Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00293652.2023.2210583
Ben Elliott, G. Warren
We wish to thank all the respondents for their thoughts on the issues we have raised, and the constructive framing of their various points of critique. We found the responses positive and useful, which is somewhat surprising given the demonstrably divisive nature of our position! It should be immediately apparent to those following this discourse that we have neatly split our audience over the utility of a decolonial approach to Mesolithic archaeology. Glørstad and Nilsson Stutz posit that the lens of colonial critique is ill-suited to critical reflection on the European Mesolithic, whilst Porr, Pitcher and Tiwari argue to the contrary. Of course, the position adopted by the respective authors emerges from their different positions of knowledge and experience. This breadth of opinions speaks to an underlying dynamic that we have not, as yet, addressed directly, that of positionality. The diversity in the professional backgrounds of our respondents vastly enriches this debate, whilst also hinting at the source of the mixed response to our approach. Is it any wonder that sociologists of race, Mesolithic researchers with experience of engagement with postcolonial studies outwith Europe, specialists in Indian Prehistory, and the director of one of Europe’s major museums would have wildly different experiences of colonial legacies and engage differentially with the extensive academic literature and analysis which surround them? We should also stress that positionality can be extended further than our professional lives. As authors, we will be open here. Beyond our academic qualifications, we are two British (at least by background), middle-aged, middle-class white men who in many, many respects have been disproportionately privileged by the hegemonies that we now seek to expose and deconstruct. As such, we wholeheartedly agree with Nilsson Stutz’s point, via Táíwò (2022), regarding the dangerous tendency of social justice discourse to be ultimately appropriated by those who lack direct experience of inequality or oppression. We are grateful to have been able to start this conversation within Mesolithic studies and are delighted to see others from different backgrounds push this discourse forwards, including in sessions at recent and forthcoming conferences. We would, however, stress that privilege within Mesolithic research is fundamentally relative and reiterate the need for robust demographic data on the make-up of our research community, before diving into a more expansive discussion over who should, and should not, be front and centre within this
{"title":"Unsettling Sin and Seeding Healing: Developing the Conversation Around Coloniality in the European Mesolithic","authors":"Ben Elliott, G. Warren","doi":"10.1080/00293652.2023.2210583","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00293652.2023.2210583","url":null,"abstract":"We wish to thank all the respondents for their thoughts on the issues we have raised, and the constructive framing of their various points of critique. We found the responses positive and useful, which is somewhat surprising given the demonstrably divisive nature of our position! It should be immediately apparent to those following this discourse that we have neatly split our audience over the utility of a decolonial approach to Mesolithic archaeology. Glørstad and Nilsson Stutz posit that the lens of colonial critique is ill-suited to critical reflection on the European Mesolithic, whilst Porr, Pitcher and Tiwari argue to the contrary. Of course, the position adopted by the respective authors emerges from their different positions of knowledge and experience. This breadth of opinions speaks to an underlying dynamic that we have not, as yet, addressed directly, that of positionality. The diversity in the professional backgrounds of our respondents vastly enriches this debate, whilst also hinting at the source of the mixed response to our approach. Is it any wonder that sociologists of race, Mesolithic researchers with experience of engagement with postcolonial studies outwith Europe, specialists in Indian Prehistory, and the director of one of Europe’s major museums would have wildly different experiences of colonial legacies and engage differentially with the extensive academic literature and analysis which surround them? We should also stress that positionality can be extended further than our professional lives. As authors, we will be open here. Beyond our academic qualifications, we are two British (at least by background), middle-aged, middle-class white men who in many, many respects have been disproportionately privileged by the hegemonies that we now seek to expose and deconstruct. As such, we wholeheartedly agree with Nilsson Stutz’s point, via Táíwò (2022), regarding the dangerous tendency of social justice discourse to be ultimately appropriated by those who lack direct experience of inequality or oppression. We are grateful to have been able to start this conversation within Mesolithic studies and are delighted to see others from different backgrounds push this discourse forwards, including in sessions at recent and forthcoming conferences. We would, however, stress that privilege within Mesolithic research is fundamentally relative and reiterate the need for robust demographic data on the make-up of our research community, before diving into a more expansive discussion over who should, and should not, be front and centre within this","PeriodicalId":45030,"journal":{"name":"Norwegian Archaeological Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43805878","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00293652.2022.2153729
Kevin Kay
This article reconsiders the association, common globally and ubiquitous in Neolithic Turkey, between dead bodies and domestic architecture. Residential burial has conventionally been handled in a representational framework. Buildings’ physical and meaningful aspects are analytically separated, so that they can act as ‘containers of meaning’ in funerary contexts and as concrete technologies in others. Here, a provocative dataset challenges this separation: infant bodies and curated remains buried against the bases of unstable Çatalhöyük walls, as if to reinforce them. Rather than asking what such bodies meant, I adopt a more-than-representational approach inspired by Mol’s (2002) ‘enacting ontology’ and Barad’s (2007) ‘agential realism’ that asks what bodies could do. Doing so extracts bodies and walls from separate domains of mortuary and mechanical action, and asks how they were enacted as objects within Neolithic practice. I trace practices that enacted walls and bodies in Neolithic worlds – making walls’ futures responsive to subsurface burial. This example raises broader implications for the way archaeologists investigate spatial aspects of mortuary practice, and mortuary aspects of architecture, and more broadly the way we determine what the objects of our study are.
