Theme:
5. All Roads Lead to Rome: Multiscalar Interactions
Session format:
Regular session
Title:
The Horse in Archaeology: An Interdisciplinary Approach for Uncovering Relations between Horse and Humans in the Past
Content:
The horse has been part of human history for thousands of years, having multiple roles: prey, source of raw materials and food, mount, “war machine”, co-worker, and companion are just a few examples of the outcome of horse and human relations through the millennia. This large diversity can be analyzed through e.g. economic, social, artistic and mythological aspects. The horse-human interactions are visible in many different types of sources: archaeological, historic, iconographic, symbolic and technological, just to mention a few.
We invite speakers to explore this grand area of different aspects of this long history and relationship in a session with two main focuses:
1) The archaeological, historical, cultural and artistic study of horses in its different contexts. Iconography available on several archaeological and historical remains such as prehistoric art, sculptures, numismatics, mosaics, and frescoes, among other artistic manifestations of very different chronologies allows us to understand better the importance of the horse in the History of Humankind and development of civilization, mainly after the domestication process.
2) Equestrian archaeology in the 21st century with the starting point in the horse as an animal. This highlights the need to bring horses, horse-related artefacts and ‘horse people’ within archaeology into a disciplinary field of research. Topics such as horse breeding, the evolution of horsemanship, and the art of riding, just to mention a few examples, cannot be studied based on archaeological artifacts only. In the growing field of equestrian studies, all types of sources and methods that help us to understand past relations between horse and man are welcome and needed.
Keywords:
Equine archaeology, iconography, horse-human relations, Diverse societies and cultures, Multiscalar Interactionsequestrian studies, interdisciplinarity
Session associated with MERC:
no
Session associated with CIfA:
no
Session associated with SAfA:
no
Session associated with CAA:
no
Session associated with DGUF:
yes
Session associated with other:
Geosciences Centre of Coimbra University, Portugal
Main organiser:
Fernando Coimbra (Portugal) 1
Co-organisers:
Dragos Gheorghiu (Romania) 2
Zuzana Golec Mírová (Czech Republic) 3,4
Merethe Schifter Bagge (Denmark) 5
Anneli Sundkvist (Sweden) 6,7
Affiliations:
1. Polytechnic Institute of Tomar
2. Doctoral School, National University of Arts, Bucharest
3. Charles University Prague
4. Institute of Archaeology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague
5. Museum Skanderborg
6. Societas Archaeologica Upsaliensis
7. Equine History Collective
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