Session I: Putting Gender Back on the Agenda

Session Chairs: Ellen Jones, Reinhart Skumsnes, Thais Rocha da Silva,

and Edward Scrivens

Gender has been a field of interest within archaeology for many years now, benefiting the discipline by problematizing andro- and ethnocentric knowledge production in past studies and widening the scope of future analyses. However, has the scope been widened far enough? Has the study of gender reached its limit? What is the potential of gender as an analytical tool? While some parts of gender theory have been taken up by archaeology, others have been slower to catch on. This session offers students a chance to engage with recent debates in anthropological and critical (feminist) theory, to explore how and to what extent gender can be explored in the archaeological record. We welcome papers that use gender as a relational framework, as one way among many that people form (or don’t form) connections with one another. We urge scholars to move beyond studies of men and women, and instead focus on how different bodies are understood, giving attention to signifying systems – that is, the way societies represent and articulate rules of social relationships and organization, creating meaning through hierarchies of difference based on practices of inclusion/exclusion etc.

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Dead Men tell no tales, or do they?

A ‘non-classic’ approach to gendered burials in Dark Age Greece

Claire Holubowskyi • University of Oxford

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By considering metal objects, ritual pottery, and spatial distributions of funerary evidence from the Early Iron Age Aegean (11th-9th centuries BCE), this paper will address the way imbalances in social structure were enacted and maintained.  A focus on cemeteries at Athens and Lefkandi reveals site-specific modes of maintaining status through burial goods, which are constant in their focus on gender representations and self-differentiation.

Anita Stromberg’s 1993 framework for identifying gender through grave goods at Athens is applied to burials at Lefkandi, to consider the significance of metal goods in elite burial displays of gender and status.  The relationship between objects classed as ‘tools’ and ‘ornaments’ reveals the status of men and women were represented in different ways, with female burials highlighted through extreme destructions of wealth, while male burials were associated with ‘warrior’ status.  The trends across both sites are towards more prominent gender distinctions, with increases in self-differentiation and individual style over time.  However, there is a disconnect between the construction of gender in burials and the social roles lived by the deceased.  As such, the efforts undertaken to emphasise the gender of the deceased represent an adherence to socially constructed symbolic frameworks over accurate depiction of the truth, suggesting the gender and class of the deceased remained an important means to influence social relationships for the living.

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The Vascular Equipment as a Gender Indicator in the Indigenous Tombs of Basilicata: New Interpretive Models

Maria Pina Garaguso • Università degli Studi di Napoli – Federico II 

 

The attribution of the gender through the analysis of funerary objects is still largely influenced by the superstructures imposed by our own culture. For instance, when there is the presence of weapons, it is natural to associate them to a male individual, while jewels and objects related to the domestic productive sphere are often attributed to the women. When ceramics vessels are found, this association is not so immediate, but it is still very accredited. This is the case of the association of particular shapes to a specific gender. This assemblage closely connected to rituals derived from the Hellenic world that are spreading and establishing themselves in the western Mediterranean area since the eighth century. B.C. The analysis of these contexts highlights an evident methodological problem related to the association of biological sex of the deceased to certain objects belonging to the funerary equipment, which reinforces the contemporary stereotype of the gender and does not allow the identification of particular or different ideological and social dynamics. 

This presentation will offer two case studies: tomb 68 of Serra di Vaglio (Potenza, Italy) and tomb 955 of Lavello / Contrada Casino (Potenza, Italy). The first burial, dated around 430 B.C., was connected to a child belonging to the élite of one of the main sites of the north-Lucanian region; the second case belongs to a Daunia woman, whose assemblage is passed to the next generation.

From the analysis of the two funerary assemblages, it is clear that the vascular forms traditionally considered as "gender indicators" are no longer revealing standardized information, but increasingly they propose new models of self-representation implemented by means of the funeral ritual.

 

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Tracing Roman Influence by the Concept of Gender and Presentation from Antiquity to the Present

Sebastian A. Knura • University of Cologne 

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The imitation of elite behaviour and their way of living by the broader population is traceable in many ways throughout Roman Archaeology. The examples are reaching all levels of human everyday life: For instance, the replication of the elite´s silverware in humble materials or the implication of the decurion in the smaller cities, mirroring the Senate of Rome. 

This paper aims at a special aspect of imitation: The reproduction of the elitarian binary concept of gender by the broader population. Cicero and Statius convey the  way in which the Roman man or woman should behave and by which principles and rules they should act. This is causing constraints of their action, both, in public and in private space. Manliness is depicted as active, public and straightforward, while female virtues are described as passive, private and receiving. These rules exclude women from public life and the possibility of accumulating wealth/earn wages. Therefore, performing gender has a serious impact on the ancient society. 

To analyse the influence in the Northern periphery of the Empire, I will present two first century CE grave contexts situated in the border province of germania inferior. The exanimation of these two assemblages will give an insight of the impact of the performance of binary gender roles within the Roman elite on the population of the Roman periphery.

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Female Figures in the Nimrud Ivories: Selection and Presentation from Antiquity to the Present

Ninhursag Tadaros • University of Oxford 

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Gender studies in ancient Near Eastern scholarship has shown that interest and focus within the field traditionally revolved around aspects of male culture: the Mesopotamian king has generally been presented as a fierce warrior and a strong protector, around whom the history, civilization, and language of the ancient Near East centred. The study of women in ancient Mesopotamia only started in the mid- late twentieth century, and the emergence of intersectional gender studies in the 1990s further influenced ancient Near Eastern scholars interested in the field.