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Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00293652.2023.2203147
M. Porr
The authors introduce their interesting and thoughtful piece with a personal anecdote that serves as an origin story to the argument within the paper itself and to the issues they have been wrestling with for some time. In 2018, they attended the 12 International Conference on Hunting and Gathering Societies (CHAGS), which was held in Penang, Malaysia. Located in a former British colony and in a part of the world that is often included in the Global South, the conference featured extensive engagements with the colonial legacies within hunting and gathering studies and political activism to initiate positive changes in future research. I am sure that many representatives of Indigenous groups and their research partners were able to attend this conference. Southeast Asia is home to a hugely diverse Indigenous cultural and social landscape, and this is not different for adjacent regions. At the same time, within the same region, many Indigenous groups suffer from oppression and their cultural and ethnic survival continues to be an ongoing struggle within different nation states. While I do not want to speculate further about the experiences of the authors on this occasion, it seems that the anecdote is reflective of a very common colonial/postcolonial situation. First, the authors mention that in Penang, they were in the minority as European researchers. This is an unusual experience for academics, who specialise in European subjects and can rarely engage with Indigenous communities from the Global South directly. Second, they experienced that their own field – hunter-gatherer studies – was seen and practiced in a very different way in a region that experienced European colonial occupation in the past and that was subjected to oppression by a foreign power. These processes were multidimensional and varied with historical circumstances; they were political, economic, social, and intellectual. In many countries in Southeast Asia, decolonisation after WWII was a violent process and in Malaysia it also involved a long and painful liberation conflict. These aspects are potentially known to Europe-based researchers, but it is a different story being exposed to the respective legacies directly and personally. I was not able to attend the CHAGS conference in 2018, but I can relate very well to the experiences of the two authors and how we are entangled in colonial legacies wherever we are and work. After finishing my PhD in the UK, I worked for several years in museums in Germany before moving to Australia in 2008. After focussing on European Palaeolithic archaeology and Palaeolithic art studies, I have now been working with Aboriginal people in Northwest Australia for many
{"title":"The Blind Spots of the Colonial Legacies of Archaeological Theory and Practice","authors":"M. Porr","doi":"10.1080/00293652.2023.2203147","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00293652.2023.2203147","url":null,"abstract":"The authors introduce their interesting and thoughtful piece with a personal anecdote that serves as an origin story to the argument within the paper itself and to the issues they have been wrestling with for some time. In 2018, they attended the 12 International Conference on Hunting and Gathering Societies (CHAGS), which was held in Penang, Malaysia. Located in a former British colony and in a part of the world that is often included in the Global South, the conference featured extensive engagements with the colonial legacies within hunting and gathering studies and political activism to initiate positive changes in future research. I am sure that many representatives of Indigenous groups and their research partners were able to attend this conference. Southeast Asia is home to a hugely diverse Indigenous cultural and social landscape, and this is not different for adjacent regions. At the same time, within the same region, many Indigenous groups suffer from oppression and their cultural and ethnic survival continues to be an ongoing struggle within different nation states. While I do not want to speculate further about the experiences of the authors on this occasion, it seems that the anecdote is reflective of a very common colonial/postcolonial situation. First, the authors mention that in Penang, they were in the minority as European researchers. This is an unusual experience for academics, who specialise in European subjects and can rarely engage