Theme:
1. Artefacts, Buildings & Ecofacts
Session format:
Regular session
Title:
Beyond Identities: Crafting Information in the Old World from the Bronze Age until the Late 1st Millennium BCE
Content:
Ample research has already been devoted to exploring the mutual relationship between identities and materiality. Yet, artefacts can carry other kinds of information as well. Through the materials used, the shapes given, the way they may be adorned, they encapsulate technical information about who crafted them and where they came from (e.g. a Greek vase in Etruria). All these qualities can be read and interpreted by users, and craft-persons. Artefacts may carry memories potentially associated with specific events or individuals, as have long been shown through object biographies’ research (see Homer’s works). Artefacts could also narrate things by themselves, through the scenes that may adorn them or through signs or writings that people could access directly or reinterpret, according to their own ideological background. Their shape, characteristics or volume may carry information about quantities, origins and qualities. Such kinds of information are clearly central when dealing with transport containers, but not only. Drinking vessels can carry information about the share its users were entitled to in a feast or banquet, an information related with hierarchy and social practices. A metal object can be assumed to weigh a certain amount, and therefore its shape provides information about its mass, which may be associated to its value (Bronze Age axe heads may often be discussed in such a way)… Objects carry information about themselves, their makers, their users, and the institutions they belonged to, were involved with, or were acknowledged by.
This session invites contributions dealing aspects with the non-verbal transmission of technical, ideological, narrative or economic information through all kind of artefacts (pottery, metal, organic materials…), on a very wide area spreading from the Middle East to Western Europe, and from the Bronze Age to the late 1st millennium BCE. Theoretical presentations are welcome, as well as case or local/regional studies.
Keywords:
Later Prehistory, Protohistory, Antiquity, Mediterranean Archaeology, Europe, Middle East
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:
Alexis Gorgues (France) 1,2
Co-organisers:
Ann Brysbaert (Netherlands) 3,4
Affiliations:
1. UMR 5607 Ausonius
2. Université Bordeaux Montaigne
3. Leiden University, Faculty of Archaeology
4. Netherlands Institute at Athens
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