Theme:
1. Archaeologists and Archaeology Here and Now
Session format:
Regular session
Title:
Stone Age Stray Finds and How to Use Them [PaM]
Content:
Stone Age artifacts found by lay people – stray finds – have been important tin European archaeology for more than a century. In many areas stray finds are fundamental for landscape studies and macro-scale investigations and they are central cues to locate sites and monuments. Nevertheless, today stray finds are often considered as lesser quality data compared to data generated through professional excavations, mainly because stray finds lack detailed context information. They are also sometimes considered superfluous due to the current volume and spatial extent of archaeology-led surveys. The question we ask here is how stray finds still can play a role in future archaeology. Several avenues are possible, and an obvious one is to draw on the sheer quantity. When systematically classified and georeferenced, stray finds may be excellent for a variety of both synchronic and diachronic “big data” analyses. Second, since they are found and collected by non-archaeologists, they represent a parallel find category, biased not by archaeological science, but by other practices outside of the antiquarian world, and may therefore help locating sites and phenomena (such as placed ritual deposits) that are beyond the capacity and problem orientation of most archaeology-led surveys. Third, they could play a complementing role in public outreach.
For this session we invite papers that work on local studies as well as studies that treat large-scale distribution patterns, and we welcome papers that discuss the relationship between archaeology-led field investigations and investigations of stray finds. Since there are major institutional and legislative differences in cultural heritage management across Europe, there is great variety in how Stone Age stray-finds are collected and stored. Papers that address these differences are welcome, as well as methodological papers that deal with how stray finds are treated, stored, and made accessible for research and public outreach.
Keywords:
Stone Age, Stray finds, Distribution, Placed deposits, Public outreach
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:
PaM
Main organiser:
Knut Andreas Bergsvik (Norway) 1
Co-organisers:
Björn Nilsson (Sweden) 2
Kristiina Johanson (Estonia) 3
Affiliations:
1. University of Bergen
2. University of Lund
3. University of Tartu
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