Theme:
1. Artefacts, Buildings & Ecofacts
Session format:
Regular session
Title:
Intertwined Technologies in Prehistoric Europe
Content:
The chaîne opératoire concept has offered a powerful methodological tool for the analysis of prehistoric technologies. Similar sequential models and biographical approaches have been employed for exploring technological products and associated practices. These are largely characterised by linearity and they commonly focus on individual material classes. The ways in which different crafts, materials and practices are linked to each other have not attracted the lion’s share of attention, even when recent approaches are more holistic in character. This is in stark contrast to the fact that prehistoric technologies were rarely performed in isolation. The very concept of technology provides the framework for dynamic social interactions to unfold. Prehistoric settings (i.e. sites, settlements, landscapes) are perceived as vibrant places, where several objects were produced, consumed and disposed, and various crafts were practiced together, forming networks of technological and social interaction.
The main aim of the session is to move beyond the study of individual material classes and towards their joint and comparative analyses, so as to more efficiently approach the fundamentals and the specifics of prehistoric technical regimes. It is to merge the technological analyses of different materials and practices (e.g. stone tools, pottery, bone implements, earthen structures, agricultural and husbandry practices, technologies of death etc.), and to shed light on the various ways in which taskscapes, technical choices, embodied skills, mental operations and dispositions intertwine.
We welcome contributions that investigate technological interconnections between crafts and across various stages of their production sequences, as well as their consumption, use, discard and deposition. A further objective is to draw attention to the spatiality and temporality of technological practice. The spatial aspect refers both to settlement space and to the wider landscape, while the temporal aspect refers, for instance, to the dominant forms of social time (e.g. the agricultural cycle) and seasonality.
Keywords:
technological practice, chaîne opératoire, cross-craft interactions, taskscape, Prehistoric Europe
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:
Tasos Bekiaris (Greece) 1
Co-organisers:
Anastasia Dimoula (Greece) 1
Dimitris Kloukinas (Greece) 2
Eleni Koutsopoulou (Switzerland) 3
Affiliations:
1. Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
2. Ministry of Culture and Sports
3. University of Bern
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