritage and the identity of local
descendants with that of a site. Finally, we should learn,
teach, and communicate diverse heritage to professionals
and engage them with the public at large. Measuring value
in terms of networking allows us to create a system
recognizing efforts achieved in developing countries.
not mention Native Americans. The intangible dominant
group narratives determine which tangible historic sites are
marked as significant aspects of America's heritage.
10:30-11:00am COFFEE BREAK
11:00-11:20am
Value in prehistory (with reference to the Balkans)
Lolita Nikolova (University of Utah)
10:00-10:20am
Historic markers: the construction of valuable heritage,
tangible and intangible
Suzanne Spencer-Wood (Harvard University)
My historical archaeology classes conduct a research project
analyzing who puts up historic markers in southeast
Michigan and why. This project has revealed which kinds of
sites have a modern constituency, and which kinds of sites
are not marked. It is significant that many historic markers
mark buildings that have become intangible in the sense
that they have been destroyed. Some markers are also
concerned with intangible aspects of heritage at sites, such
as marking the home of a woman who dressed as a man and
served in the Civil War. Remains of this activity would
probably not be excavated at the woman's post Civil-war
marital household site that has been marked but has also
been destroyed. This case also illustrates the androcentric
emphasis in historic markers in the Detroit area. The vast
majority of historic markers focus on men's public activities,
even when marking a man's house site. House site markers
may mention a man's wife and children, but seldom name
them. The family is subsumed under the male head of
household. Only 12% of historic site markers focus on
women's activities. Charitable sites are also rarely marked, a
fact that is probably related to the ideology that considered
women innately more pious, moral, and suited to charitable
activities than men. Most historic markers are concerned
with men's capitalist activities, materializing the dominant
national narrative of industrialization. In Detroit, most
marked sites are white, but the African-American
community has marked many churches, underground
railroad sites, black schools and households, still
predominantly focussing on men's activities. Very few
historic markers are concerned with Native American sites,
and the narrative usually focuses on white conquest. Many
white site markers are concerned with colonization and do
11:20-11:40am




Value is one of the essential topics of conceptualization in
the recent theoretical prehistoric research on the Balkans
(see e.g. Bailey 1998, 2005; Souvatzi 2008; Nikolova et al.
2009 with refs.). Our research attempts to explore how the
concept of value evolved, materialized and developed
during the Neolithic, Copper and earlier Bronze Ages
between the Carpathians and the Aegean. We have a twofold goal: to test the modern understanding of value against
the archaeological data and to observe whether the
empirical data from Balkan Prehistory will bring theoretical
conclusions that may contradict some of the general
understanding of value in Prehistory.
In the context of Balkan prehistoric data (e.g. Nikolova 1999,
2000, 2003; Nikolova et al. 2009; Bailey 1998, 2000, 2005;
Todorova 2002; Souvatzi 2008), it looks that prehistoric
value is a concept that had developed gradually, including
new and different material and non-material expressions
and dependant on innovations, complexity, multi-scale
cultural networks and many other factors. Specific problems
are how the concepts of value and wealth interacted in
Balkan Prehistory, as well as how innovative materials (e.g.
spondylus, copper, gold, silver, etc.) created new values. We
will also outline the differences between the settlement and
burial data for analyses of value in Prehistory and the sharp
ambiguity of some archaeological records by constructing
anthropological models. The archaeological framework
includes the following cultural horizons:
Early Neolithic (Koprivets I – Karanovo I-II – Starčevo)
(later 7th – mid 6th millennium cal BCE);
Late Neolithic and Early Copper Age (Karanovo III – IV – V
– Vinča – Boian – Hamangia – early Cucuteni) (later 6th –
mid 5th millennium cal BCE),
Late and Final Copper Ages (Sălcuţa / Kodzhadermen /
Bubanj – Gumelniţa / Karanovo VI / Varna – Sălcuţa IV /
Telish IV – Cernavoda I – later Cucuteni) (later 5th – earlier
4th millennium cal BCE), and
Early Bronze Age (Cernavoda III / Boleraz – Yunatsite –
Ezero – Coţofeni – Kostolac – Vučedol – Pit Grave Culture,
etc.) (later 4th – 3rd millennium cal BCE).
52
Fly me to the moon: protecting the immediate past at the
Apollo 11 Tranquility Base Site
Beth Laura O'Leary (New Mexico State University)
Many of the "Space Age" artifacts and sites lie at the
boundary between heritage objects and space junk. It is a
large complex technological assemblage which is transient
in several respects: it is thought to represent outmoded and
obsolete ideas, is no longer working and is perceived as
standing in the way of more advanced technologies. The
preservation issues are huge in terms both of volume and of
how to protect objects in space or on other celestial bodies
like the Moon. The challenges faced by the Lunar Legacy
necessity of valuing the significance of the Apollo 11
landing site on the Moon are explored as well as how to
find ways of dealing with heritage in off-earth
environments.
11:40-12:00pm
The contesting of value at Prestongrange?
Phil Richardson (Newcastle University)
It recently has been suggested that in the fields of
archaeological
heritage
and
public
archaeology,
archaeologists have to confront the central issues of what
archaeology does, what archaeology makes, and what
archaeology is for. In this regard Value would appear of
central importance. The issue of what is valued, why and by
whom surfaced recently at The Prestongrange Community
Archaeological Project (a heritage project developed by East
Lothian Council Archaeological Service) near Edinburgh,
Scotland. The standing remains of the 19th century colliery
predominate the site but also visually disguise the fact that
the site has had a lengthy and highly significant social and
economic past. The excavations and documentary work
were conducted by volunteers from the local community,
many of whom had relatives, some not so distant, that had
worked in the on-site industries. Oral history, provided by
surviving former workers and local residents, was also
recorded by many of the volunteers.
However, it was the volunteers’ enthusiasm to use and
discuss the archaeological deposits they were excavating as
a means to explain the more recent past, often understood
through the oral history they themselves had recorded, that
undercut the standard concept of ‘value’ in archaeology.
The discovery of a 17th century glass-flue, as expected, was
particularly ‘valued’ both by the archaeologists and the
volunteers who took a great deal of pride in the discovery.
Yet, it was the chance for the volunteers to come together, in
a place where a shared sense of identity and awareness of
the immediate past was associated with local social
memory, that was of more ‘value’ to this project. This paper
will explore these conflicting senses of ‘value’ and explore
how the understanding of the archaeological layers and
deposits
became
a
contest
between
excavation
methodologies and the replaying of memories and
meanings associated with the histories of more recent
relatives. Thus, the paper demonstrates how, in this
instance, it was the transient nature of the excavation
process itself, and not just the results of excavation, that was
of real ‘value’; it created a rich working environment and
added considerably to the quality and importance of the
project as a whole.
12:00-12:20pm
Displaying prejudice and subjectivity: archaeologists’
treatment of Mesoamerica versus their lack of interest on
Aridamerica (hunter-gatherer) archaeology in Mexico
Leticia González Arratia (Museo Regional de La Laguna,
Torreón, Coah., México)
History of Mexican archaeology reveals a great interest in
studying sites and monumental sculpture since the second
part of the XVIIIth century. Since that time, both nationals
and foreigners have focused their attention on large
prehispanic cities, mainly those showing impressive
architecture, decorated ceramics, stone steles, etc. These
types of remains are found mostly in Central and Southeast
Mexico in the cultural area known as Mesoamerica.
Other types of archaeological remains, such as those left by
hunter-gatherer societies or small agricultural villages in the
desert of Northern Mexico in the cultural area known as
Aridamerica, were only acknowledged seriously as part of
the study of archaeology after the second part of the XXth
century. This has to do with the history of the country as
well as with politics and the need to reinforce Mexican
identity. It is also related to a prejudiced attitude on the part
of archaeologists towards societies lacking architectural
remains, stone sculpture and decorated ceramics,
considered as unworthy of being studied and denying them
even the possibility that they had built their own and
characteristic civilization different from Mesoamerican
societies.
The aim of this paper is to provide an account of this fact
and propose that the archaeology of hunter-gatherer
societies of the desert in Mexico have been the target of
subjective and biased treatment on the part of
archaeologists. The result has been an absolute silence about
the importance of their technological improvements,
economic, social and political strategies, as well as their
ritual life, and even to ignore the monumentality of some
archaeological remains such as pictographs, petroglyphs
and burial places.
53
12:20-12:40pm
Heritage values in contemporary society
George Smith (Southeast Archeological Center)
Discussion of heritage in the twenty-first century must
include the many voices representing the heritage sector
and stakeholders, including but not limited to those in
archaeology (university professors as well as governmental,
private sector, and public archaeologists), law, economics,
Sunday 3rd May
historic preservation, education, tourism, and indigenous
populations. Discussions should address how the past is
valued and how such values can be defined and applied to
public policy, spending, management, education (at all
levels), education and training of heritage sector
professionals, economic and sustainable development, and
delivered services relating to a collective heritage in a
manner that is accountable and includes public
involvement.