Running parallel to these developments in gender scholarship, recent work in museum studies has highlighted the importance of museums as educational institutions and creators of knowledge, noting that women have been largely absent in museum displays, and illuminating how scholars follow an androcentric discourse due to the influence of societal ideals and biases.

The Nimrud Ivories is a collection of ivory carvings, the majority of which originated in the Levant and taken to Nimrud, Iraq, in the early first millennium BC. Excavated in vast numbers, a great range display female figures. The British Museum holds a large collection of ivories from Nimrud, among them many representing female figures. The Nimrud Ivories thus provide and excellent case study for the investigation of the reception and presentation of female imagery.

The thesis used official guidebooks and British Museum publications, as well as current galleries (‘Mesopotamia 1500-539’ and ‘Ancient Levant’), to explore how, and if, the development of display at the British Museum has reflected changes of focus regarding gender- and museum studies in ancient Near Eastern scholarship. It finds a disparity between the two, especially in the end of the twentieth and early twenty-first century galleries.
These natural challenges seem to help to preserve a unique culture, and it appears that over the centuries unorthodox religious dynamics have been practiced in a micro-region by the Kizilbash (Alevi Kurds). Although, the Kizilbash people define themselves as “followers of Ali”, the cousin and son-in-law of Prophet Muhammed, their belief system, religious practices relating to burial customs do not fit those of the similarly named Alevi. The ethnoreligious constituents of Kizilbash culture, such as sacred mountains, trees, animals and healing sources were part of the local religious complex situated in its sacred landscape. As a result, the modern funerary practices intertwined pre-Islamic tradition with Alevism both in burying and transition of the soul.

This paper aims to analyse this modern inhumation practice and its elements with an ethno-archaeological approach in order to understand how the unorthodox burial customs have been survived throughout history and have been passed on through the generations. It aims to use sepulchral material culture supplied by archaeological data to depict the burial traditions of the region as a whole from past to present.

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Tryphé, Banquet and the Appraisal of Etruscan Women

Nancy Maria Antonieta Braga Bomentre • Universidade Federal de São Paulo

 

According to written sources of antiquity, of both Greek and Roman authors, which has come down nowadays, Etruscan women had no good reputation. The dissimilarities in the customs of this culture with the Greek – and also with the Roman one - have provoked criticism and defamation in several quotations, including one of philosopher Aristotle that comments with indignation on the Etruscan custom of allowing the women to participate of banquets, lying in the same kliné that the husband and under the same mantle (Politics, I, 23, d). With this commentary in mind, among with other quotations and fragments, and from previous studies on the Etruscan culture, in this article we will seek to approach the concepts of tryphé, banquets of extreme opulence extravagance and the presence of Etruscan women in  banquets in their own society. We will also address some aspects of Etruscan society in relation to women who present themselves as relevant in our study. We will consider Livy’s commentary on the episode of Lucrezia, which led to the expulsion of the Tarquinius from power, marking the end of the Etruscan monarchy in Rome and the quotation that Athenaeus of Naucratis makes of the Theopompus’commentary about Etruscans. We suppose that the tenor of the comments sought to construct a notion of otherness between Greeks / Romans and coeval cultures. 

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Female agency and Long-Distance Trade during the kārum Period

Joshua Britton • University College London 

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The women of the Old Assyrian kārum period present the scholar with a problem. The women in question lived in a patriarchal society, yet according to textual evidence they appear to have engaged in a range of activities touching on various aspects of daily life evidenced by the correspondence they wrote to their merchant husbands residing in Central Anatolia. In explaining these circumstances, it becomes essential to highlight the relationship between agency, gender and mobility in Old Assyrian society due to the long-distance trade that characterised the period. In the past, Assyriological textual studies have been found wanting in their ability to raise and answer productive questions in relation to the categories of women and gender. It is therefore necessary to employ gender theory derived from archaeological scholarship, in particular the work of Marie Louise Stig Sørensen, in producing a theoretical framework to explore the activities of Old Assyrian women through the medium of letter-writing. Such a framework allows us to observe how developments in Old Assyrian society regarding the geographical distance between family members led to historically contingent and particular expressions of female agency. Developing an understanding of gender as a relational category via archaeological theory leads us to consider how these new forms of agency were experienced within the environment of a patriarchal society and subsequently took the form of challenges to and reiterations of patriarchal structures. Furthermore, the adoption of a relational understanding of gender helps us to move away from a priori assumptions regarding women’s oppression under patriarchal authority, and towards an agency-based approach able to consider women’s encounters and negotiations with patriarchy. A nuanced and integrative consideration of agency, gender and mobility therefore allows us to consider how female agencies shaped and were shaped by Old Assyrian society. 

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Session II: Refugia: Negotiating Identity in a Dynamic Environment

Session Chair: Isobel Wisher

 

The concept of taking refuge, or “refugia”, permeates throughout human history, from our hominin ancestors during the Last Glacial Maximum surviving in a frozen landscape, the historic migrations of Inuits in Greenland in response to environment, to the modern refugee crisis and climate change refugees. Refugia not only represent an ecological or social ‘safe-haven’, but the ability of people coming together to survive within harsh, dynamic environments.

