Session: #331

Content:

Stone is a durable, lasting medium. Even in its fragmentation, it exudes permanence, solidity, and symbolism. For millennia, humans have shaped stone, fashioning it into architectural wonders, sculptured monuments, objects of lived religion, and things of everyday use. At the same time, natural stonescapes, from caves and mountains to canyons and valleys, have played indisputable roles in the shaping of human experience and expression. Natural and hewn stone has long been used, reused, repurposed, and recycled in myriad contexts, at local, regional, and global levels. To this end, this session explores human relationships to stone from both historical and archaeological perspectives. It invites scholars of all time periods and geographies, but especially those working from the prehistoric to the medieval periods, to contribute papers exploring the experience of stone. Possible subjects include, but are not limited to: stone and the landscape; a phenomenology of stone; agentive stone; stone and lived religion; the theology of stone; the materiality of stone; the reuse of hewn or sculptured stone; the relationship of stone artifacts to ecofacts; stone and memory; or, shaping stone into space. Above all else, this session seeks to open a dialogue between eras, disciplines, methodologies, and geographies, with the particular aim of bringing archaeologists and historians into further conversation with one another.

Session: #331

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