with Indigenous communities from the Global South directly. Second, they experienced that their own field – hunter-gatherer studies – was seen and practiced in a very different way in a region that experienced European colonial occupation in the past and that was subjected to oppression by a foreign power. These processes were multidimensional and varied with historical circumstances; they were political, economic, social, and intellectual. In many countries in Southeast Asia, decolonisation after WWII was a violent process and in Malaysia it also involved a long and painful liberation conflict. These aspects are potentially known to Europe-based researchers, but it is a different story being exposed to the respective legacies directly and personally. I was not able to attend the CHAGS conference in 2018, but I can relate very well to the experiences of the two authors and how we are entangled in colonial legacies wherever we are and work. After finishing my PhD in the UK, I worked for several years in museums in Germany before moving to Australia in 2008. After focussing on European Palaeolithic archaeology and Palaeolithic art studies, I have now been working with Aboriginal people in Northwest Australia for many","PeriodicalId":45030,"journal":{"name":"Norwegian Archaeological Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46620060","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-15DOI: 10.1080/00293652.2022.2137841
James Walker
As the back cover of the book notes, Chantal Conneller’s ‘The Mesolithic in Britain: Landscape and Society in Times of Change’ presents the first true synthesis of the British Mesolithic in 90 years. This is somewhat incredulous to think, but not a trivial point when considering the significance of this publication. To put this into perspective, the central premise around which The Mesolithic in Britain is structured is the proposal of a new chronological framework. When Grahame Clark’s PhD thesis was published in 1932 (the last time a synthesis of this kind was undertaken) the radiocarbon method was still 17 years away from being successfully demonstrated. To say that an update is overdue would be beyond an understatement. There have, of course, been less synthetical treatments of the British Mesolithic (e.g. Palmer 1977, Wymer 1991, Smith 1992), edited volumes (e.g. Conneller and Warren 2006), and summary papers and overviews (e.g. Tolan-Smith 2008). In addition, several parts of the British Isles have benefited immensely from being the subject of regionally focussed collections of papers and studies, including from recent decades, the Mesolithic of Scotland (Saville 2004, Warren 2005), Wales (Lillie 2015), and the northeast of England (Waddington and Pedersen 2007) among others. It has been apparent, since Clark’s treatment of the matter, that the British Mesolithic has never been a monolithic entity. An improved resolution of regional trends only makes the challenge of conducting an overview of the whole, and all the variability that that entails, an inherently challenging proposition to do justice. For a long time, the period has been framed through an ‘early/late’ division, but this has always been overly simplistic, and has increasingly come to obfuscate more than it helps to elucidate. Consequently, this division is eschewed in favour of a newly updated and more highly attuned alternative. The book begins by reviewing the history of British Mesolithic research, from Clark and his predecessors through to more contemporary leaders of the field, such as the late Caroline Wickham-Jones. It explores problems with the traditional framework before suggesting an alternative, comprising four phases with a chapter devoted to each, except for the first phase, which is given two chapters focusing on the differing nature of the earliest Mesolithic record from the north and south. These phases are, as follows: (1) 9500– 8200 BC (chapter focus on northern pioneers) and 9300–8200 BC (chapter focus on the ‘Early Mesolithic’ of the south), (2) 8200–7000 BC the ‘Middle Mesolithic’, (3) 7000–5000 BC the ‘Late Mesolithic’ and (4) 5000–4000 BC, the ‘Final Mesolithic’. These divisions are broadly reflective of spatial and temporal trends in microlith typology, underpinned where possible by an expanded and improved radiocarbon database. There is significant utility in this approach. Despite the chronological control brought to bear through radiometric dating, th
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Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/00293652.2022.2083980