 In response to the changing relationship between the environment and the people, people continuously negotiate their self and identity through the entanglement of relations with human and non-human actors, materials, and the landscape. Identity is relational, inherently linked to the surrounding environment. As external stresses pose challenges, people must renegotiate and reconstruct these relations. This is critical not only for survival, but to ensure the maintenance of personhood and socio-cultural identity.

 This session aims to explore how people construct, negotiate, and preserve their identity within adverse and changing environments. We welcome any papers related to the following themes:

1. Adaptations to challenging environments

2. Personhood and social relationships with the environment

3. Constructing systems of refugia

4. Relational and environment-focused approaches to identity

5. Socio-cultural changes of a population over time

 

Rock Music: A Lithic Origin for Percussive Instrumentation

Kiefer Duffy • University of Liverpool

Music is a core human experience, the mechanisms by which we experience and create music/dance are deeply embedded within human anatomy and psychology. Music has been linked to our earliest forms of communication and has been noted for its ability to communicate information both, emotional and semantic, at a group scale in ways which transcend spoken language. Music has an affective power and ubiquity within human culture that demands yet defies explanation. Unfortunately for paleoanthropologists, what must be a long and rich history of music and music like behaviours among our ancestors is almost completely invisible thanks to the vagaries of preservation and the ambiguous nature of most kinds of instruments. 

Here, I present an experimental archaeological approach using the inherently percussive and social nature of lithic technology as a window into the processes that may have drawn hominins to producing sound from objects within a cultural context; An elaboration of what Ian Morley (2013) calls “Lithic Sound Play” mixed with an adaptation of the embodied cognitive approach to proto-art conceived by Derek Hodgson (2016). It is suggested that the first “musicians” were Homo erectus whose experience and reaction to a changing environment led to many of the socio-cultural developments that continue to define human experience.  

 

Musical behaviour is here presented as a key part of early hominin sociality, partially derived from the acoustic qualities of lithic technology. This behaviour helped structure identity, both personal and group and supported the social care and increased cooperation observed among the hominins of the early to middle Pleistocene. Though this “music” would be very different to what we know today, the core elements of sound from objects, voices and bodies in a communal context is something that has structured hominin sociality for hundreds of thousands of years.

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In the Eye of the Beholder? Negotiating Identity through Personal Ornaments in the Magdalenian

Isobel Wisher • University of York 

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Personal ornaments are elusive objects, frequently debated as either representing social status, “symbolic” behaviours, communication mechanisms, or mere embellishments. These debates present these objects as passive, only reflecting pre-existing information or relations. This perception is inherently problematic and critiqued by the use of personal ornaments in numerous non-Western societies and recent relational theories. This critique argues personal ornaments are not static and bounded, as presented in previous research, but active and entangled within the social fabric of societies. Consequently, they are agents in mediating the entanglement of object/human/animal/landscape relations. Their ability to construct and renegotiate these relations means they are a crucial mechanism in the negotiation of identity, particularly during periods of dynamic environmental changes. 

 

During the Magdalenian, populations were emerging from refugia after the end of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) and were under pressure to adapt to unfamiliar, everchanging landscapes as they expanded across Europe. Social networks during this period were vital, providing a safety net as populations negotiated the unknown. This research argues that for the inhabitants of El Mirón (Cantabria, Spain) and Saint-Germain-La-Rivière (France), personal ornaments were essential in enabling the negotiation of new relationships. These relationships had pertinent implications for the personal, social, and cultural identities of the inhabitants. Through employing a relational approach which integrates ethnographic analogies, theoretical frameworks, and experimental archaeology, the relations negotiated by these personal ornaments are unravelled. This enables an in-depth understanding into their role in identity negotiation, providing a glimpse at what these objects meant to the eye of the beholder.

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Mesolithic Shamans: The Disabled and the Unique

Andy Langle • University of York 

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Identification of shamans in the Mesolithic often focuses on atypical body types and perceived disabilities in the skeleton. Osteological analysis highlights the potential pathological nature of particular afflictions and these are interpreted, along with certain types of grave goods, as the basis for shamanic status. Critical Disability Studies (CDS) is an emerging discipline which looks at the social and power dynamics of disabilities, critiques the overwhelming emphasis on pathology over the lived experience of disabled people and challenges the concept of disability in itself as a constructed identity rather than an essential nature. Using CDS I aim to challenge the Mesolithic scholarship on shamanism and shaman identity and argue against the perception that an individual’s bodily potentials determined their social role in prehistory.

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Temples as a Tool for Negotiating Identity and Establishing Power:

A study of the Gurjara Pratihara Dynasty of North India

Shriya Gautam • Independent Research Scholar 

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The Gurjara-Pratiharas of North India were one of the first four patrilineal clans of the caste group referred to as the Rajputs. Although their significance has largely been overlooked by historians and students of history, their influence on art and culture and their political sway over the major part of North India from the 9th to the 11th century cannot be ignored. One of the most debated subjects in relation to the Gurjara-Pratiharas is their origin and identity, a topic that has, over the years, acquired racial, colonial and nationalistic tinge. Study of the archaeological sources, however, reveal that the Gurjara-Pratiharas probably rose from a varied background and not from the “sacrificial fire altar” as their court historians claim and their contribution to art, especially temple art and architecture was a motif of legitimation of power. 