Afternoon sessions
CHAT @ TAG: Symmetry and Diversity in
Archaeologies of the Recent Past (cont)
B. R. Fortenberry (Boston University) & Adrian
T. Myers (Stanford University)
2:00-2:20pm
Aboriginal Fishing Practices in Past and Present: An
Archaeological Approach to the Study of ColonialInfluenced Changes in Stó:lō (Coast Salish) Household
Organization
Catherine Bailey (University of California, Los Angeles),
Anthony P Graesch (University of California, Los Angeles)
& David M. Schaepe (Stó:lō Research and Resource
Management Centre, British Columbia, Canada)
This paper discusses an archaeological approach to studying
Stó:lō (Coast Salish) lifeways through 200 years of colonial
influence in the upper Fraser Valley of southwestern British
Columbia, Canada. Examining the cultural practices of
contemporary Stó:lō communities provides a framework for
examining how Aboriginal lifeways were impacted by
shifting spheres of interaction with non-Aboriginal settlers.
We argue that a valuable epistemological approach emerges
from the simultaneous investigation of contemporary Stó:lō
fishing camps (where we attempt to translate Stó:lō
perceptual language into an anthropological one) and
household-level artifact assemblages (which provide insight
into the production of fish butchery tools). As a theoretical
basis for modeling the latter, we consider the role of
contemporary fishing camp assemblages in the organization
of cooperative activity and the development of
organizational relations that cross multiple planes of
interaction and involve multiple actors.
(2pm - 6pm)
2:20-2:40pm
Material Landscapes and the interstices of Ethnicity: PostContact indigenous interiors of South-Central California
David Robinson (University of Central Lancashire, UK)
Theoretical approaches to ethnicity have proven to be
sophisticated and flexible in interpreting the rapidly
changing post-contact archaeological record of California.
However, is ethnicity always a satisfactory way to
understand
changes
enacted
within
indigenous
communities? New research into interior South-Central
California has identified indigenous historical occupation of
sites in specific ‘backcountry’ contexts. In this paper I wish
to consider if the material evidence found at these sites may
fall between the crevices found in our theories of ethnicity
by working through material culture in its social and
physical landscape context.
2:40-3:00pm
Fire and Ruination: The Potentially Liberating Force of
Near-Total Destruction in Expanding Interpretation at the
Kate Chopin House/Bayou Folk Museum (Cloutierville,
LA)
Julie H. Ernstein (Northwestern State University)
This presentation considers the archaeology of recent
events—specifically the loss of a National Historic
Landmark property to a fire last October—as an
opportunity to revisit the creation of meaning(s) and,
consequently, revise and expand heritage interpretation at
this site. Students, faculty and an alumnus from the
author’s university engaged in salvage operations at the site
and were joined by neighbors, community members, and
the property owners (a local historic preservation group) in
mourning the loss of this nationally significant resource
which—among other things—had been home to turn-of-the20th-century feminist writer Kate Chopin (1850-1904).
54
However, it was the subsequent prospect of dedesignation
as a NHL, the potentially devastating impact of this loss to
local heritage tourism efforts, and trying to assist the
property owners in determining where they might go from
here, that has proven a somewhat revelatory experience.
Specifically, contemporary archaeology—as the archaeology
of recent events and their direct relevance for our increased
appreciation of the evolving nature of meaning, collective
memory, and understanding the past—functions as a means
for turning this terrible loss into a gain in the form of
expanding both formal and informal interpretive
opportunities at the site.
3:00-3:20pm
Pipes, Pots, Palisades and People: Atlantic Connections at
the Nansemond Fort, Virginia
Luke J. Pecoraro (Boston University)
English colonization of Virginia has been characterized as
boldly intrusive, spreading out quickly from the first
toehold at Jamestown into the hinterlands and leading to
open hostility with native peoples almost from the start. The
tactics used and methods employed in colonizing Virginia
were not new; many of the Jamestown venturers were
themselves involved in plantation efforts in the late
16th/early 17th centuries in Ireland. While it has long been
known that there are direct historical links among
individuals at Jamestown and other Virginia Company
Period (1607 – 1624) sites to Irish plantations, historical
archaeology in Ireland and elsewhere in southeastern
Virginia is producing evidence that there are more Irish
influences on the 17th -century colonial project than
previously thought.
Archaeological evidence is the best point of departure for
understanding southeastern Virginia’s 17th century
settlements because of the destruction of most colonial
records. Using archaeological evidence from the
Nansemond Fort (44SK192), a c.1635 - 1680 inland fortified
bawn in Suffolk, Virginia, I posit that architectural evidence
indicates a fort plan similar to forts from the same period in
Ireland. Artifacts recovered during excavation at
Nansemond point to three distinct occupation phases,
producing a chronology that allows individuals to be
associated with the property. The material remains also
speak to a shift in economic and trading patterns, and an
increased reliance on locally produced items. By
contextualizing the Nansemond Fort in a comparative
framework with English plantation sites in Ireland, a clearer
picture of the influence and adaptations that these earlier
colonial ventures had on the development of Virginia
emerges and permits the consideration of the agency of
individuals to shape the Virginia landscape based on their
previous colonial experiences.
3:20-3:40pm
Ancient Egypt and Brazil: A Theoretical Approach to the
Uses of the Past
Pedro Paulo A. Funari & Raquel dos Santos Funari
(Unicamp, Sao Paolo, Brazil)
Archaeological theory has been paying attention to the uses
of the past in different contexts. This paper deals with the
way ancient Egypt has been used to forge Brazilian
identities in the last two hundred years or so.
3:40-4:00pm
Snapshots of History and the Nature of the Archaeological
Image
Travis Parno (Boston University)
Archaeology, as it is experienced by tenured professors and
young field school students alike, occupies a unique
position at the intersection of materiality and temporality.
By its very definition, the discipline, which is of course a
modern construction, handles the remains of past societies.
This multifaceted relationship informs every archaeological
action we undertake, from field work to publication.
Photography is also imbricated in this nexus of the material
and the temporal. Every photograph captures an instant in
time, a frozen representation of a context’s materiality. This
is both a constraining and emancipating quality. It prevents
the photographer from illustrating the true depth of any
setting’s materiality, but allows him to construct the context
according to his own agenda. In this way, photography,
with its limitations and abilities, plays an important role in
how archaeology is depicted in both the public and
academic spheres.
To illustrate just how photography is able to manipulate
both materiality and temporality, I will first explore how we
understand each of these characteristics and how they relate
to the power of the image. The history of photographic
technology provides a clear example of how materiality and
temporality are truly entangled. I will then discuss the
phenomenon of Japanese tourist photography in the late
19th-century to show the scale at which a simple set of
photographs can define a culture. Lastly, I will offer some
thoughts regarding the ways in which we construct
archaeological photographs. It may be time to rethink the
manner in which we employ photography to represent the
complex practice of archaeology.
4:00-4:20pm
Toward a Historical Archaeo-Geography of the Rise of the
American Welfare State: Spatial Re-Scaling and the
Materiality of the New Deal
Anne E. Mosher (Syracuse University) & Laurie Wilkie
(University of California: Berkeley)
55
While there has been a rich exchange and collaboration
between the disciplines of archaeology and geography in
the UK—particularly in the realm of landscape
archaeologies—less intellectual cross-pollination has
occurred in the US.
In this paper, we offer possible
explanations for why this was the case. We also envision
the possibilities for ‘historical archaeo-geography,’ a
collaboration that draws upon both the complementary and
unique practices of the two disciplines of historical
archaeology and historical geography. Together, we share
concern for space and place in time (synchronicity) and over
time (diachronicity). What historical archaeology brings to
the table is a fine-grained consideration of household lives
and practices. This meshes with historical geography’s
sensibilities regarding the complex interplay and
connections between multiple scales— linking the body,
family, and household to the neighborhood, community,
state, region, nation, and the global.
We explicitly discuss a collaborative project that will
investigate the geopolitical and material dimensions of
‘state re-scaling.’ Building upon the work of Theda Skocpol
(1992), political scientist Suzanne Mettler (1998) notes that
prior to the New Deal, state responsibility for women,
children, the unemployed, poor and elderly resided at the
local scale/level (a feminized domestic realm) whereas the
national scale/level (the realm of federal social policy) was
directed more at masculine worlds of trade and commerce
and international relations (national defense). The crisis of
the Great Depression, however, far exceeded the abilities of
local charities and the local state to handle its responsibility
and a ‘scaling up’ occurred in which the national state
stepped in to avert a continental social crisis. This was,
however, a re-scaling that at first privileged structurally
unemployed white men with federal programs for the
‘worthy poor’ coming later. Through a collaborative
historical archaeo-geographic study, we raise the question:
how did individuals, families, non-state institutions such as
charities as well as the local state learn to exist within this
re-scaled world of federally funded welfare? Or, to put it
another way:
where and how did the subject learn the
performance of national/federal citizenship? How might
this performance have been reflected in everyday spatial
and material practice? We suggest that collaboration
between archaeology and geography allows us to construct
something not really attempted on a synthetic level for the
recent past—a historical archaeology and a historical
geography of the state as viewed and lived from the bottom
up.
4:20-5:00pm
Discussion
Discussant: Michael Wilcox (Stanford University)
Histories, Identities, Theories (cont)
Laurie Wilkie & Rosemary Joyce (University of
California: Berkeley)
2:00-2:20pm
Brothertown commemoration practices and the materiality
of mass consumption
Craig N. Cipolla (University of Pennsylvania)
Mass consumed items are indeed the bread and butter of
historical archaeology. This paper investigates the
materiality of such items. More specifically, it explores the
social affects of replacing the “homemade” with the “store
bought”. I examine shifts in commemoration practices of the
Brothertown Indians, a multi-tribal community of Christian
Native Americans that moved west together starting in the
late 18th century. Early on, the Brothertown commemorated
their dead with locally produced limestone markers bearing
no inscriptions. In the early 19th century, members began
consuming professionally made marble headstones. These
stones nearly replaced “homemade” stones by the mid-19th
century. How were identities represented with blank
“mute” stones as compared to mass-consumed stones
bearing inscriptions? Did this transition play a role in
fostering new social distinctions within the community?
