Session: #382

Regular session

As technology has been persistently seen as a principal means of adaptation/risk reduction in human societies, past and present, and is intimately implicated in our biological and cultural evolution, archaeology, with its artefact (i.e. material-technology) centred approach appears well placed to contribute to a deepened understanding of some themes which have have only fairly recently become a focus of attention. Aaron Wildavsky and co-researchers, in discussing modern economic and social settings, note that “Only by comparisons across types of danger can we learn whether individuals have a general tendency to be risk averse or risk-taking, or whether their perceptions of danger depend upon the meaning they give to objects of potential concern” (Dake & Wildavsky 1991). Risk is not normally associated with diachronic archaeological research and yet it is increasingly clear that prehistoric populations have faced similar challenges to those faced today in relation to disease, demography, environmental degradation, resource management, short- and long-term climate change and, last but not least, changes in and to their own technology, whether chosen, imposed, or entailed/consequent in some way (‘drifted into’). Although these challenges can be judged similar from an etic, or external and comparative perspective, emically, in terms of culturally-valorised categories, it is far harder to say how threats (‘real’ or ‘imaginary’) were conceptualized, and thus it is difficult to identify the baseline assumptions (to use modern terminology) that underpinned past decision-making. Contributions to this session will critique a range of risk-analysis tools in relation to a variety of archaeological cases.

risk, technology, change, environment, cultural evolution, emic and etic

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Timothy Taylor (Slovakia) ^1,2

Ezra Zubrow (United States) ^3,4,5