Elisabeth Niklasson
Few things are as interesting as seeing how people in the past imagined the future. ‘France in the Year 2000’ is one example. A series of paintings by Jean-Marc Côté, produced for the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris. The paintings were in the form of small cards, meant to be placed in cigar boxes, and humorously depicted what life would look like in our millennium. Many visions never materialized, such as scuba divers riding huge seahorses and winged police constables controlling airborne traf-fic. Others did. They foresaw the creation of war-planes, robots that clean your house
{"title":"Heritage Futures: Comparative Approaches to Natural and Cultural Heritage Practices","authors":"Elisabeth Niklasson","doi":"10.1080/00293652.2022.2083980","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00293652.2022.2083980","url":null,"abstract":"Few things are as interesting as seeing how people in the past imagined the future. ‘France in the Year 2000’ is one example. A series of paintings by Jean-Marc Côté, produced for the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris. The paintings were in the form of small cards, meant to be placed in cigar boxes, and humorously depicted what life would look like in our millennium. Many visions never materialized, such as scuba divers riding huge seahorses and winged police constables controlling airborne traf-fic. Others did. They foresaw the creation of war-planes, robots that clean your house","PeriodicalId":45030,"journal":{"name":"Norwegian Archaeological Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42871822","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/00293652.2022.2073910
C. Fredengren
This paper deals with the deposition of artefact and bodily remains in watery places, such as lakes, rivers and bogs. The research draws on critical feminist posthumanist theory and engages in questions on how necropolitics were linked to the subject formation of the killable, thereby examining changing human-animal relations and their links to situated environments. The paper traces the critical cartographies of the dead and how the dead co-worked in generative and lively worlding practices. This is done by investigating some of the relations that were tied together and undone through such deposition. It deals with questions around sacrifice and the personhood of waters and matters around how ecologies become alive or dead.
{"title":"Worlding Waters with the Dead","authors":"C. Fredengren","doi":"10.1080/00293652.2022.2073910","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00293652.2022.2073910","url":null,"abstract":"This paper deals with the deposition of artefact and bodily remains in watery places, such as lakes, rivers and bogs. The research draws on critical feminist posthumanist theory and engages in questions on how necropolitics were linked to the subject formation of the killable, thereby examining changing human-animal relations and their links to situated environments. The paper traces the critical cartographies of the dead and how the dead co-worked in generative and lively worlding practices. This is done by investigating some of the relations that were tied together and undone through such deposition. It deals with questions around sacrifice and the personhood of waters and matters around how ecologies become alive or dead.","PeriodicalId":45030,"journal":{"name":"Norwegian Archaeological Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45650608","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/00293652.2022.2076609
J. Oliver
For ten months of the year the Black Rock Desert of northwestern Nevada is one of the emptiest spaces in the American West. Between August and October, the silence and vastness of the playa is interrupted by what could be described as a wonder of the modern world: the raising, occupation, and disassembling of Black Rock City; quite possibly the largest seasonally inhabited settlement in the Americas. In the space of a few short weeks, survey teams, machines, shipping containers and porta-potties invade the ‘smooth space’ of this one-time ancient lakebed and transform it into a vast city: ‘striated space’ in the shape of a giant clock, but with the built space forming a semicircle reminiscent of a giant horseshoe. Concentric and radial streets (the latter named for the hours of the day) form city blocks while public plazas punctuate the length and breadth of its great arc. With its infrastructure established the