Theme:
5. All Roads Lead to Rome: Multiscalar Interactions
Session format:
Regular session
Title:
Ties That Bind: Community, Ecology and Challenges of Scale
Content:
This session invites participants to interrogate two concepts used by archaeologists to create boundaries around our questions and our assemblages. If community has long served as a heuristic term for the ties of culture, kinship, and mutual regard that contain human societies, then ecology has likewise served to delimit the linkages between human societies and the natural world in which they exist. But what happens if we untangle and re-tie these bindings and boundaries, questioning how ecology leaks into community and vice versa? How can multi-scalar and interdisciplinary archaeology knot knots across our categories of nature and culture? How might we consider seasonal interactions that forged shared identity with human and natural neighbors? Who—and what—would have been part of the larger imagined community and how are human, creaturely, and vegetal kinships manifest in material culture, landscape and/or ecofacts? We ask the participants to consider not only the material rhythms of everyday life, or the timescales of ecological change, but also the methods we use to recreate these patterns. How can newer scientific techniques (isotopes, aDNA, proteomics, etc) productively un-bound and re-tangle human and more-than-human scales in the archaeological past?
Keywords:
community, ecology, everyday life, multiscalar
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:
Tekla Schmaus (United States) 1
Co-organisers:
Kate Franklin (United Kingdom) 2
Affiliations:
1. Washington State University
2. Birkbeck, University of London
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