How do these patterns compare with shifting social
relations between the Brothertown Indians and other
contemporaneous Native and Euroamerican communities? I
pursue these questions by drawing upon theories of practice
and semiotics. The answers to these questions are not only
important for historical archaeologists but also have
implications for broad theories of materiality, ethnogenesis
and mass consumption.
2:20-2:40pm
Understanding subjective experiences of the material
world: A phenomonological approach the archaeological
record
Kira Blaisdell-Sloan (University of California: Berkeley)
While phenomenological approaches to the archaeological
record have varied, one of the greatest potentials of these
approaches lies in their emphasis on the subjective
experience of the material world. In this paper I review the
theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of this variety
of phenomenological approach to the archaeological record.
Based on a review of this literature and a case study from
Colonial Honduras, I argue that archaeological data in
general, and historical archaeological data in particular, are
well suited to phenomenological analysis. Critical to the
success of such an approach is a move towards the
incorporation of multi-sited, reflexive analysis.
56
2:40-3:00pm
Twisted lives: the mergence between the material past and
the historical present
Kristján Mímisson (Univeristy of Iceland)
People’s biographies are dominated by a multitude of
factors. In recent years it has come to a general
understanding that people’s lives are embedded in things
just as things are premising the biographies of people. This
notion has infiltrated both anthropology and archaeology in
various approaches to the cultural biographies of things, the
life courses of objects and the inseparable interrelation
between materialities and the person, unfolding a variety of
lived experiences in the past and the present.
In this paper I will explore how the category of biography
transcends the barriers of time. It is a discussion about how
the material past, i.e. the tangible traces of times long gone,
intermingles with the historical present, the context of
history that is presently and continuously being constructed
and negotiated, and how the materiality of biographies is a
blending of the two. The argumentation rests upon my own
involvement with the biography of a 17th century peasant
from the site of Búðarárbakki at the borders of the southern
highlands of Iceland. The site and its materiality have
become both the cause and consequence of our shared and
twisted lives, thus, dispensing time and creating an
immediacy between two worlds; the material past and the
historical present.
3:00-3:30
Discussant:
Kent Lightfoot (University of California: Berkeley)
The Color of Things: Debating the Role and
Future of Color in Archaeology (cont)
Alexander Nagel (University of Michigan)
2:00-2:20pm
Color Power: Exploring Color and Status in Early
Chorasmian Elite Mural Art
Fiona Kidd (Department of Archaeology, University of
Sydney)
The monumental building complex at Kazakly-yatkan in
ancient Chorasmia, modern Uzbekistan, provides a unique
opportunity for the contextualized study of color in elite
ritual contexts in 1st century BCE Central Asia. Color at
Kazakly-yatkan was produced using various media and
techniques. Polychrome mural art and relief sculptures, gold
leaf, moulded copper alloy, painted columns and stone
column bases suggest that a planned program of visual art
decorated the complex. A ‘portrait’ gallery comprising at
least 27 bust portraits painted on the eastern façade of a
corridor surrounding the central building of the complex
raises several critical issues in scholarly approaches to color.
Torques depicted on the personages indicates that members
of the elite were shown. However, diversity in headdress
type, costume color and ornamentation style suggests that
the individuals were differentially ranked. Other significant
characteristics in the use of color associated with the
portraits such as the ubiquitous red ears, and the
distinguished use of yellow suggest that color, rather than
being a question of personal choice or taste, represents a
significant category of enquiry in the pre-Islamic Iranian
world. To what extent is it possible to define the role of
specific colors in elite ritual contexts? How can personal
choice and taste account for the use of color in such
contexts? Through a contextualized study of the portraits
and their associated color traits, this paper will explore how
color can materialize voices in elite contexts in the preIslamic Iranian world.
2:20-2:40pm
The Colors of the Sasanian Empire: Color and Sasanian
Seals
Judith A. Lerner (Independent Scholar, New York)
By the end of the reign of Shapur I, the Sasanian Empire
(224-663 AD) stretched from the River Euphrates to the
River Indus and included modern-day Armenia and
Georgia. This paper will focus on Sasanian seals and color.
Sasanian seals are made from a variety of stones and hence
are of different colors. In addition to their utilitarian
function, seals were carved from stones that had aesthetic
appeal; further, many—if not most—seals had for their
owners amuletic value. This value came not only from the
image carved on the seal, but also seems to have derived
from the type, and thus color, of stone on which the image
was carved. Indeed, there seems to be a connection between
the choice of subject for a seal and the kind or color of stone
on which it is carved. This paper will explore such
connections, drawing upon Iranian and Zoroastrian beliefs
about color that may have influenced Sasanian seal-carvers
and their patrons, as well as on Ancient Near Eastern and
Classical traditions.
2:40-3:00pm
Colored History: The European Polychromy Debate of the
19th Century and the Contribution of Spain
María Ocón Fernández (Freie Universität, Berlin)
Color constitutes an important reference point of the past
and the present. At the same time, polychromy belongs
amongst the phenomena of multiplicity, pluralism, and
mass culture that have become integral parts of our material
57
culture and current world views. For nineteenth century
architects, the reference to the colorful image of antiquity
was a general premise for their theoretical understanding
and their own practise. With the emerging European
polychromy debate, color mutated from an "uncertain
grandeur" (A. Prater) to the intrinsic key. Not only a bastion
of European culture, but the traditionally accepted "white
Classicism" (Winckelmann) associated with the images of
Europe and its antiquity would be completely revised.
On the basis of the European polychromy debate of the
nineteenth century, this paper will address the following
questions: Could the question about the phenomenon of
'European Identity' be answered by examining the inception
of polychromy in European architectural history? How does
the interpretation of multicolors as a 'conjugative element'
stand within the nineteenth century polychromy debate on
a European level? How would the contribution of Spain,
with the background of its specific historical experience and
in the face of the current conflict between Western culture
and Islam, be viewed? The role of Archaeology, which was
just being established as a discipline at the time, will be
given special consideration in this context of
interdisciplinary discourse.
3:00-4:00pm
Response and Discussion
Discussant:
David Batchelor
Bridging Subjects and Objects in the Near
Eastern and Mediterranean World (cont)
Stephanie M. Langin-Hooper & Benjamin Porter
(University of California: Berkeley)
2:00-2:20pm
Objectified Bodies: Reconstructing a “Foundation Burial”
from Late Bronze Age Alalakh (Ancient Syria)
Alexis Boutin (Sonoma State University)
An unusual burial of a child was excavated recently at
Alalakh (Tell Atchana), a regional capital of ancient Syria.
Dating to the mid-second millennium BCE, this burial is
unique at the site insofar as it is the only one incorporated
directly into wall foundations. As such, it apparently
represents a “foundation burial.” In the first part of this
paper, I discuss how such burials have traditionally been
interpreted as a type of foundation deposit: objects buried
in a building’s foundations as an act of sanctification or
commemoration. If the traditional interpretation of
foundation burials is accurate, then an explicit or implicit
process of objectifying the decedent’s earthly remains
presumably was involved. I then describe how this process
of objectifying bodies in ancient cultures is replicated by
contemporary osteological analyses. Recent discourse in
bioarchaeology has focused on how standardized methods
of analyzing skeletons (e.g., numbering rather than naming)
and interpreting skeletal data (e.g., writing conventions that
are dominated by the passive voice) can de-humanize the
very people whose remains they purport to explain.
In the last part of the paper, I propose that narrative modes
of interpretation, which interweave skeletal and
archaeological data to create fictive osteobiographies, are
one way to re-subjectify human skeletons. Rather than
employing reified axes of identity to reconstruct an essential
skeletal subject (cf. Smith 2004), however, these narratives
draw on the materiality of human skeletal remains to
reconstruct the embodied experiences of past individuals
within specific socio-historic contexts.
2:25-2:45pm
People of Kemosh?: Investigating a Cultic Context from
Iron Age Jordan
Annlee Dolan (San Joaquin Delta College)
Wadi ath-Thamad Site #13 (WT-13) offers a unique
opportunity to explore the relationship between object and
subject in a solely religious context. This extra-mural shrine
is situated upon an ancient trade route in Moab, central
Jordan, with artifacts having a wide-ranging provenience.
Neutron activation analysis has shown that there are
artifacts of a local and foreign origin, suggesting that both
neighboring nomadic peoples and passerby’s worshipped at
this site. Thus the subject-object relationship can be
examined in light of how the shape or form of the object
affects the function and meaning. It appears that at WT-13,
local inhabitants viewed the possible foreign travelers and
their cultic paraphernalia in a positive light. That is,
foreigners were likely accepted into the region and the cult
place at WT-13. Moreover, foreign sacred objects were not
considered disrespectful or profane, and instead likely
influenced and shaped the local style. Gosden (2005) notes
that in order for an object to be impactful emotionally, there
are certain rules to which the form of the object must
conform. This concept is of the utmost importance when
examining a collection of artifacts that are cultic in nature.