city is ready to meet its festival goers, ‘Burners’, who arrive on mass in a convoy of pickup trucks for the week-long event (in 2019 there were more than 75,000 people). The planned city blocks are then filled by a myriad of camps and provisioning centres. The empty space at the geographic heart of the city forms a grand public plaza and is set aside for Black Rock City’s most famous resident: the ‘Man’, a giant humanoid effigy who will be set ablaze at the festival’s zenith. The ‘burn’ and the carefree expression and chaos that surround it, signifies the climax of the festival, which takes place on a Saturday night. By Monday morning, the entire city will begin to be disassembled. The complex choreography that erected the city is put into reverse. By the middle of October, the city has disappeared and the silence and vastness of the Black Rock Desert returns. The media friendly image of Black Rock city focuses on the immolation of the Man and the spectacle that surround it. But as Carolyn L. White argues in The Archaeology of Burning Man, Black Rock City is much more than the setting for America’s most celebrated summer festival. The contours and temporalities of its urban fabric provide the medium for one of the most ambitious experiments in ‘active site’ archaeology since leading lights in contemporary archaeology came up with the concept earlier this century. What is active site archaeology? If contemporary archaeology is about understanding the very recent past – usually aspects of daily life that we take for granted, but which often go undocumented – active site archaeology puts this into the context of places that are still inhabited and used by people today. This is more than just the study of a lived-in urban setting. As White explains, unlike most archaeology projects, which study abandoned sites, ancient or modern, given that ‘it exists for one week a year, every year’, it ‘provides an accelerated example of the kinds of structures and social situations that people create for themselves’ when they come together, voluntarily, wi
一年中有十个月，内华达州西北部的黑岩沙漠是美国西部最空旷的地方之一。从8月到10月，playa的寂静和广阔被一件可以被描述为现代世界奇迹的事情所打破:黑石城的崛起、占领和解体;很可能是美洲最大的季节性居住地。在短短几周的时间里，勘测团队、机器、集装箱和移动厕所侵入了这个曾经古老的湖床的“平滑空间”，并将其转变为一个巨大的城市:一个巨大时钟形状的“条纹空间”，但建筑空间形成了一个半圆形，让人想起一个巨大的马蹄铁。同心和放射状街道(后者以一天中的小时命名)形成了城市街区，而公共广场则点缀着它的大弧线的长度和宽度。随着基础设施的建立，这座城市已经准备好迎接节日的观众，“燃烧者”，他们乘坐皮卡车队来到这里，参加为期一周的活动(2019年有超过75000人)。然后，规划好的城市街区被无数的营地和补给中心填满。城市中心的空地形成了一个巨大的公共广场，留给黑石城最著名的居民:“人”，一个巨大的人形雕像，将在节日的顶峰被点燃。“燃烧”以及围绕它的无忧无虑的表情和混乱，标志着在周六晚上举行的节日的高潮。到周一早上，整个城市将开始被拆解。建立这座城市的复杂编排被颠倒了。到十月中旬，这座城市消失了，黑岩沙漠的寂静和广阔又回来了。媒体对黑石城的友好形象集中在“男人”的牺牲和周围的奇观上。但正如卡洛琳·l·怀特在《火人节的考古学》中所说，黑石城不仅仅是美国最著名的夏季节日的举办地。其城市结构的轮廓和时间性为“活跃遗址”考古学中最雄心勃勃的实验之一提供了媒介，因为当代考古学的领军人物在本世纪初提出了这个概念。什么是活跃遗址考古学?如果说当代考古学是关于理解最近的过去——通常是我们认为理所当然的日常生活的方方面面，但往往没有记录在案——那么活跃遗址考古学则把它放在了今天人们仍然居住和使用的地方的背景下。这不仅仅是对城市生活环境的研究。怀特解释说，与大多数考古项目不同的是，这些考古项目研究的是古代或现代的废弃遗址，因为“它每年都会存在一周”，当人们自愿地在一个有限的、密集的城市环境中聚集在一起时，它“提供了人们为自己创造的各种结构和社会环境的加速例子”。在这个更广泛的背景下，一系列其他问题为本书提供了方向和结构。人们在这个城市是怎样生活的?伯纳生命的物质特征是什么?人们是如何设置权宜空间的?在这些空间里什么是重要的?六个内容丰富的章节带领我们进行了一次民族志之旅——其他人称之为“考古民族志”(Harrison and Schofield 2010，第91页)——通过跟踪黑石城的建设、占领和拆除周期，了解了黑石城的物质性和空间性。白色受到宾福德民族考古学的影响，其特点是详细
{"title":"The Archaeology of Burning Man. The Rise and Fall of Black Rock City","authors":"J. Oliver","doi":"10.1080/00293652.2022.2076609","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00293652.2022.2076609","url":null,"abstract":"For ten months of the year the Black Rock Desert of northwestern Nevada is one of the emptiest spaces in the American West. Between August and October, the silence and vastness of the playa is interrupted by what could be described as a wonder of the modern world: the raising, occupation, and disassembling of Black Rock City; quite possibly the largest seasonally inhabited settlement in the Americas. In the space of a few short weeks, survey teams, machines, shipping containers and porta-potties invade the ‘smooth space’ of this one-time ancient lakebed and transform it into a vast city: ‘striated space’ in the shape of a giant clock, but with the built space forming a semicircle reminiscent of a giant horseshoe. Concentric and radial streets (the latter named for the hours of the day) form city blocks while public plazas punctuate the length and breadth of its great arc. With its infrastructure established the city is ready to meet its festival goers, ‘Burners’, who arrive on mass in a convoy of pickup trucks for the week-long event (in 2019 there were more than 75,000 people). The planned city blocks are then filled by a myriad of camps and