Theme:
1. Artefacts, Buildings & Ecofacts
Session format:
Regular session
Title:
Weaving Bridges between Funerary and Domestic Archaeologies
Content:
This session asks how do we combine evidence arising from different archaeological contexts, to present more fully rounded social models for archaeological phenomena? Funerary, craft, domestic, industrial, symbolic or religious contexts produce different archaeological datasets, often constrained by the analytical method employed or theoretical framework required for interpretation. Funerary contexts, centered on the human skeleton and accompanying objects, give potential for biomolecular analysis targeted at individual identities and lifeways. Settlement and households, appearing in collective action, reveal specialization, food production, craft activities and environmental exploitation. The contrast between individual and the collection can at times be at odds with each other, while routes to synthesis do not emerge clearly from the evidence itself. For example, in the Neolithic contrasting narratives of equality between houses and inequality in the grave are in direct conflict. Yet, how to combine this wealth of data is thus rarely considered, usually only occurring at the highest level of analysis, and at quite some distance from the data.
We invite papers from different research traditions, and working across different chronological periods (from the Palaeolithic onwards), to consider how archaeology can produce multi-context perspectives by combining data from funerary and settlement practices.
Specifically, we wish to consider the following areas:
1. Appropriate methods for combining different datasets, whether proposing models or new interpretative frameworks.
2. Case studies from different time periods providing new insights into individual and collective identities, social practices or lifeways.
3. How the same question can be answered in different contexts? For example, mobility, dietary practices, hierarchy and kinship.
By questioning how we integrate datasets drawn from different contexts in different time periods we aim to produce new insights into social organization in the past, but also routes to further analysis.
Keywords:
Funerary archaeology, Domestic archaeology, Individual vs collective identities, social practices, lifeways, multi-context perspectives
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:
Solène DENIS (France) 1
Co-organisers:
Penny BICKLE (United Kingdom) 2
Stella SOUVATZI (Greece) 3
Affiliations:
1. CNRS UMR 8068 TEMPS
2. University of York
3. University of Thessaly
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