Theme:
5. Theories and methods in archaeology: interactions between disciplines
Session format:
Regular session
Title:
Rhythms, Routines and Repetition against Culture: The Emergence of Social Identities in Shared Everyday Practices, Food Strategies and Lifestyles
Content:
This session asks how social integration and identity in the Neolithic and post-Neolithic periods are revealed through small-scale interactions and the everyday routines of life. Both traditional archaeological methods and some more recent scientific analytical techniques (e.g. tracing migrations of human populations using aDNA etc.) rely on the cohesion of past social units to frame the scale of study. This leads to archaeologists ascribing certain identities to diverse human populations based on a general unity of material culture or common genetic signatures. In contrast, anthropological research in living communities suggest that large-scale social groupings are to some extent “fictive”, built up of multiple and diverse identities and variations in practice. Such mass social entities (normally called cultures) are (ab)used in interpretative narratives creating histories which focus on the culture acting as a whole – or agency is placed in the hands of certain actors (such as the elite, males, etc…). This approach thus neglects social interaction in non- or loosely-stratified societies, which is small-scale and based on a common habitus, food traditions, everyday practices and shared cosmologies/mythologies. Generalizations in the form of archaeological cultures are then hard to sustain as explanatory mechanisms in narratives of change, but what is the impact of this on our use of archaeological cultures as analytical frameworks in long-term histories?
Our goal is to bring together scholars from different areas of archaeology and bioarchaeology to debate how we can uncover these small-scale interactions and habitus from integrating material culture, architecture and the burial record with the evidence from bioarchaeological techniques, such as isotopes, aDNA and lipid analysis. We invite papers connecting these data based forms of evidence, such as distribution patterns of various aspects of material culture, diet composition reconstructions based on stable isotope analyses, dental microwear, studies of short-range mobility and so on.
Keywords:
social identity, lifestyle, food strategies, Neolithic and post-Neolithic, small-scale interactions
Session associated with MERC:
no
Session associated with CIfA:
no
Session associated with SAfA:
no
Session associated with CAA:
no
Session associated with DGUF:
no
Session associated with other:
Main organiser:
Petr Kvetina (Czech Republic) 1
Co-organisers:
Penny Bickle (United Kingdom) 2
Frantisek Trampota (Czech Republic) 3
Affiliations:
1. Institute of Archaeology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague
2. Department of Archaeology, University of York
3. Department of Archaeology and Museology, Masaryk University
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