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The Early Medieval Indian society (circa 700-1300 CE) was highly caste-ridden, where power was centralised with the ruling clans. Negotiating one’s identity and establishing the authority to rule was therefore a social necessity for any emergent new caste group. Through an intensive study of the existing historiography, the epigraphic evidence and the temples of the period, this paper attempts to examine the origin of the Pratiharas, and also study how constructing a temple served as a tool to negotiate identity and establish power in a religiously and socially divided society.

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Maritime Minesis in Polynesia, Complex Creative Epistemologies:

An Investigation of Polynesian Creative Entanglements with European Maritime culture

Joanna Tonge • University of Southampton

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In the Pacific, archaeological debates have often focussed on dispersal in the ancient record and the wide, long-lasting spread of the Lapita culture. Focussing on more recent centuries, Polynesian cultures have long been studied by anthropologists with little attention given to the objects which are so frequently considered important by these cultures. Collating and contrasting objects, images and ethnographic descriptions which exhibit a cultural duality, within Polynesian material culture during this period of increasing cultural contact, allows for a greater depth of understanding of the potency of Polynesian creative expression and its role in shifting social circumstances. Examples are largely centred on Polynesia, though some come from wider Oceania including; engravings from Easter Island, a ‘performance’ ship described in Samoa, Tongan War clubs and Kanak engraved bamboos. Exploring the entanglement of Polynesian material culture with European maritime culture in the 18th and 19th centuries brings historical narratives and anthropological discourse together to analyse cultural contact from an archaeological starting point.

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Session III: Liminality and Transition in Death

Leah Damman, Margalida Coll, and Sonia Pastor

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Liminal spaces and transitional places in the physical and cultural landscape are continually part of the human experience throughout history and prehistory. These bridges, or links, between the known and unknown, life and death, this world and others are shown to be key parts of community belief systems and mythology. Most prevalently this liminality is evidenced in the sphere of death and dying with mortuary customs often tied to either physical locations or surrounded by symbolic rites to assist in the transition from life to death. Archaeologically the evidence for these transitions is varied by region, period in time and peoples, yet with this individuality in expression overarching themes are also visible. On the physical landscape naturally formed spaces such as caves, bodies of water (such as rivers, waterfalls and pools), and rock formations have all provided liminal, even magical, locations that become focal points for peoples in these transitions. Human built spaces like pyramids, temples and alters, megaliths and cairns also held special places in societies for connecting to the ‘other’. These boundaries, doors, thresholds and gateways are all over human history and evidence our need to connect with what is beyond this life. This session aims to focus on these transitional, liminal spaces for the dead and dying and what they represent, how they were interacted with and their role in past societies.

 

Tombs and Transition: Turning the Lens on the ‘Liminal’ in Prepalatial Crete

Ellen Finn • Trinity College 

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The use of the concept of ‘liminality’ in archaeological interpretation truly heralds the coming together of different worlds, if only in terms of its import from one discipline to another. Whilst anthropology and archaeology might superficially appear to differ in methodological approach, both essentially rely upon the application of theoretical models in order to explain the unknown ‘origins’ or ‘functions’ of certain aspects of human existence, whether those of a tangible or an intangible nature. 

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Liminality as an anthropological concept has been applied with ever-increasing frequency in archaeological interpretations of the funerary archaeology of Early Bronze Age Crete, as a model through which scholars have attempted to access Minoan eschatological belief and worldview. The skeletal remains  - incredibly fragmentary due to their continual disturbance during both ancient funerary practices and modern looting  – have thus been interpreted from a distinctly anthropological perspective, posited as the main body of ‘evidence’ from which we may identify a period of transition acknowledged by the tombs’ users in antiquity.

Through an examination of the discourse surrounding the Prepalatial tombs of Crete, this paper will seek to turn the lens on this anthropological approach in its own right, questioning the validity and consistency of the continual import of Turner’s concept and the effect of our own sociocultural understanding(s) of personhood, pollution and transience on its application to the archaeological record. By highlighting that the terminology borne from this theoretical transitory state of ‘unbeing’ – i.e. the ‘liminal’ – has become synonymous with ideas relating to more permanent marginality or peripherality, this paper will work to emphasise that in an interpretative framework where anything anomalous is regarded as potentially ‘liminal’, the concept will have truly lost its kick.  

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Death Spaces and Their Impact on the Senses of the Living:

Late Iron Age Funerary Sites on Mallorca

Margalida Coll • Universitat de les Illes Balears 

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Open air spaces, subterraneous areas and outdoor monuments are the three main types of sites used by the people who inhabited Mallorca in the Late Iron Age. This period, also known as the Posttalaiòtic, occurs between the middle of the 6th century BC and until after the Roman conquest in 123 BCE on the island. The main objective of this presentation is to suggest an alternative study approach by discussing how mortuary spaces impacted peoples senses in different ways. When the prehistoric funerary world is studied, we tend to focus on the physical remains of the dead, on the artefacts accompanying the dead, on the artefacts accompanying the dead, or on where the dead were placed. We tend to forget that all of the mortuary evidence heavily impacts the living people of the community, as well as can be a reflection of them. By going through some of the caves and hypogeums (Son Maimó), open air cemeteries (Ca's Santamarier), and burial monumental buildings (Son Real) used to bury the posttalaòtic deceased, this presentation aims to illuminate how the diverse spaces impacted on the senses of the living. The sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and touch that occurs between the living and the dead in these spaces at the juncture of transitioning from the known world of the living to the unknown world of the dead are just as important to study and understand as part of the mortuary context as the physical evidence.

