Session: #157

Theme & Session Format

Theme:
4. Polis, Empire, League and Beyond – Living in Interconnected Societies
Session format:
Regular session

Title & Content

Title:
Finds Stories: Archaeological Biographies in Contexts of Mobility
Content:
Material artefacts across the various stages of production and circulation become intertwined with social processes, acquire layered histories, and affect in diverse ways how humans act, interact, and perceive themselves and the world around them. Formed at the intersection of anthropology and ethnographic studies, and grounded especially in Appadurai’s and Kopytoff’s influential concepts of the “social life” and “cultural biography of things”, biographical approaches have been integrated in archaeological analytical frameworks and are a well-established tool in material culture analysis.
This session explores biographical approaches to contexts of mobility, such as mobility of ideas, styles, technological know-how, or in fact people. It is targeted towards papers addressing the current theoretical and methodological discourse in archaeological research on the topic of object biography and associated themes of entanglement and ontology. It seeks to introduce innovative cross-disciplinary perspectives into the broad scope of interactions between objects and humans across social, cultural, temporal, and geographical space. We welcome discussions on metanarratives, case studies applying biographical, life-history, and genealogical methodologies, as well as novel ways of writing and sharing object histories, including but not limited to object-biographical narrative structures and creative representational forms.
Keywords:
Object biography, Life-history, Mobility, Narratives and Metanarratives
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:

Organisers

Main organiser:
Christina Marini (Greece) 1
Co-organisers:
Konstantinos Trimmis (United Kingdom) 2
Affiliations:
1. Australian Archaeological Institute at Athens
2. Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Bristol