These objects form a distinct group whose function and
meaning go beyond everyday utilitarian items. Not only do
they carry powerful connotations, but these sacred objects
take on an importance that is outside of themselves and
their intrinsic value. As a result, the exceptional group of
artifacts from WT-13 provides the perfect opportunity to
look at the subject-object relationship.
58
2:50-3:10pm
The Agency of Landscapes: Object-shaped Identities in
Elite Female Burial Practices of First Millennium Egypt.
Jean Li (University of California: Berkeley)
theory, artificial intelligence, posthumanism, cognitive
science, environmentalism, phenomenology, science and
technology studies) and archaeologists are recognizing these
profound transformations. However, instead of reassessing
the unique potential of their own disciplinary practice and,
in turn, contributing to and advancing these debates,
practitioners have largely reconfirmed an old and deeply
rooted inferiority complex of being a second string social
science by adding the products of forerunner disciplines
and sciences to their accounts of the past (an attitude which
is in fact a product of the very rifted regime that these new
discourses want to do away with).
In his discussion of subject agency, Gosden (2005), following
Clark and Gell, writes, “…objects set up universes of their
own into which people need to fit…things behave in ways
which do not derive simply from human intentions and in
fact channel those intentions.” This paper uses the site of
Medinet Habu in southern Egypt to examine the ways
meaningful interactions of subjects and objects result in
object agents shaping the identities of people. The site of
Medinet Habu is an especially fitting context in which to
examine these entanglements of objects and subjects.
Originally housing the older state and funerary temples of
the New Kingdom (ca. 1550-1069 BCE) the landscape of
Medinet Habu was gradually transformed in the Late
Period (ca. 747-525 BCE). At this time it was used as a
necropolis for a group of priestesses, the Singers in the
Residence of the Temple of Amen, whose functions
included the stimulation of sexual energies of the creator
god. Engaging with Gosden’s key issues of form and
genealogy, the paper examines how the object landscape of
the past as materialized in the New Kingdom temples
acquired subject-ness in the Late Period. The tombs situated
around and within the older temples indicate that aspects of
the landscape conditioned and constrained the burial
practices of these singers. Conversely, these priestesses
reused and re-inscribed the landscape of Medinet Habu to
define their group and individual identities, demonstrating
the dialectical complexities between subjects and objects.
3:15-4:00pm
Discussion: Reflections on the subject/object divide
Marian Feldman (University of California: Berkeley)
Archaeology: The Discipline of Things
Michael Shanks (Stanford University), Timothy
Webmoor (University of Oxford) & Christopher
Witmore (Brown University)
This session takes leave of such a parasitical attitude (an
attitude which insults archaeology) and revisits core aspects
of the archaeological. Drawing together a diverse group of
archaeologists, it offers a bold picture of what it is
archaeologists do. It builds a case that at the heart of
archaeology is a trans-disciplinary set of practices and
understandings that address the very nature of what it is to
be human and how in turn humans relate to things and
companion animals. It speaks to our unique and long-term
perspective on human relations with material goods, the
design of things, and the nature of the past. Placing to one
side the narrow foci of human intentionality, essentialist
notions of property and meaning, this session offers far
more interesting and refreshing accounts of our
shared/mingled material world and the importance of the
past. Indeed, the radical ethical implication of a symmetrical
approach is to redeploy humanism’s care for people to
encompass a collective of humans, things and non-humans
(including our fellow creatures).




‘Ta archaia’, quite literally ‘old things’ are at the
etymological root of archaeology. So a concern with things,
an obligation to 'materiality', a commitment to landscape
runs to the heart of the profession.



The weather patterns across the social and natural sciences
are shifting; and many of these shifts are centered upon a
(re)turn to things. Under the banner of things, the traditional
social-natural science divide (and its ontological grounding)
is being challenged from different positions (actor-network-

In the course of detailing a more democratic ontology this
session will address a number of questions:
How does a symmetrical understanding of people, things
and animal relations over the long term offer alternative
accounts of human history?
In what ways do things and our fellow creatures come
together with humans to co-produce society and shape
history?
How does a symmetrical archaeology reveal the extent to
which thing are caught up in innovation and tradition?
How do our accounts of the past change by understanding
any period, epoch or era in terms of time percolation?
In what ways do things impact sensation and cognition?
Why have things, instruments and media been ignored in
histories of archaeology and theories of ‘representation’?
Why have considerations of ‘heritage’ become lodged with
the non-material and how does care for people and things
urge a reconfiguration of heritage?
How will a ‘politics of things’ transform archaeology?
59
2:00-2:20pm
From pragmatology to archaeology, with the aid of a few
vignettes from Greece
Christopher Witmore (Brown University)
Archaeology’s original obligation has been to ‘ta archaia’,
literally ‘old things’. There is nothing wrong with this
commitment so long as archaeology holds fast to the cares
specified by its etymology—a duty to stuff out-of-date; a
concern for those forgotten associations covered by ‘ta
archaia’. Difficulties ensue, however, when, in spite of its
etymological roots, ‘archaeologists’ expand their remit to
encompass all things implicated within other webs of
concurrent relations. Though ‘ta archaia’ things may be,
they are also a lot of other things in addition.
Things, we might say, are simultaneously gatherings,
matters of concern, objects and archives. As ‘gatherings’
they connect achievements seemingly distant in time and
space. As ‘matters of concern’ they draw in various groups
supposedly scattered in space and time. As ‘objects’ (a term
that we neither deploy in opposition to, nor as detached
from, that which is commonly taken to be encompassed by
the traditional notion of ‘subject’) things continue to do as
they have always done—fulfill roles and swap properties
with humans and nonhumans. As ‘archives’ they bear
traces of their many transactions/exchanges. Just as it
would be a disservice to things by emphasizing any one role
over the others, it would be an injustice for archaeology to
carve out a partial share in things as ‘ta archaia’.
My purpose in this paper is show how in order to be faithful
to the bewildering diversity of things, archaeology cannot
be construed as holding to domain of ‘ta archaia’
exclusively. In order to be symmetrical, archaeology must
come to recognize how it begins as ‘pragmatology’. Much
like things, ‘pragmata’ fulfill many more roles than what is
covered by the ‘material past’. To this end, I offer several
vignettes from Greece.
2:20-2:40pm
‘Going along, remembering the way'. An archaeology of
movement in Iceland
Oscar Aldred (University of Iceland)
In this paper I will explore the types of relations that exist in
the practices of transhumance and pastoralism to and from
the highland pastures in Iceland. I will assess what this tells
us about the archaeologies of movement that are
materialised and embodied in the bonds that are forged
between animals – environments - humans. Although these
movements are based on the repetitive seasonal practices
that are 'traditional', this tradition is reinforced both by its
innovations (a retrogressive placement of historical change
that shrinks) and its improvisations (as a forward looking
practice that is rhizomic and grows). In view of
these
perspectives, I will offer a different type of temporality, one
that is flattened which neither privileges a backward or
forward looking temporality, but rather views repetitions
which relies precisely on the inconsistencies that are
conducted in a given contemporary situation. This entails a
complex and ongoing alignment of observation with an
active world, one in which movement which is generative,
relational, temporal and the way things are done.
Movement then in this sense is both an amplification and
reduction, but also aleatory through the paths that
collectivities work with and against the perceived
hegemonic and subjugated relations of humans - animals seasonal cycles of environmental change.
2:40-3:00pm
Making quarries move: the case of Fasillar
Bradley Sekedat (Brown University)
Far from resourceful places in a landscape, quarries are
involved in intimate forms of interaction between people,
technologies, materials and the environment. At quarries,
these things come together in a way that continuously alters
the terrain, thereby altering that which forms an integral
part of relationships that occur at the those places.
Implicated in this as well is the constant movement of
material to and from quarries: tools, people, water, animals
and so forth all come in, while blocks, partially finished
sarcophagi, and decorated surfaces move out. From this
perspective, quarries must be looked at in terms of the
movements they entail, which also necessitates a shift away
from
strict definitions of quarries, both conceptually and
geographically. This paper will look at quarries and
quarried stone from a perspective that emphasizes
movement and material. The blocks of stone sent from the
quarry implicate different places with that quarry from a
material perspective, just as the incorporation of different
materials at quarries brings together an integrated notion of
quarries as places or landscapes: they cohere as something
complicated, the actions of various times forming the
terrain, and the interactions of various materials literally
distributing a quarry beyond its immediate environment.
Using the site of Fasıllar, Turkey as an example, this paper
will develop a picture of a specific, long-term use quarry as
something moving, diverse, and integrative.
3:00-3:20pm
Where is the Colosseum?: following the image/paper trails
of an 'emblem' of Imperial Rome
Cecelia Weiss (Brown University)
Where is the Colosseum? The answer to this question seems
obvious: it is a structure that stands prominently in Rome,
60
in the valley between the Palatine and Esqueline Hills, and
here it has stood for nearly two thousand years. A veritable
icon for the "Roman past-as-glorious," for "Roman presentas-tourist destination," the Colosseum is a prominent
feature both on the Roman cityscape and in the
contemporary collective imagination. However, since its
construction, the Colosseum has been translated in to
numerous media (coins, maps, books, photographs, video
games, the internet, film and television, etc.). Past
treatments have dealt with these media as epiphenomena,
as mere representations of an "original." If, however, we
consider media as modes which translate something of the
material world, they are thereby able to circulate the world
at a distance. If we understand the Colosseum to be
distributed through media then the prospect of identifying
any one place that it occupies suddenly becomes much more
complicated.
human-material visibilities that we seek. While this
experiment opens the black box of technology using
transdisciplinary tools, it remains possible to produce
visibilities that are anchored in archaeology and contribute
to nuanced archaeological understandings.