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Ancient No More: A Reinterpretation of the Storeberg Labyrinth

Anton Larsson • University of Gothenburg

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The Storeberg labyrinth, classified as the protected monument RAÄ Göteborg 95:2 and located in Gothenburg Municipality on the Swedish West Coast, is one of 400 known labyrinths across Sweden, joining others in Finland, Norway, Russia, Estonia and elsewhere. It is a little-known site category, commonly thought to be connected to magical rituals of some sort. The desolate and isolated Storeberg labyrinth, firmly positioned in the public mind since the 1970s as an Early Iron Age site tied to a nearby prehistoric grave field, has previously been solely studied by amateur archaeologists. New research has prompted a re-evaluation. 

The recent work of Christer Westerdahl (2016) has shown the labyrinths of the Baltic Sea to likely be a solely historical phenomenon, tied to the Late Medieval and Early Modern periods, with connections to fishermen and mariners, folkloric ideas of death and the afterlife, Folk Catholicism and the Marian cult, and apotropaic magic used to ward off evil. Using a combination of historical sources, geology, landscape studies and GIS, it is shown that a Westerdahlian perspective can be applied to the Storeberg labyrinth as well, while previous arguments showing the site to be prehistoric can likely be dismissed. 

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That Which Was Before Time-Night, Darkness, and Every Night-Life in Ancient Egypt

Paola Badani Zulet • Uppsala University 

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This study presents the ancient Egyptian perception of night and darkness contextualised through Egyptian descriptions of nocturnal practices. These descriptions were phenomenologically and lexicographically analysed, showing amongst others how the use of more than one word for the same phenomenon hinted to a wide contextual understanding of the night, sometimes even visible in the hieroglyphs: for instance, a sign depicting a lying mummy in the ancient Egyptian word “to spend the night” might exclude the mummy when making reference to the spending of a sleepless night, when the body remained in a vertical state. 

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Thus, night falls upon day, and what was visible during the day becomes blinded and dimmed, darkness turns the once polychromatic day-world into a monochromatic night-world, spearheading the use of artificial lightning, an important and almost ritual practice in terms of darkness. This darkness also limits to some extent the human trajectory, bringing matters inwards into the home, towards physical intimacy, closeness and safety. The human body falls into horizontality – into sleep with its accompanying silence, stillness and non-consciousness, elements in many instances associated with death. Time’s day-time linearity gives way to a nightly non-linearity, as narrated in the mythological discourse. The duality between day and night is further conveyed in how the break of dawn literally breaks the darkness of night, the silence associated with sleep, and scares the attributed dangers away. With the start of the day, the human body stands into verticality, movement and consciousness. 

And although the preconceived notions of night and darkness were ones of danger and death, the analysed texts present high levels of activity during the nightly hours, describing how Egyptians lived their nights in ways both contrasting and reinforcing the daily practices. As such, in a true spirit of duality, night constituted a highly vivid experience. 

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A Modern Mortuary and an Old City: Deciphering New and Ancient Practices

Tülay Yeşiltaş • University of Birmingham

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Tunceli (Dersim) is a modern city lying on the upper Arsanias River, one of the branches of the Euphrates in eastern Turkey. This area is referred to as Sophene in geographical, historical, ethnographical sources (Geographica, Geographike Hyphegesis, De Situ Orbis and Natural History) as well as in Byzantine Legislation, such as Corpus Iuris Civilis and in Leges Novellae of Justinian I, which call the local people gentes/ἔθνη and indicate that the culture and ethnicity of the population were different from that of people living in Magna, Prima and Secunda Armenia. The city and its nearby districts cover 10.000 square kilometres zones. 75% of the area is covered by mountains and its altitude is more than 1000 meters above sea level.

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These natural challenges seem to help to preserve a unique culture, and it appears that over the centuries unorthodox religious dynamics have been practiced in a micro-region by the Kizilbash (Alevi Kurds). Although, the Kizilbash people define themselves as “followers of Ali”, the cousin and son-in-law of Prophet Muhammed, their belief system, religious practices relating to burial customs do not fit those of the similarly named Alevi. The ethnoreligious constituents of Kizilbash culture, such as sacred mountains, trees, animals and healing sources were part of the local religious complex situated in its sacred landscape. As a result, the modern funerary practices intertwined pre-Islamic tradition with Alevism both in burying and transition of the soul.

This paper aims to analyse this modern inhumation practice and its elements with an ethno-archaeological approach in order to understand how the unorthodox burial customs have been survived throughout history and have been passed on through the generations. It aims to use sepulchral material culture supplied by archaeological data to depict the burial traditions of the region as a whole from past to present.

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The Houses are Living, the Children are Dead: Spaces’ Liminal Moments and the Utility of the Dead Bodies at Catalhoyuk

Kevin Kay • University of Cambridge 

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Death’s transformative power extends far beyond the body. Although much archaeological research identifies the complex politics surrounding the body that occurs when people die, including the establishments of customs, institutions, ontologies and spaces for managing death, less focus has been given to the agency of dead bodies in other socially-negotiated spheres of community life, including the politics of space-making. 

