Theme:
5. Theories and methods in archaeology: interactions between disciplines
Session format:
Regular session
Title:
Now You Can’t See Me! Searching for Resilience as an Archaeologically Observable Phenomenon
Content:
‘Resilience is the capacity of a social-ecological system to absorb or withstand perturbations and other stressors such that the system remains within the same regime, essentially maintaining its structure and functions’ (Resilience Alliance 2015). This definition implies to conceptualize past communities as socio-ecological systems, calling for (inter-/trans-)disciplinary approaches. Furthermore, the definition poses great challenges for archaeology: Do we have to consider a social entity as resilient if we cannot perceive a significant change in their material remains? Can we assume that resilience is epistemologically the invisible results of the unchanged? But as we know: past communities were always in flux.
Despite the increasing applications of resilience and related concepts in archaeological studies, it is unclear how we can grasp resilience within the framework of (pre-) historical research beyond the pure metaphorical use of the term. So is resilience a meaningful concept stimulating research that can be addressed with our methodological tools? Can we distinguish between situations where communities can buffer external shocks from those where these shocks did not occur, or such where we lack the sources to identify them? How can we meaningfully address questions of contemporaneity with blurred dating in archaeological and palaeoecological investigations? What temporal/spatial scale should we use to identify a change? How can we deduce causality when there is an event on one side and a non-event on the other? How can we deal with the problem of equifinality? And is resilience a gradual or an absolute characteristic of communities?
For this session, we would like to invite contributions that deal with these and related topics from an (inter-/trans-) disciplinary perspective and propose a solution to these questions. These can be theoretical papers discussing concepts of resilience or ‘better’ alternatives or case studies covering examples of resilience or resilience strategies empirically.
Keywords:
Resilience, Transformation, Crisis, Climate, Environment, Epistemology
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:
Martin Hinz (Switzerland) 1,2
Co-organisers:
Caroline Heitz (Switzerland) 1,2
Julian Laabs (Germany) 3
Jan Kolář (Czech Republic) 4,5
Affiliations:
1. Institut für Archäologische Wissenschaften, University of Bern
2. Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research, University of Bern
3. Institut für Ur- und Frühgeschichte, CAU Kiel
4. Department of Vegetation Ecology, Institute of Botany of the Czech Academy of Sciences
5. Institute of Archaeology and Museology, Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University
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