3:40-4:00pm
Discussion
4:00-4:20pm
Dingpolitik and beyond: archaeology, symmetry, politics
Alfredo Gonzales-Ruíbal (Universidad Complutense de
Madrid)
Moreover, the nature of the thing itself needs to be called
into question. Even though as a building-in-itself we seem
to be dealing with a singular entity, a bounded object, the
Colosseum is also a heterogeneous ensemble. It is
implicated in a complex network of materials, interactions,
actions, pasts, and presents. Not only is the building a
multiplicity, but through its translation in various media,
the possible modes of accessing and engaging with it
become exponential in scope. Therefore, in this paper I
investigate some of the ways in which the Colosseum is
distributed and translated and argue that these actions
allow for it to be in Rome and in many other places
simultaneously.
It has sometimes been pointed out that symmetrical
anthropology and actor
network-theory are essentially
apolitical for epistemological reasons: apparently, there is
no much room left for dissension and conflict in the
networks explored
by ANT. However, I think that a
focus on the constitution and working of
collectives in a
symmetrical sense is not at odds with a political stance. In
this paper, I will try to show the usefulness of archaeology
in unraveling the genealogies of modern collectives from a
critical position. By comparing the way in which collectives
of people and things have been constituted in our society
and in other societies past and present, we may find out
ways of bypassing modern dualism that have proven to be
tremendously negative both in social, political and
ecological terms. In this way, we can turn archaeology into a
relevant discipline for thinking other ways of being in the
world.
3:20-3:40pm
Symmetry in the archaeology of technology: microscopic
points of departure
Krysta Ryzewski (Brown University)
4:20-4:40pm
Pyramids and Palimpsests. Object, Event and Assemblage
in the Archaeological Record
Gavin Lucas (University of Iceland)
The black box of technology demands more than the powers
of traditional archaeological observation to open it and to
understand the complex processes that lie within. Beginning
from microscopic details of iron objects, this paper examines
networks of innovation and tradition archaeologically. The
discussions critique the continued linear treatment of
technological processes, frequent explanatory uses of
slippery notions such as Industrial Revolution, and
archaeological orientations that separate the social from the
material elements of material culture. Symmetry provides
the vehicle for moving away from these constraints and
shortcomings, along paths that recognize the heterogeneous
nature of the materials of colonial ironworking, and towards
directions and questions that were otherwise invisible in our
former archaeological treatments of technology. Symmetry
also urges us to use tools and theories beyond our
immediate disciplinary comfort zone in accessing the
In 1919, Alfred North Whitehead gave a series of lectures
subsequently published as the Concept of Nature; in those
lectures, he provocatively called the Great Pyramid at Giza
an ’event’ (not simply a building, or an object); Whitehead‘s
intention was to argue against a materialist theory of nature,
by which he meant an atomistic, object-centred theory
rather than one which foregrounded the ’passage of nature’
as he called it – the fact that the world is in a constant state
of flux or becoming, rather than one composed of static
elements. Whitehead was openly influenced by the french
philosopher Henri Bergson and both thinkers were of
course important to Delueze. In this paper, I want to draw
on the ideas of these philosophers to explore the relations
between object and event as they are articulated in our
understanding of the archaeological record and in
particular, suggest that as archaeologists, we are not simply
digging up the residues of events but digging up actual
61
events. To appreciate this point however, means re-thinking
what we mean by terms such as object and event and also
enriching other concepts which we usually take for granted,
especially the concept of ’assemblage‘. At the heart of this
problem is the relation between time and materiality and
understanding the complexities of writing histories from/of
things.
and policy, will be addressed and connected to issues of
scientific re-presentation, of how archaeologists witness and
work upon sources.
4:40-5:00pm
Archaeological prostheses and media ecologies
Timothy Webmoor (Oxford University,)
Theorizing (in between) Space and Place in
Archaeology
Uzma Rizvi & Josh Wright (Stanford University)
We increasingly function in the world through things. This
is no less true for how we work on the past and make claims
to know it. The archaeological process is less to do with
discovering and representing the past than with working
with media to assemble a past for us to know and engage.
Instead of asking how do we document and represent the
past we ought to ask how we work with media and
instruments to assemble the past. This paper considers
archaeological fieldwork and recovers the active role of
visual media. Such media are archaeological prostheses –
augmentations of ourselves and the past.
Taking things seriously involves asking what and who are
involved in working on the past? Contrary to embedded
notions of 'representation' which distance past from present,
human from nonhuman, specialist from stakeholder, we
ought to unpack the transformative and collective (people,
media and instruments) process of mediation. The aim is
to recover a deanthropocentric ethnography of
archaeological practice. Instead of an encounter with
archaeological material or a record (whether described as
textual or physical), archaeologists and things archaeological materials, instruments and media - are mixed
at every step. This mixing of archaeologists and the
archaeological confounds the conventional research flow
as linear; it is continuous and reversible. The past as a
collective and participatory ‘heritage ecology’ packed with
people and things.
5:00-5:20pm
We have always been cyborgs
Michael Shanks (Stanford University)
This paper will ground the themes of the session in
contemporary posthumanism through the concepts of
cybernetic organism (cyborg) and prosthesis. Looking to the
archaeology of the archaic Mediterranean Greek state, polis
and body politic, will provide a way of connecting
modern(ist) angles on artificial life and human being or
ontology (La Mettrie to Haraway) with current arguments
concerning archaeology as an active engagement with the
remains of the past. The politics of presencing, of translating
the past into the present through future-oriented projects
5:20-6:00pm
Discussion
Theorizing in between space and place situates
archaeologists at a very specific point, one at which we are
forced to question and be sensitive to spatial ontology and
the nature of our knowledge about spatial phenomena.
Questioning the centrality of location as place and location
within the logic of interpretation and documentation of
archaeological data, this session evaluates the placelessness
of social and political organization. Key themes we hope to
cover include: New theories on the organization of mobile
societies; the flexible mobility of urban spaces; scale-free and
localized concepts of exchange; the semiotics of space at all
scales; equivalencies between large areas and local spaces;
the incorporation of the supernatural into social space;
ephemeral spaces that come into existence for a variety of
reasons; the valence of bonds between heterogeneous places
and environments; concepts of events, time geography,
chronotypes and similar temporal formulations of location
and place, the use of a network metaphor as a way of
understanding the structure of space and place, and
boundaries formed from both spaces and places. In addition
to moving away from previous ideas of centrality, some key
concepts that we would like to include are, ideas of scale
and scale-free theorizing, a critical examination of
definitions of place, theorizing the transformations of
spaces, and a critique of the space-hostile judgement of
mobility as irrationality.
We invite papers that offer new looks at archaeological data
that inform innovative theoretical approaches that move
beyond discussions in which space is, and can be, made via
social, interlinking interests and interstitial coexistence
towards a focus on the archaeology of the experience in
between space and place.
2:00-2:10pm
Introduction
Uzma Rizvi & Josh Wright (Stanford University)
2:10-2:30pm
Stones and People: Viking Age Gotlandic Picture Stones
Alexander Andreeff (University of Gothenburg, Sweden)
62
The Viking Age (9th-11th cent. AD) picture stones from the
Island of Gotland, Sweden, constitute a promising material
for studies of the relationship between materiality, identity,
iconography, and landscape. About 15 picture stones are
still standing at their original site, emphasizing natural and
political borders in the ancient landscape. They are erected
at causeways, crossroads, fords and bridges that
represented boundaries and transition points between
farmsteads and districts. The picture stones have
traditionally been interpreted as memorials made in honour
of distinguished male members of the local society. A few of
the sites have been excavated and cultural layers at the base
of some stones indicate that sacrifices, ritual meals, and
ritual depositions were performed. A recent excavation
done by the author of a picture stone site has revealed a
unique combination of finds. Scattered at the base, probably
remains of a disturbed deposition, were found cremated
human bones from probably two individuals and artefacts
that can be interpreted as grave goods. Preliminary results
indicate that the artefacts are older then the picture stone.
This might suggest that the human remains and the artefacts
were exhumed from an unknown cemetery and redeposited during the inauguration ceremony when the
stone was erected. These finds confirm that the picture
stones not only were memorials but also parts in complex
social practices linking human remains, landscape, and
monuments.
2:30-2:50pm
Rock carvings as an entrance to the understanding of large
scale changes in Northern Sweden during the Neolithic
and Bronze Age
Ylva Sjöstrand (Stockholm University )
No one who has studied the elk motif featured in the rock
art of northern Scandinavia could possibly doubt its
importance. Pictorial presentations of this animal are,
however, very diverse and the motif can not be interpreted
as a homogenous group. Instead, we need to investigate its
complex range of variations. Here, I intend to focus on one
aspect that has been omitted, the fact that the elks usually
have been depictured with rather straight or angled legs. In
my opinion, the difference between elks with angled and
straight legs respectively is an important aspect that has
been very much overlooked. The elks leg position affects the
figures visual identity to such an extent that it is obvious
that they where intended to signify different concepts. Thus,
the existence of a dichotomized relation between elk figures
with straight and angled legs respectively. In this paper, I
will argue that the straight and angled legs can be
understood as manifestations of complex and large scale
processes that occur in the region during the period 25001800 BC.