In a step toward remedying this imbalance, this paper inverts the basic premise of the session: rather than focusing on the contribution of liminal spaces to the transformation of human bodies, I examine the use of human bodies as tools for the transformation of spaces. Taking the practice of burial in houses at Neolithic Çatalhöyük, in Central Turkey, as my case study, I examine the articulation of burial events with houses’ biographies. I show that there were uses for dead bodies in defining and transforming house structures and houses’ role in the community. Specifically, I suggest that dead bodies, especially those of infants, were often involved in the construction of new walls, the burial of old walls, and the shoring-up of weak or unstable structural elements. By shifting focus away from the life-ways and death-ways of people, to the life-ways and death-ways of built spaces and the role of dead bodies in those transformations, I aim to expand the study of mortuary space beyond its anthropocentric tendencies to one in which humans’ bodily histories and the histories of their extended, architectural worlds come together to build one another.

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Session IV: Globalization before Modernization

Session Chair: Christina Leverkus

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Although not entirely ignored, the evidence of globalization as a phenomenon prior to the “modern” world has only recently stepped onto the stage. When looking at the importance of connectivity and networks in the past the discrepancy is surprising. As a response, this session seeks to highlight the

importance of networks and connectivity between different cultures of the past and/or the effects thereof.

Globalization, defined as increasing connectivity across borders, with modern denotations such as westernization and standardization removed, has significant value as an archaeological theory.

Globalization is often considered a modern phenomenon created in the post-sixteenth-century when industrialism and trade connected the world. The reality, however, is that the world had been connected long before. Globalization was just as much a part of the socio-cultural relations of the past as it is the present.  Not only has trade and warfare connected individuals across borders, but thoughts, rituals, religions, and traditions have also been parts of different globalizations.

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Sea to Sea: Report on the GAST Rock Art Survey

Paula Molander • University of Gothenburg 

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In 2015, the Gothenburg Archaeological Student Association (GAST) launched a project to study the Bronze Age (1700–500 BC) petroglyphs of Southern Bohuslän Province in Sweden. Organized and carried out by the students themselves, using a methodology which followed prehistoric patterns of shoreline displacement, two survey seasons in 2016 and 2018 resulted in the discovery of 16 undocumented rock art sites, alongside Stone Age flint finds and new additions to previously known sites.

In Harestad Parish, GAST’s two surveys increased the total known and documented number of rock art sites with 32%. In Torsby Parish, it was a 39% increase. Continued surveying is planned for 2018, carried out by the students themselves with funding from the Carl Jacob Lindeberg Foundation and the helpful assistance of the University of Gothenburg, the Swedish Rock Art Research Archives, and Botark.

Among the most notable new finds by GAST is a so-called “oxhide ingot” -type carving, previously known from only a handful of rock art sites among the thousands documented across Sweden. As shown in 2015 by Johan Ling and Zofia Stos-Gale, this unique type of petroglyph likely depicts metal ingots deriving from the Mediterranean Late Bronze Age. Together with recent isotope analyses of Scandinavian bronzes, they hint at an early pan-European trade networks spanning the continent, broadening perspectives on pre-modern globalization.     

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Global Minds:

Insights from the Space Syntax Analysis of Built Environments in the Ancient Near East

Xose L. Hermoso-Buxan • University College London

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In the First Millennium BCE we can observe a trend towards a more syncretic and increasingly multicultural and universalistic society in the Ancient Near East, which culminates at the time of the Achaemenid Empire. This is visible in multiple aspects of society and material culture, including iconography, jewellery, urbanism or architecture. This paper will present and compare the preliminary results of the Space Syntax Analysis of the Middle Bronze Age Palace at Mari, the Neo-Assyrian palace of Sargon II at Dur-Sharrukin (Khorsabad), the Median palace at Tepe Nush-i Jan in Media (NW Iran) and the Achaemenid palaces of Darius I at Persepolis (SW Iran) and Dahan-e Ghulaman in Eastern Iran. 

Space syntax goes beyond traditional formal approaches to the analysis of the architecture of palaces, normally based on typological classifications, and offers new information based on the assumption that architecture is used to encode social information which, in turn, affects human behaviour. 

This type of analysis will allow us to ascertain whether similarities and differences in architectural typologies between Assyria and the neighbouring territories of Media and Southwestern and Eastern Iran also extend on to spatial organisation -that is, permeability, integration, interaction, centrality of movement, control of inner space and privacy. This might indicate that the impact of the interactions between these neighbouring regions transcends the sphere of material culture and reflects the development of new patterns of thought and social organisation, parallel to the wider developments observed in Near Eastern Society in the First Millennium BCE.

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Between Dorestad and Kaupang:

A Study about Frisian-Scandinavian Contact and Exchange

from the 8th to the end of the 10th Century

Nora Hansen • University of Oslo

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For my presentation during this session, which is about globalisation and its approaches and relations in archaeology, I want to talk about my master’s thesis. I focused on Frisian-Scandinavian contact and exchange from the 8th to the end of the 10th century, with the aim to study which types of contact and exchange could be witnessed within the material relevant.

