Session format:
Regular session
Title:
Prehistoric Histories: Linking Individual Agency and Broad Transformations
Content:
Archaeology is well equipped to study history either as sequences of transformative events, or as a continuous process of everyday life where time serves as a function of cultural persistence. On a macro-scale, sweeping reconfiguration of human-material relations marked by events and interpreted as cultural change have been at the center of archaeological practice since the first descriptions of ‘cultures’ as convenient analytical and spatio-temporal units for the analysis of past societies in the early 20th century. Wars, migrations, far-reaching effects of economic innovations have been considered the primary motors and signatures of change at the center of archaeological narratives, marked by an overwhelming focus on socio-economic and political systems. Alternatively, the archaeology of everyday life to study the material residues of cumulative and repetitive action became a central topic of archaeological practice in the 1980’s. Within narratives of everyday life, emphasis shifted to the mundane, to the multivocality and multidirectionality. Corresponding to the decreasing scale of analysis and interpretive context, the struggle became to present the ways in which people’s repetitive day-to-day practices mattered and figured into great chains of historical events. With no attention paid to their complementary character, these approaches developed to involve different interpretative strategies, necessitate different narrative modes, rely on different properties or analytical assessment of material evidence, require different methodologies, and are linked to different spatio-temporal scales.
The aim of our session is to facilitate a discussion focusing on processes of becoming, the ways in which the messiness of humanity unfolds, and leads to recognizable patterns of historical transformation. Whether using fractal replication, eventful history, theories of structuration, or iterations of the Annales School, we invite participants that seek to establish a connection between agency and structure, and bridge the scalar gap between micro- and macro-levels of observation and interpretation in their case studies.
Keywords:
historiography, eventful archaeology, agency, structuration, scales of observation, deep history
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:
Tamas Polanyi (United States) 1
Co-organisers:
Vajk Szeverényi (Hungary) 2
Affiliations:
1. Sandbox Archaeology
2. Déri Muzeum
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