2:50-3:10pm
Archaeology and landscape in the Mongolian Altai: the
semiotics of monuments within space
Esther Jacobson-Tepfer (University of Oregon)
Over the last fifteen years, the Mongolian Altai Inventory
has surveyed a mountainous region of approximately 21,500
sq km in far northwestern Mongolia. This effort has resulted
in the location and documentation of several thousand
surface monuments and many thousands of petroglyphs
previously unrecorded and largely unknown. In order to
make sense of this data in the aggregate and to allow focus
on individual monuments and typologies, we have
developed a number of approaches, all of which locate
monuments within physical, cultural, and mythic extensions
of space and time. These approaches may be conceived in
terms of nested contexts. The first is spatial––referring to the
region itself and its geophysical character. The second I will
call distributional: Where are monuments located and where
are they not? How are they grouped or combined? Within
which kinds of archaeological and physical contexts? And
what is the profile of that distribution over time? The third
is relational, by which I refer to the relationships of any one
monument to directionality, to larger physical features
(mountains, ridges, rivers, confluences), and to earlier
cultural layers. Using a variety of approaches in the field
and in the lab, we are able to develop a multi-dimensional
understanding of cultures and monuments in relationship to
the landscape and over a period of several thousand years.
3:10-3:30pm
A network approach to the role of the physical
environment in social interactions
Tim Evans, Ray Rivers (Imperial College London) and Carl
Knappett (University of Toronto)
In this paper we propose new statistical models of
interaction networks that help clarify the relationship
between geophysical ‘space’ and relational social ‘space’.
As our main example we take the Middle Bronze Age
Minoan maritime network of the S. Aegean, developing
ideas begun in [1]. This is chosen not only because island
archipelagos provide a simple physical substrate for social
interactions, but that these interactions are strongly
constrained by the available marine technology. Our
multiscale approach, which shows how interactions emerge
over large scales while still possessing regional attributes
informed, in turn, by the local environment, accommodates
volatility in this environment, changes in technology and is
maximally stable against our ignorance of the archaeological
record. As the archaeological record becomes more
complete we need a more sophisticated analysis of the
relational aspects of material culture, which we exemplify
briefly for early Viking networks of N. Europe.
63
3:30-3:50pm
Discussion
3:50-4:10pm
Theorizing “The Warpath”
James E. Snead (George Mason University)
Interpreting paths and trails remains problematic for
archaeologists working within the landscape paradigm. For
some, these features are seen as links between places, the
spatial framework integrating larger networks of meaning.
A second perspective suggests that paths and trails are
meaningful places in their own right, engaging other nodes
within the landscape but with particular significance
emerging from the specific associations of movement. Time,
memory, distance, proximity, belonging, and separation can
all be invoked by walking the path, connotations embedded
within specific historical and cultural contexts.
Paradoxically our difficulty fitting paths and trails into a
space/place dichotomy mirrors the methodological
challenge presented by ambiguous archaeological data and
discontinuous, elusive features. This paper explores these
issues, in particular the relationship between movement,
paths, and conflict as expressed in the idea of “the
warpath,” an 18th century conceptualization of indigenous
patterns of movement on the American frontier. The
influence of these cultural tropes on archaeological
interpretation will also be addressed, with particular
reference to the “Mohave War Trail,” a distinctive feature of
the Colorado Desert also known as the “Trail of Dreams,” a
dichotomy in nomenclature that captures the complexity of
understanding landscapes of movement.
4:10-4:30pm
Netherworlds: children's and others' alternate spatialities
Peter Whitridge (Memorial University of Newfoundland)
Archaeologists assume the task of characterizing past
realities as if singular representations of ancient lifeworlds
have ever existed. Unfortunately these worlds were as
messy as our own, and do not allow of a simple best
account. At any given time and place the social world was
composed of overlapping and intersecting realities in which
individuals participated in complex ways, according to an
array of social identities based on class, gender, age,
ethnicity etc. Further, individuals' understandings of place,
and the spatial performances in which they engaged, varied
between one another as much as did the larger social
frames. And of course, individuals conceived of, and acted
within, the world in different ways in different contexts, and
at different moments in the life course; even the self may be
an Other. The worlds of children illustrate the
archaeological challenge presented by such profuse,
unstable, stacked realities. Children inhabit the same spaces
as adults, but employ different understandings and spatial
practices. Their distinct social geographies organize places
for playing, hiding, fighting, learning, working, and so on.
These overlap and intersect adults' and others' networks of
places, and eventually metamorphose into them. By way of
illustration, ethnographies illuminate Inuit children's
topologies in northern North America during the early
twentieth century, which in turn help make sense of the
spatial patterning of children's material culture at precontact
and early historic Inuit sites in Labrador. These results
contribute to the opening of an archaeological dialogue on
the radical social multiplicity of places.
4:30-4:50pm
On the edges: The Portuguese in India
Praveena Gullapalli (Rhode Island College)
The Portuguese colonial presence in South Asia occupied
areas along the western coast of the subcontinent from
modern day Gujarat to Kerala. These areas mediated
between terrestrial and maritime trading realms and
regimes, with Portuguese control of their colonies
predicated more on maritime control than on terrestrial
control. Indeed, as has been noted, their empire was an
empire of the ocean with little incursion into the land
masses onto which their colonies clung. In this way,
Portuguese colonies were on the edges of their empire.
Similarly, these same colonies were on the edges of
terrestrial South Asian polities. Yet these edges were
neither margins nor marginal, for they were of profound
interest as the places of significant trading and economic
activity and production for numerous groups including but
not limited to South Asians and Portuguese. These groups
employed various tactics to maintain the nature of (and
access to or control over) trading sites as the Portuguese
worked to monopolize them (and as a result change their
nature and meaning). Using the Portuguese intervention as
a starting point this paper begins an exploration of the
changing nature of these coastal areas, focusing on the
implications, if any, for the South Asian polities who
experienced this new phenomenon and how these spaces
may have been transformed for them.
4:40-5:10pm
Movement, Diaspora, and Rupture
Bryn Williams (Stanford University)
In traditional archaeological models of the Overseas Chinese
communities that formed in North America during the 19th
century, the movement of Chinese men (and occasionally
women) into diaspora represented a fundamental rupture
from normal life. Living in diaspora entailed moving into a
liminal space, a kind of social purgatory where individuals
were “in between” identities. In this geographic and
64
imaginary space the Overseas Chinese were constantly
working towards an anticipated social sedimentation, either
as “Chinese” (albeit richer Chinese) in their homeland or as
“Chinese Americans” or “Chinese Canadians” in North
America. This paper questions this model by drawing
attention to its historical and material failures. It also
explores the theoretical and practical implications of this
model for contemporary debates about immigration, culture
change, and national belonging.
5:10-5:40
Discussants:
Ian Hodder, Uzma Rizvi and Josh Wright (Stanford
University)
Changing Models for Understanding Biblical
Edom: Anthropology, Environment and
Information Technology
Thomas E. Levy (University of California:
San Diego)
The archaeology of the southern Levant that focuses on the
2nd and 1st millennia BCE is closely linked to traditional
‘Biblical archaeology.’ Since 2002, a team from UC San
Diego, the Department of Antiquities of Jordan and the
Friends of Archaeology of Jordan has carried out
archaeological research in the copper ore rich Faynan region
of southern Jordan that relates to these periods. The project
is known as the Edom Lowlands Regional Archaeology
Project (ELRAP) and focuses on an anthropological
archaeology study of the role technology, specifically metal
production, on social change during the Iron Age (ca. 1200 –
500 BCE). By applying high precision radiocarbon dating,
on-site GIS digital archaeology recording, and other tools to
control time and the context of artifacts (space), the team has
extended the Iron Age chronology of this part of the
southern Levant (popularly known as the ‘Holy Land’) by
over 300 years. This newly extended chronology has
inadvertently drawn the ELRAP team into heated debates
concerning the relationship between sacred texts (the
Hebrew Bible or Old Testament) and the archaeological
record. In this session, ELRAP team members present a
series of papers that explore new theories and methods for
what may best be referred to as ‘historical biblical
archaeology’ – a more pragmatic way of striving to remove
ideology and bias from historical archaeology.
2:00-2:10pm
Introduction
Thomas E. Levy (University of California: San Diego)
2:10-2:30pm
The New Pragmatism: Integrating Anthropological,
Digital, and Historical Biblical Archaeologies
Thomas E. Levy (University of California: San Diego)
Over the past three decades of so, Biblical archaeology, or
the archaeology of the Old Testament, has suffered as a
paradigm of scientific archaeological investigation. In this
lecture, I would like to suggest a new pragmatic approach to
what should be referred to as ‘historical biblical
archaeology’.
Accordingly, it is a type of historical
archaeology where researchers strive to understand the
relationship between sacred and other ancient texts and the
archaeological record in the same way that historical
archaeologies around the world should attempt to confront
ancient texts and the archaeological record with particular
attention to the contribution of high precision radiocarbon
dating and GIS tools for controlling both time and space.