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It is well known that people from Scandinavia travelled long distances to countless places in Europe, the Middle East and Asia from around 700 up to the 11th-century. In Europe this period is usually referred to as the Early Middle Ages, however, in Scandinavia, it is known as the Viking Age. The fact that Scandinavians travelled the world has been a focal point of both early and modern Viking Age research, especially regarding those who went to Great-Britain and Iceland. Significantly less research has been carried out when it comes to Scandinavians who travelled to former Frisia, a coastal region along the south-eastern corner of the North Sea. It is now part of the Netherlands and some smaller parts of Germany. The same goes for people from Frisia who travelled to Scandinavia because less research has been conducted in this field as well. However, both the archaeological records and contemporary literary sources indicate extensive contact with other regions. Fortunately, contact and exchange between Frisia and Scandinavia have been researched on a much broader scale in recent years, as well as several excavations and publications contributed to the discussions.For my thesis, I specifically focused on direct contact and exchange between the Viking town of Kaupang in Southern Norway and the medieval town of Dorestad in the Netherlands. The relations and contact between these towns are of special interest to me since it has only recently become an area of research, as well as it opens up for further debate around globalisation in the Viking Age.

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The Ubaid-Phenomenon: From the Strait of Hormuz to the Mediterranean

Eleanor Preston • University College London 

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Maritime trade in the Persian Gulf has been a pivotal feature of world networks from the Bronze Age to the present. Understanding its origins in prehistory is essential for any broader interpretation of early social and economic developments between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean. The key period in this respect is the mid-late sixth millennium BCE, when material culture of Mesopotamian origin is first documented in the Gulf. The material remains are in the form of pot sherds from the Southern Mesopotamian Ubaid tradition, which have been found as far as the Straits of Hormuz, 900km from Iraq. Chemical analysis, conducted on the Ubaid-ware found in Arabia, determined that these potsherds originated from southern Mesopotamia and were not local imitations. These Ubaid-ware sherds, alongside a coarse-ware, believed to be local, are the earliest ceramic material found in Arabia. However, after the Ubaid period came to an end by the end of the 5th millennium BCE ceramic artefacts are not seen again in Arabia for nearly a millennium. Therefore this early appearance of ceramics in the Gulf region takes on a central role in approaching the wider questions of cross-cultural interaction. However, questions concerning provenance remain. My research includes an in depth study of both the Ubaid-ware and the local coarse-ware, through ICP-AES and petrographic analysis, in order to further our understanding of the exchange relationship between Mesopotamia and Arabia and put the Ubaid in context of the Arabian Neolithic nomadic population.

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Redefining Urbanism, Globalism, and its Impact on Identity in Neolithic Orkney

Thomas Renshaw • University of the Highlands and Islands

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What is urbanization? Historically in England and most of Southern Europe urbanization is seen as the continuation of the Greco-Roman form of settlement organization, in fact most modern cities are still explained using the following criteria

1. From administrative viewpoint,

2. Through size and importance (concentration of population, employment structure, services, hospitals, ...)

3. By urban way of life (anonymous, impersonal, labour relations, socio-pathological phenomena, ...).

4. settlement of considerable size, with differentiated structure of areas and  a distinctive centrality.

 

However, within a Northern European context, this Greco-Roman model never existed. So, in this paper I am putting forward the argument that Urbanism in Northern Europe existed in the Neolithic, as a more diverse and subtle manner than the later Greco-Roman model, a low density or proto-urbanization.  In this model urbanization is not defined by geography or urban population density, Urbanization is viewed as complex of entangled social, cultural political and economic systems, if this theory holds, it should be possible, amongst its features, to find evidence of advanced division of labour and social diversity. low density or proto urbanism then is defined by a entangled system of economic, social, cultural and political interactions, characterized in the main by interpersonal relationships and politically enforced social norms and values, a coming together as a cognitive function of identity, be that social, cultural or individual. To explore in more depth, I will be using Orkney as an example of proto urbanism.

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Garum Masala: Was the Indo-Roman Trade of Ingredients Truly Unilateral?

Nicole Caldwell • University of Oxford 

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On many tables around the world today sits a humble reminder of ancient trade endeavours, the pepper shaker. This attests to the legacy of Imperial Rome, reaching through time to influence our current culinary habits. Traditionally, western academic focus on the Indo-Roman trade has assumed that the movement of ingredients was fairly one-way into Rome from a so- called ‘periphery’, but the archaeological record and ancient literature contradict this. 

 

While previous scholarship has emphasised the Roman Empire’s acquisition and consumption of eastern ingredients, this presentation (based on my dissertation research done at Oxford) will aim to demonstrate that the culinary exchange of spices, seasonings and some staples was not unilateral. To argue this point I will draw upon ancient literature and language, archaeo- botanical evidence from sites in Egypt and India, and trace the native origins of certain ingredients. 

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Session V: Multi-disciplinary Approaches in Archaeology

Session Chair: Alice Rose

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Constructing an archaeological narrative is rarely the result of the analysis of a single aspect of the evidence. The strength of archaeological research tends to lie in the bringing together of a variety of information, data and methodologies. This can take many forms, from numerous specialists contributing to a commercial site report, to bioarchaeologists bringing together multiple analyses to create an osteobiography, to researchers applying specific theoretical frameworks to material evidence. This session welcomes papers demonstrating multi-disciplinary approaches to archaeology, illustrating the coming together of knowledge, techniques and/or methodologies to enrich their interpretation of the past.

