Theme:
4. Persisting with Change: Theory and Archaeological Scrutiny
Session format:
Regular session
Title:
Perceiving and Shaping Landscapes
Content:
The prehistoric use of landscapes is a fundamental field of study in archaeology that has recently been investigated by many interdisciplinary research approaches. But while it is often only about the reconstruction of certain sites and their subsistence and organization, with this session we would like to bring together different approaches to the perception of whole landscapes that have been actively divided, structured and shaped between the Palaeolithic and the beginning of our current era in Europe. As existing research has shown, landscapes have always been modified and used in different ways, be it through the creation of landmarks or places of memory (e.g., megaliths, burial mounds, towers), boundary lines (e.g., pit alignment, fortifications) or other functional as well as sacred sites (e.g., cooking stone pit areas, cult sites, deposition sites). In addition to such artificially created elements that shaped landscapes, natural features were also used, shaped and integrated into people's perception of their own environment, such as caves, forests, trees, bodies of water, wetlands, islands and mountains. While today – following a naturalistic worldview – western-educated scholars often make the distinction between artificial and natural landscape elements, for prehistoric societies this has to be concretely questioned and viewed from different angles.
For our session, we are interested in contributions that deal with prehistoric perceptions of landscapes from both theoretical and ethnoarchaeological perspectives and link these to archaeological evidence. Furthermore, we are interested in diachronic perspectives, which look in particular at phases of change in function and use or changes in the structuring and shaping of landscapes. Interdisciplinary discussions that also include landscape and land use reconstructions are very welcome. We are also interested in spatial analyses that focus, for example, on modelling or predicting landscape changes.
Keywords:
Spatiality, Transformations, Prehistory, Diachrony, Theory and Practice, 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:
no
Session associated with other:
Palaeolithic and Mesolithic Community (PaM)
Main organiser:
Stefanie Schaefer-Di Maida (Germany) 1,2
Co-organisers:
Gianpiero Di Maida (Germany) 3
Gustav Wollentz (Sweden) 4
Affiliations:
1. Institute for Pre- and Protohistoric Archaeology, CAU Kiel
2. CRC 1266
3. CCEHN Project – Niedersächsisches Landesamt für Denkmalpflege, Hannover
4. Nordic Centre of Heritage Learning and Creativity
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