Following a brief discussion of the history of Biblical
archaeological research Southern Levant, the historical
biblical archaeology paradigm advocated here is discussed
based on recent research in the Iron Age of southern Jordan.
2:30-2:50pm
Questioning the deterministic paradigm: Reflections of
Bedouin folklore in the archaeological evidence in
Faynan, Jordan
Erez Ben-Yosef (University of California: San Diego)
Ethnographic studies of Bedouin tribes in the Sinai
Peninsula have demonstrated the unique place of acacia tree
in the folklore and tradition of pastoral nomads in arid
zones of the southern Levant. The tree, one of the most
prominent perennial plants in the floral landscape of the
southern Levant and a substantial source of wood, is
considered sacred by the tribal societies of Sinai, and a strict
system of laws and customs protects it from cutting down,
pruning and harm. Consequently, the main wood used by
these societies consists of semi-shrubs and shrubs (e.g.,
Retama and Haloxylon), and in the rapidly regenerating
Hydrophytic vegetation (e.g., Tamarix and Nerium) found
near high water table environments.
This paper suggests that the interpretation of more than
9,000 identified charcoal fragments from the Iron Age (c.
1200 – 500 BCE) copper production district of Faynan
(Jordan) should be done in the light of the ethnographical
evidence from Sinai. In lieu of the common explanation that
acacia was in use as fuel only from the Roman period
because of ecological change, the lack of acacia charcoal
during the Iron Age is a marker of tribal, semi-nomadic
society that probably a had similar value system in relation
to its natural assets as the tribal societies of Sinai. In later
periods, when the copper industry was controlled by
65
centralized empires, the acacia was incorporated as a fuel in
proportional scale to availability, and the cultural
sensibilities of local societies were no longer relevant.
Acknowledging social agency as part of the interpretation
fits into the recently suggested model of a tribal-state polity
for Iron Age Edom, where tribalism is the fundamental
mechanism of social interaction - even in considerably largescale enterprises like the one conducted in Faynan.
Independent key aspects of the tribal-state model support
the ethnographic parallelism suggested here, while in return
the evidence from Faynan coupled with ethnography
substantiates the model and elaborates its implications.
2:50-3:10pm
The Pottery Informatics Query Database– A New Digital
Archaeology Tool for Analyzing South Levantine Iron
Age Pottery
Neil G. Smith*, Avshalom Karasik+, Tejaswini Narayanan*,
Thomas E. Levy*, Uzy Smilansky+ (* University of
California, San Diego; +Weizmann Institute of Science,
Rehovot, Israel)
The Pottery Informatics Query Database (PIQD) is a new
online tool designed to enable researchers to test their own
interpretations and models against an ever-expanding
digital medium of ceramic datasets in ways that
conventional print data cannot provide. It opens a new
arena for how archaeologists can simultaneously publish
their research in scholarly journals but also provide a more
in-depth online format for collaborative research and
investigation. It makes available an online Geographic
Information System of 2D and 3D ceramic profiles from
archaeological publications of Iron Age (1200-580 BCE)
Southern Levant ceramics. The PIQD stores all ceramics
profiles published for the region digitally using a
mathematical algorithm called the “curvature function.”
This algorithm enables researchers to query and analyze
morphological differences in ceramic profiles using an
objective, quantitative method similar to BLAST searches
commonly employed in the biological science to identify
patterns of similarity in complex datasets. Results from a
recent implementation of the PIQD will be demonstrated
using datasets collected from recent excavations in Ancient
Iron Age Edom located in Southern Jordan.
3:10-3:30pm
StarCAVE 3D: Virtual Reality, Anthropology and the
Biblical World
Kyle Knabb, Jurgen Schultz and Thomas E. Levy (University
of California: San Diego)
The StarCAVE at UCSD’s California Institute for
Telecommunications and Information Technology is an
immersive virtual reality environment where we have
developed a process for modeling archaeological sites to be
visualized in three dimensions. The project strives to
accomplish four things: create compelling visual imagery,
develop a new hermeneutic toolkit, integrate GIS and
virtual reality and contribute to the preservation of cultural
heritage. Archaeologists and anthropologists rightly argue
that digital archaeology and visualization theory is
underdeveloped. At the same time, rapid changes in
technology make it difficult for theory to keep up.
Archaeologists need to strike a balance between the theory
and practice of digital technologies.
The excavations carried out at Khirbat en-Nahas provide an
abundance of data for testing the benefits of modeling
archaeological sites in virtual reality. Models and the
process of modeling are fundamental to interpreting
archaeological data. Working through models is often the
best way to explain and experiment with the meaning of
data. In a general sense a model is a simplification, which
we can easily understand and manipulate, of some part of
reality, which is more difficult to comprehend. Thus, if we
can understand the process and end result of a model we
can attempt to apply that understanding to the situation in
reality we are trying to figure out. Virtual reality and
computer modeling offer two great benefits to
archaeologists. First, they allow the researcher to illustrate
reconstructed sites. This is especially helpful to the public,
who has little or no experience in reading archaeological
maps. Modeling assists the researcher articulate and
communicate his or her interpretation of the archaeological
data. Second, the model can allow the archaeologist to test
new theories, ideas and reconstructions and see the effect of
those new interpretations on the site. It is these strengths
that make virtual modeling such a valuable tool.
3:30-3:50pm
Iron Age Foodways in the Faynan District –
Zooarchaeology Perspectives on Paleo-Economies in
Southern Jordan
Adolfo Muniz (University of California: San Diego)
Recent archaeological research at Khirbat en Nahas in the
Faynan region of southern Jordan is beginning to provide
evidence on the role of metal production and its effects on
the evolution of complexity in this region. Intertwined
within the fabric of society is the relationship between the
inhabitants of this site and their use of animal resources.
Current zooarchaeological research from the Iron Age site of
Khirbat-en-Nahas stresses a correlation between the
intensity in metal production and the changes in the animal
economy. Additionally, the diversity of species identified at
this site indicates the interaction sphere of the Faynan
66
region extended beyond local ecological niches to the
coastal areas.
Diego’s Edom Lowlands Regional Archaeology Project
(ELRAP) that provides the examples used in this lecture.
3:50-4:10pm
The Meaning of Melekh: Archaeological Readings of
Genesis 36
Marc A. Beherec (University of California: San Diego)
4:30-5:00pm
Discussion
Among the challenges facing archaeologists who seek to
integrate textual and archaeological evidence are the
complexities of translation and source criticism. One of the
most interesting passages dealing with the early history and
social structure of Edom is the genealogy and king list of
Genesis 36. This paper will consider the historical
geographical, semantic, and source criticism background of
this chapter in order to understand its complexities. This in
turn will shed light on the convergence of lines of evidence,
including archaeology, which illuminate and obfuscate the
history of the land of Edom.
4:10-4:30pm
Photography in the ELRAP Digital Archaeology System
and Beyond
Aaron Gidding (University of California: San Diego)
Archaeology and photography both share their origins in
the mid 1800s and grew complementarily as fields. Early on
photography was used as an objective tool to verify the
observations made by early antiquarians and archaeologists.
Over time the notion of the photograph as an objective tool
representing factually the process and results of
archaeological excavations has rightfully eroded. Critiques
of the photograph in archaeology have focused on problems
of contextuality and artificiality of production, especially in
this digital age. Notwithstanding these faults, the
photograph in the digital age has remarkable objective
potential when used as an integral part of a systematic
digital
excavation.
Utilizing
the
geo-referenced
photographic data applications within a larger database of
archaeological data, such as the Digital Archaeological Atlas
of the Holy Land (DAAHL) database, allows for more
collaborative research opportunities utilizing larger
subjective data sets in ways previously unavailable. This
integration signals a new step for the use of the photograph,
as integration into excavation methods increases, in its
digital form as an important facet of larger scale, regional
research using diverse data sets accessible in the digital
media. Further careful data management in order to
maintain original images preserving academic integrity and
allowing for reproducibility of results furthers analytical
goals outside of the field using the digital medium. While
of course the photograph does not replace the actual artifact,
it does being to allow for new considerations utilizing
digital technologies. The test bed for this has been UC San
Spatiality in Conflict: The Archaeology and
Anthropology of Space in Conflict Zones
Simone Paturel (Newcastle University)
'(Social) space is a (social) product… the space thus produced also
serves as a tool of thought and of action; that in addition to being a
means of production it is also a means of control, and hence of
domination, of power; yet that, as such, it escapes in part from those
who would make use of it.'
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1991), p. 26.
The 'spatial turn' is now well established in the social
sciences, through the work of Henri Lefebvre and
geographers like Edward Soja. Space in this sense is socially
constructed. Physical spaces stand in a dialectical
relationship with the societies that inhabit them. What
happens to these spaces when conflict occurs and what
happens to our interpretations in spaces that lie within
zones of conflict?
This session will explore two key themes. The first theme is
how do spaces shape our response and experience of
conflict, be that domestic space, communal space or the
wider landscape? How do we react to the restriction of
physical space that was once open and undisputed and is
now inaccessible? How does this affect social spaces and
relationships? How are power relationships expressed
through spatiality and how are those power relationships
inverted and contested? The second theme will examine
how we as archaeologists and anthropologists respond to
zones of conflict? How do we study and research within
regions that are disputed? How does the spatiality of
conflict affect our interpretations and reception of our work?
Together these two streams explore our perception and
experience of spatiality and conflict.