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 Archaeology Beyond Excavation: Using Ancient History in the Modern Museum

Abbey Ellis • University of Leicester 

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Archaeological plaster casts, namely the exact replicas of ancient Greco-Roman statuary made from Plaster of Paris in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, have had a tumultuous history. Casts have long been viewed as inauthentic mechanical reproductions and are regularly relegated to the back rooms and basements of museums. The reason for the negative attitudes toward plaster casts is their material – Plaster of Paris is thought by many critics to be inauthentic and “un-ancient”, paling in comparison to the original bronze and marble of ancient statuary by the likes of Polykleitos and Lysippos. 

 

However, bronze and marble were not the only materials employed by ancient sculptors. A bias in the archaeological evidence causes us to underestimate plaster as a sculptural material. Plaster does not survive as readily in wet Mediterranean climes as marble, so it is discounted as a sculptural material, but my research, which uses multi-disciplinary approaches from the fields of archaeology, ancient history, and museum studies, has uncovered that plaster was extensively used in the ancient world. Archaeological evidence from Greece, Egypt, and beyond shows that plaster was employed both as a finished material for original sculpture and for the production of works in other media. Epigraphic and literary sources also attest to the presence of plaster statuary in ancient homes and public settings.

 

My presentation will outline my archaeological and ancient historical investigations with the aim of negotiating a new, authentic place for modern plaster casts in the museum. Critics of plaster casts hold the ancient original sculpture to be the consummate museum object; the marble and bronze materials are the ideal. But if plaster too can be considered authentically ancient, as my research suggests, can archaeological casts be saved from the scrapheap?

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 The Process of Building a Roman Domus

Annika Skolik • University of Tübingen 

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In every archaeological field buildings are usually considered architectural end products and are analysed in terms of their art style and chronology. But the constructing process itself, however, is rarely studied, even though it can state social and economic aspects of craftsmanship and daily working life. 

Therefore it is interesting to deal with all construction steps necessary to build up a Roman building with regard to the amount of workload. My Bachelor thesis “Construction economics of private residential building in Roman times by the example of the Casa del Menandro in Pompeii” deals with the calculation of the construction time and all aspects of its building process of a roman domus. 

The method of estimating process time is based on a previous architectonic study as well as depending on the well-preserved state of a building. The volume of building techniques used needs to be figured out and multiplied with a specific time factors. The source of these time constants is given by the labour time calculation of J. Delaine, who studied the construction of the baths of Caracalla and was one of the first researchers to develop this method. As result of the calculation, we get a reliable solid working time for the construction of the Casa del Menandro. The aspects of material quarrying, production and transport are also taken into account. It is furthermore also interesting to look at the amount of workers deployed and the working year schedule. The results of a calculation like this can serve as reference for comparison with other buildings of Roman or Greek times to give a broader overview of Roman building economy.

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Simple and Complex Hunter-Gatheres:

A Fallacy Within the Archaeology of the European Upper Paleolithic

Dylan Jones • University of Liverpool 

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Since the formulation of the simple and complex dichotomy of hunter-gatherers by Price and Brown (1985), the identification of social complexity has been a ubiquitous line of questioning within the archaeology of hunter-gatherer societies, with reference to a commonly used trait list. Due to the latitudinal correlations with social complexity observed within contemporary H-G, and an influx in what are considered as “complex” behaviours, archaeologists have looked towards the European Upper Palaeolithic to identify the origins of complex societies. This is generally attempted through burials, storage, sedentism, social networks, specialisation, and implications of labour, among others. However, some are beginning to challenge the use of the term “complexity” and the way in which it is used when approaching Upper Palaeolithic archaeology, highlighting the drawbacks in using polythetic contrasts derived from societies living on the peripheral of the modern world. This limits us to seeing complexity as a gradual linear development. In an attempt to gain a better understanding of Upper Palaeolithic society in Europe, archaeologists have begun to draw from socioecology to explain ephemerality in social organisation in the Late Pleistocene. This includes the use of resilience theory and adaptive cycle models to reconceptualize Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers within frameworks less limiting than ethnographically derived trait lists.

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Press Play to Start Archaeogaming:

An Introduction to Archaeological Narrative Video Games in Contemporary Society 

Merel van den Hoek • University of Groningen 

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No archaeologist or historian would deny that the past has interesting and fascinating stories to tell. This attraction towards archaeological stories has also been picked up by the video game branch, which has resulted in the publication of a fair amount of video games with an archaeological or historical theme. The fact that these two disciplines are now ‘merging’ together has resulted in a newly established field of research: archaeogaming. Video games are immensely popular in contemporary society and this ultimately results in players consuming archaeology through this new medium in a form of public outreach that is mostly unregulated by the academic archaeological community. 

This presentation serves as an introduction to the topic of archaeogaming, and combines existing theories on the portrayal of archaeology in the media and the perception of archaeology by the public with information on how the past, archaeology and archaeologists are represented in popular (mostly) narrative video games. Additionally, it is considered how archaeological video games can both be a curse and a blessing to archaeology by discussing the themes of accuracy and emotional narrative. While the lack of accuracy and nuance is a major disadvantage of video games with an archaeological theme, the publication of these games should not necessarily be discouraged, for their emotional narrative makes that these games, and thereby archaeology in general, can become beloved by a large and diverse audience. Whether we like it or not, new archaeological games will be developed and released, and therefore the topic should not be ignored by the academic archaeological community. 

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