provisioning centres. The empty space at the geographic heart of the city forms a grand public plaza and is set aside for Black Rock City’s most famous resident: the ‘Man’, a giant humanoid effigy who will be set ablaze at the festival’s zenith. The ‘burn’ and the carefree expression and chaos that surround it, signifies the climax of the festival, which takes place on a Saturday night. By Monday morning, the entire city will begin to be disassembled. The complex choreography that erected the city is put into reverse. By the middle of October, the city has disappeared and the silence and vastness of the Black Rock Desert returns. The media friendly image of Black Rock city focuses on the immolation of the Man and the spectacle that surround it. But as Carolyn L. White argues in The Archaeology of Burning Man, Black Rock City is much more than the setting for America’s most celebrated summer festival. The contours and temporalities of its urban fabric provide the medium for one of the most ambitious experiments in ‘active site’ archaeology since leading lights in contemporary archaeology came up with the concept earlier this century. What is active site archaeology? If contemporary archaeology is about understanding the very recent past – usually aspects of daily life that we take for granted, but which often go undocumented – active site archaeology puts this into the context of places that are still inhabited and used by people today. This is more than just the study of a lived-in urban setting. As White explains, unlike most archaeology projects, which study abandoned sites, ancient or modern, given that ‘it exists for one week a year, every year’, it ‘provides an accelerated example of the kinds of structures and social situations that people create for themselves’ when they come together, voluntarily, wi","PeriodicalId":45030,"journal":{"name":"Norwegian Archaeological Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42719540","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/00293652.2022.2101938
Karin Tansem
Since its discovery in the 1970s, the rich rock art assemblage of Alta, Northern Norway, has been increasingly examined and interpreted. Central to the interpretations are topics such as ritual, circumpolar cosmology, landscapes and communication. The interpretative frame of reference has grown steadily, while discussions and disagreements have been surprisingly few. This paper argues that the outcome of this is a broad but still closely related set of understandings that define the kind of interpretations that qualify as likely or eligible. The paper offers a critical view on how ethnographic sources as well as concepts such as circumpolarity, rituals, and shamanism are mobilized in this interpretative formation. It also questions the increasingly more profound and intricate understandings of the rock art as a world-shaping and mediating tool. The interpretative imperative of finding a ‘deeper meaning’ is discussed and alternative approaches to rock art suggested.
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Pub Date : 2022-06-13DOI: 10.1080/00293652.2022.2068157
A. Sörman, Karin Ojala
This paper explores the use of iron in the Late Bronze Age and the earliest Iron Age (c. 1100–300 BC) in south-eastern Sweden, with a focus on the final Bronze Age and Pre-Roman Iron Age I. The aim is to study how early iron was used, valued and perceived, particularly in relation to pre-existing bronze and gold. Choosing iron for certain object types, such as dress attributes and arm rings, and in key symbols, notably the spiral, suggests an appreciation for its metallic shine and colour in contrast to bronze. This silvery lustre was in some cases exploited intentionally, and may sometimes have been associated with the moon in a celestial mythology. The lunar connection might have been accentuated by the origin of iron from bodies of water, which were surrounded by strong beliefs and were often the focus of sacrificial depositions in this period. The qualities sought after in iron during the Bronze Age–Iron Age transition were in some ways different from those appreciated later in Iron Age and historical times. It is necessary to further consider early iron in its contemporary setting without comparison to the ‘successful’ adaptation in the late Pre-Roman Iron Age onwards.
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Pub Date : 2022-06-13DOI: 10.1080/00293652.2022.2071332
M. Eriksen
sets out, on the very first
从第一个开始
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