Theme:
6. A Decade after the ‘Third Science Revolution in Archaeology’
Session format:
Regular session
Title:
Towards an Archaeology of Household Practices – Current Archaeological and Scientific Contributions
Content:
Contrary to a widely held perception that associates methodological advances and the archaeological sciences with broadly speaking Processual Archaeology and its current successors in the so-called ‘Third Science Revolution’, it is the contextualised understanding of past social practices as already outlined by Post-Processual Archaeology back in the 1990s that imposes the much higher demands on the archaeological data at hand. It is the detailed reconstruction of social practices, invariably bound to practical understandings and the expedient manipulation of a material world, that requires application of the more fine-grained excavation techniques and scientific analyses – a prominent example being, of course, Ian Hodder’s fieldwork at Çatal Höyük, whatever one may think about the specifics of his ensuing interpretations.
In this session, therefore, we will ask from a long-term, comparative perspective – from the Neolithic, via the Copper and Bronze Ages – what is our current state of knowledge on the various practices associated with and carried forward by the members of prehistoric households in the Carpathian Basin and South-Eastern Europe. Adopting a micro perspective, we employ a heuristic definition of household as the basic unit of social and economic life in prehistoric communities. Whether these were integrated by kinship or co-residence etc., that are often beyond our grasp, using a wide array of archaeological and scientific techniques we can reach a detailed understanding of their daily activities, decision making and consumption etc. from subsistence practices, raw material procurement, housing and architecture to the various crafts such as pottery making or metallurgy. We see here actually, in every specific case, a plenum of practices, that contains innumerable practices and countless material arrangements, and whose development through time we can trace including the numerous cross-linkages among such activities all too often discussed separately for purely heuristic reasons.
Keywords:
Household Archaeology, Practice Theory, Prehistoric Archaeology, Archaeological Sciences, Neolithic, Bronze Age
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:
Tobias Kienlin (Germany) 1
Co-organisers:
Klára Fischl (Hungary) 2
Gabriella Kovács (Hungary) 3
Astrid Röpke (Germany) 1
Ákos Pető (Hungary) 4
Affiliations:
1. Institut für Ur- und Frühgeschichte, Universität zu Köln, Germany
2. University of Miskolc, Hungary
3. Hungarian National Museum, Budapest
4. Szent István University
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