2:00-2:10pm
Introduction
Simone Paturel (Newcastle University)
2:10-2:30pm
Spatiality, Memory and Conflict in Beirut: Living the Civil
War and After
Simone Paturel (Newcastle University)
67
Conflict is inevitably spatial and space often leads to
conflict. Territory holds resource and emotional value and is
the source of conflict between those that seek control. Power
relations are determined through spatial relations. Dispute
over spaces leads to their reconfiguration, destruction and
renewal. Social memory also plays a significant role in
spatial relations during and after conflict. Memory is used to
claim spaces for particular agendas while forgetting is also
used to eliminate inconvenient pasts. This paper explores
spatiality, memory and conflict in Beirut during and after
the Lebanese civil war of 1975-1990. The account is drawn
from my own personal experience of the civil war, having
lived in the Beirut suburb of Achrafieh until 1987. I explore
the role that spatiality plays in conflict on a personal level,
considering how the forced reconfiguration of space affects
daily life and how conflict redefines spatial relations and
vice versa. Social memory was an important element in this
conflict as the different participants constructed new
narratives to suit the changing political situation. In a
similar way the history of Lebanon was reconfigured after
the conflict to construct new personal and political identities
in the post civil war era. Conflict is often seen in causal
terms through a narrative of 'who did what to whom' or a
chronology of war and peace. This paper aims to redress the
balance and explore how spatiality and memory construct
personal experience in a time of conflict.
2:30-2:50pm
'Space, Power and Conflict: theorizing the relationship
between social space and violence'
Andrew Green (Independent Researcher)
Spaces have long been seen as contested in a physical sense
as territory to be fought over or the space where violence
occurs. Yet this perspective on space is limited to seeing it as
a resource to be owned and exploited. The 'spatial turn'
provides an opportunity to explore the relationship between
(social) space and violence in much greater depth. Power
relationships are expressed spatially; Foucault expressed
this by expanding his well-known Power-Knowledge
dialectic to include Space while Henri Lefebvre saw violence
as essential to the growth of the politico-economic space and
central to the foundation of the modern state. Edward
Said's Orientalism is also fundamentally spatial, consisting
of the creation of an 'imaginative geography' that 'othered'
Eastern culture. This paper examines how these ideas and
others can be applied in two contexts. Firstly to explore the
relationship between spatiality and violence where those
spaces in question are the under archaeological study, and
secondly to explore the archaeologist's relationship to
contested spaces within which she or he is working.
2:50-3:10pm
Bordering History / Historicizing Borders: Nationalism,
Internationalism and the Fate of Famagusta
Michael Walsh (Eastern Mediterranean University)
The historic walled city of Famagusta, located just inside the
borders of the internationally unrecognized Turkish
Republic of Northern Cyprus, is a priceless cultural resource
in the Eastern Mediterranean. Here, forgotten, lies the
enormously wealthy artistic and architectural legacy of
Byzantine, Lusignan, Genoan, Venetian, Ottoman, British
and Cypriot rule. In its one thousand year history,
Famagusta has been the meeting point of East and West,
Christian and Muslim, Greek and Turkish, and today lies on
the border / fault line between the Europe Union and Asia.
A matter of a few kilometers from the UN Green Line which
divides the island of Cyprus militarily, and now doomed by
its isolation in an unrecognized state, Famagusta faces an
inappropriately bleak future, to follow its rich though
turbulent past. Political borders have entrenched it, while
manipulations of the historical mind, have re-positioned it
as 'out of reach' to the world. Its suburb of Varosha (in
Greek) / Maraş (in Turkish) is behind a secondary military
border and has been a ghost city for 34 years – its
population forcibly and hastily expelled. The borders
around this city, and its collectivized and nationalized
memory (for Greeks/Christians and Turks/Muslims alike),
are absolute. This paper examines the historical and cultural
legacy of Famagusta and places it within a modern
understanding of the nationalism and internationalism
which still determines its fate. The paper also looks at the
efforts made to re-engage the international community and
reports on some early successes in this process of heritage
welfare management through the European Union and the
US based World Monuments Fund.
3:10-3:30pm
The Kral Tepesi/Vasili Salvage Excavation Project
Uwe Muller (Eastern Mediterranean University)
The UNESCO Second Protocol of 1999, which updated the
UNESCO Hague Convention of 1954, limits archaeological
activity in occupied territory to work performed to
"safeguard, record, or preserve cultural property."
UNESCO, as it views the northern 38 percent of Cyprus as
occupied territory, feels that this convention applies to this
disputed region. While this regulation itself contains a
number of interpretive conflicts – it never defines what kind
of archaeological activity does, or does not, safeguard
cultural property, for example - the virtual lack of
archaeological activity in northern Cyprus is also
representative of a regional view of what archaeology is.
Historically, archaeological activity in Cyprus has been
characterized by excavations and, as such work is inherently
destructive, it is thus perceived as an activity that cannot
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also preserve cultural property. Excavations, as a result, are
virtually absent in northern Cyprus because of the view that
they conflict with the UNESCO regulations. In August of
2008, however, an international team conducted an
underwater archaeological survey along part of the coastline
of northern Cyprus in an effort both to document material,
and to apply a new methodology that does not require
intrusive activity to collect and interpret its data. The
purpose of this paper is to expand upon the issues raised
above, as well as to demonstrate that legitimate
archaeological practices, above or below water, are still
viable in disputed regions governed by such international
regulations.
3:30-3:50pm
Rethinking Archaeology in Disputed Territories
Matthew Harpster (Eastern Mediterranean University)
The UNESCO Second Protocol of 1999, which updated the
UNESCO Hague Convention of 1954, limits archaeological
activity in occupied territory to work performed to
"safeguard, record, or preserve cultural property."
UNESCO, as it views the northern 38 percent of Cyprus as
occupied territory, feels that this convention applies to this
disputed region. While this regulation itself contains a
number of interpretive conflicts – it never defines what kind
of archaeological activity does, or does not, safeguard
cultural property, for example - the virtual lack of
archaeological activity in northern Cyprus is also
representative of a regional view of what archaeology is.
Historically, archaeological activity in Cyprus has been
characterized by excavations and, as such work is inherently
destructive, it is thus perceived as an activity that cannot
also preserve cultural property. Excavations, as a result, are
virtually absent in northern Cyprus because of the view that
they conflict with the UNESCO regulations. In August of
2008, however, an international team conducted an
underwater archaeological survey along part of the coastline
of northern Cyprus in an effort both to document material,
and to apply a new methodology that does not require
intrusive activity to collect and interpret its data. The
purpose of this paper is to expand upon the issues raised
above, as well as to demonstrate that legitimate
archaeological practices, above or below water, are still
viable in disputed regions governed by such international
regulations.
3:50-4:10pm
Sites of Memory / Sites of Malice: Graves, Churches, and
Ethnic Spaces in Northern Cyprus
Allan Langdale (University of California: Santa Cruz)
In teasing out a rhetoric of contentious spatialities for
Cyprus no sites are more eloquent or more socially charged
than the ruined Byzantine and Orthodox churches and
graveyards in northern Cyprus. Similarly, nowhere are the
historical moments of ethnic rage so vividly evident even
after 34 years. This paper examines the tensions and
stratagems that have been used since the Turkish
intervention of 1974 regarding the exiled sacred sites, the
responses of those exiled from them, and the reactions of
those who currently are in physical 'ownership'. This study
hopes to analyze the specific problematic of the Cyprus
situation in terms of its ecclesiastical and funerary sites,
around which several strands of social anxiety are gathered.
The material for this study consists of a range of artifacts,
including photographs of Orthodox graveyards, which
today remain torn apart as they were in late August of 1974.
Here, for example, the nature of the iconoclasm is examined
as an instance of the extirpation of 'Greekness' from the land
(i.e. unburying the dead so they cannot 'occupy' the land). In
other cases, the sacred sites of Orthodox churches—still
sacred loci for Greek Cypriots, now existing for them only in
memory and imagination—are converted by Turkish
authorities to tourist sites or neglected as 'ruins' thus
creating a dialectic of physical 'ownership' but
social/functional denial. Greek Cypriot representations,
most notably the publication Cyprus: A Civilization
Plundered will also be examined in terms of their value as
directing historical/ethnographic 'readings' of Turkey's
intervention and the barbarity of Turks. Other instances
include a brief case study of the destruction of the Avgasida
Monastery Church in response to the mass killings of
Turkish Cypriots by retreating Greek Cypriot paramilitaries
in late August of 1974. In a compilation of contested spaces
and objects the Cyprus ethnic division thus finds a
configuration beyond the standardized, purely political
representation.
The range of engagement ranges from the very private to
the wider public social tensions in Cyprus. I will consider,
for instance, the case of a profoundly personal narrative
with regards to the churches of northern Cyprus: a fortyyear old Greek Cypriot woman who, without telling anyone
(even her family), snuck to northern Cyprus to visit her
village church which she had last seen when she was 6 years
old. The paper also considers recent attempts to reintroduce
a dialogue of bi-communality on Cyprus and a reframing of
exiled spaces and revisionism of the conflict and rewriting
of memory (confession, forgiveness, reconciliation). The
potentials for compromise and the difficult road to
remapping the spatialities of conflict, both actual and
figurative, are discussed as a way to re-envision a unified
notion of 'Cyprus'.
4:10-5:00pm
Discussion
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