Theme:
2. Archaeological Sciences, Humanities and the Digital era: Bridging the Gaps
Session format:
Round table (without formal abstracts, only list of confirmed discussants / session co-organisers to be provided)
Title:
Path to New Horizons or Handmaiden to History? Isotopic Studies across the Prehistoric?historic Divide
Content:
Isotopic data offer the possibility to investigate individual life histories, tracking growing conditions, and consumption and mobility of both animals and humans, now with high-resolution sampling strategies that can drill into sub-annual changes. This has dramatically refined the temporal purview of materials typically dealt with on the scale of centuries. Therefore provide a temporal scale that can be integrated with the textual and epigraphic sources that inevitably shape investigation and interpretation of later periods. This brings with it a series of opportunities and challenges as archaeologists, archaeological scientists and historians grapple with a material record often different from previous epochs, ancient communities often organized in new and potentially different ways, and a interpretive narrative often dominated by a corpus of high-resolution but intrinsically biased documentary sources. Are isotopic data opening the door to new horizons and contributing to new interpretive models for understanding of human societies? Or simply providing high resolution data recycled through well-trodden generalizations, assumptions, and simplistic reconstructions of human behavior? What lessons can be learned (or not) from approaches that cross the prehistoric-historic divide, considering the many anthropological and taphonomic differences that come into play?
This session invites prehistorians, Classical/historical archaeologists, archaeological scientists and stable isotope specialists to a mutually constructive dialogue. Discussion will seek to identify primary theoretical and interpretive problems and to construct new frameworks to surmount them, linking anthropologically-informed models with integrative datasets, in order to find new pathways forward in the use of isotopes in examining questions on the formation, transformation, and dissolution of human communities. This may include plant and animal husbandry, human diet, mobility, urbanisation, social complexity and inequality. Overall this session aims to push beyond the status quo, and herald in a new era of integrated archaeological stable isotope investigations that bring new understandings to key questions regarding proto-historic/historical societies.
Keywords:
isotope analysis, Classical archaeology, prehistory, archaeological science
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:
Angela Trentacoste (United Kingdom) 1
Co-organisers:
Roz Gillis (Germany) 2
Cheryl Makarewicz (Germany) 3
Affiliations:
1. The British School at Rome, Italy
2. Referat für Naturwissenschaften - DAI
3. Institut für Ur- und Frühgeschichte Christian-Albrechts-Universität
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