Theme:
4. Persisting with Change: Theory and Archaeological Scrutiny
Session format:
Regular session
Title:
Redefining Abandonment: Geoarchaeological and Ethnographical Approaches to Unveiling Hidden Narratives
Content:
Abandonment is synonymous with processes and acts such as desertion, neglect, disuse, and evacuation. Historical and ethnographic evidence shows that periods of abandonment encapsulate pivotal social and economic changes in the biographies of human settlements. Abandonment processes arise from cultural, economic and environmental transitions in human history and the temporality of these processes can vary, but they are often only described as a ‘book-end’ to an archaeological narrative and rarely a topic considered worthy of discussion. This gap in understanding is perhaps due to an initial focus in processual archaeology on it being a process by which something becomes archaeology, implying cessation and “end of life”, rather than the agency of those processes. Far from just creating "empty" settlements, abandonment processes also generate a novel view of seeing and perceiving the landscape in the local population. Shifting the focus in the examination of abandonment involves a move away from seeking centralized causes and instead emphasizes the observation of how the interactions between humans and non-humans evolve over time and space (Pétursdóttir, 2014).
The aim of this session is to examine, through geoarchaeological and ethnographical approaches, how archaeological sites, monuments, and landscapes can be in flux, their states of periodic abandonment and re-use, but also the processes and events resulting in (and from) complete abandonment.
We welcome papers focusing on:
- Theoretical and methodological viewpoints attributing new meanings to abandoned areas, also from a non-anthropocentric perspective.
- Geoarchaeological investigations bringing new data for the understanding of both agencies and formation processes in abandonment, also with the contribution of a comparative perspective from ethnoarchaeological data.
- Ethnographical and community archaeology aimed at the disentangling of identities and memories linked to the abandoned spaces.
Keywords:
Site formation processes, Heritage, Landscape archaeology, Settlement biography, Ethnoarchaeology, Geoarchaeology
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:
Rowena Banerjea (United Kingdom) 1
Co-organisers:
Lionello Morandi (Italy) 2
Claudia Sciuto (Italy) 2
Affiliations:
1. University of Reading
2. University of Pisa
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