Session: #439

Content:

In this session, we return to a staple part of our prehistoric diet - buildings. The session poses two key questions which, in our view, have been un(der)-explored: (1) the function of buildings and (2) the agency of buildings.
We invite papers on more explicit definitions of the meaning of a ' ‘House’ and how 'dwelling houses' can be differentiated from workshops, storage areas, annexes or sanctuaries.
The second theme explores the agency of buildings of all kinds - how buildings make an active contribution to daily life but also long-term living through their own material existence. In this part of the session, we invite papers on different aspects of buildings which work out the implications of the specific features of a building for whoever lives there, visits the house or has an ancestral presence there. Obvious elements include (but are not restricted to): Size: its implications for residents, the issue of monumentality; Complexity of layout;
Use-life: the length of a building's life in relation to a prehistoric generation of 15 or 30 years; Building superposition: does this prompt different relations to the ancestors or different kinds of place-memory?; Number of storeys: intra-site divisions between one- and two-storey buildings, monumentality in the landscape; Furniture, fittings and decoration: what does their density tell us about the kind of 'Neolithic' life lived in such houses?; House 'living' assemblages vs. house 'death assemblages': can we define a house 'living assemblage' - an assemblage which was really used during the use-life of the house?; Deliberate house-burning: the ultimate house performance, making a real 'timemark' in people's memory; and Notions of ‘home’ vs. ‘work space’ /. ‘personal space’ vs. ‘ public space’ / ‘individual space’ vs. ‘collective space’ / ‘usual space use’ vs. ‘unusual space use’.

Session: #439

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