Material culture surrounds us and yet is habitually overlooked. So integral is it to our everyday lives that we take it for granted. This attitude has also afflicted the academic analysis of material ...culture, although this is now beginning to change, with material culture recently emerging as a topic in its own right within the social sciences. Carl Knappett seeks to contribute to this emergent field by adopting a wide-ranging interdisciplinary approach that is rooted in archaeology and integrates anthropology, sociology, art history, semiotics, psychology, and cognitive science. His thesis is that humans both act and think through material culture; ways of knowing and ways of doing are ingrained within even the most mundane of objects. This requires that we adopt a relational perspective on material artifacts and human agents, as a means of characterizing their complex interdependencies. In order to illustrate the networks of meaning that result, Knappett discusses examples ranging from prehistoric Aegean ceramics to Zande hunting nets and contemporary art.Thinking Through Material Cultureargues that, although material culture forms the bedrock of archaeology, the discipline has barely begun to address how fundamental artifacts are to human cognition and perception. This idea of codependency among mind, action, and matter opens the way for a novel and dynamic approach to all of material culture, both past and present.
The diverse forms of regional connectivity in the ancient world have recently become an important focus for those interested in the deep history of globalisation. This volume represents a significant ...contribution to this new trend as it engages thematically with a wide range of connectivities in the later prehistory of the Mediterranean, from the later Neolithic of northern Greece to the Levantine Iron Age, and with diverse forms of materiality, from pottery and metal to stone and glass. With theoretical overviews from leading thinkers in prehistoric mobilities, and commentaries from top specialists in neighbouring domains, the volume integrates detailed case studies within a comparative framework. The result is a thorough treatment of many of the key issues of regional interaction and technological diversity facing archaeologists working across diverse places and periods. As this book presents key case studies for human and technological mobility across the eastern Mediterranean in later prehistory, it will be of interest primarily to Mediterranean archaeologists, though also to historians and anthropologists.
Material Agency Malafouris, Lambros; Knappett., Carl
2008, 20080730
eBook
Agency is a key theme that cross-cuts a wide raft of disciplines in the humanities, social sciences and beyond, yet it is invariably discussed separately behind closed disciplinary doors. Within ...archaeology, agency has been characterized as a uniquely human attribute, and a means of incorporating individual intentionality into theoretical discourse. In other domains, however, notions of non-human and material agency have been finding currency, and it is our aim to introduce some of these themes into archaeology and develop a non-anthropocentric approach to agency. It is anticipated that such a perspective will not only help us achieve more convincing interpretations of the past, giving a more active role to material culture, but also throw new light on the changing role of artifacts in the present and the future. This book is a groundbreaking attempt to address questions of non-human and material agency from a wide range of perspectives and disciplines: archaeology, anthropology, sociology, cognitive science, philosophy, and economics. The editors and authors demostrate that a distributed, relational approach to agency, incorporating both humans and artifacts, has important ramifications for how we understand material culture.
Full text
Available for:
FIS, FZAB, GEOZS, GIS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, MFDPS, NUK, OBVAL, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, SBMB, SBNM, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK, VKSCE, ZAGLJ
Agricultural production and the palatial redistribution of staples have played a key role in the debate concerning the emergence of social complexity in Minoan Crete. However, much
of the focus has ...fallen on major settlements where such products were consumed, rather than on the landscape where agricultural surplus was produced. While there is no shortage of
landscape surveys on Crete, their emphasis has typically been on the distribution of rural settlements instead of on identifying landscape structures and arrangements—such as
terraces, enclosures, and field systems—that might provide data about a territory's economic focus. A key aim of the new survey at Palaikastro has been to address this bias. By
combining extensive archaeological survey with differential GPS (DGPS) measurements, high-resolution aerial photography, and microrelief generation and analysis, the project has
identified hundreds of structures, forming an almost continuous fossilized landscape and providing important clues on landscape management practices. The results highlight the
importance of pastoral practices, to which a large part of the landscape was dedicated. Agricultural arrangements were also documented in the form of terraced areas adapted for
dryland agriculture and reflecting concerns for soil retention. We argue that a highly structured landscape, indicative of pressures in land use, was established during the Middle
and Late Minoan periods across Palaikastro's territory.
This article is also available as open access on AJA Online.
Full text
Available for:
BFBNIB, INZLJ, NMLJ, NUK, PNG, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK, ZRSKP
Later prehistory in Eurasia is characterised by a suite of radical new technologies that include metallurgy, writing, and the wheel. Their emergence has often been attributed to the dramatically ...improved efficiencies they offer. This paper argues that instrumental accounts underplay the aesthetic qualities of technical action that have considerable bearing on how technologies emerge. In archaeology, the aesthetics of techniques finds limited recognition. Here, thinking on 'cultural techniques' from media theory, the French tradition in the anthropology of techniques, and notions of skill and learning from ecological psychology are combined to develop the aesthetic perspective required for exploring the relationship between technical action, the experience of technological wonder, and the formation of lasting infrastructures. The paper concludes that some emergent technologies create a convergence of different zones of activity, generating the growing infrastructural integration that characterises later Eurasian prehistory.
Full text
Available for:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
While the study of networks has grown exponentially in the past decade and is now having an impact on how archaeologists study ancient societies, its emergence in the field has been dislocated. This ...book provides a coherent framework on network analysis in current archaeological practice by pulling together its main themes and approaches to show how it is changing the way archaeologists face the key questions of regional interaction. Working with the term ‘network’ as a collection of nodes and links, as used in network science and social network analysis, it juxtaposes a range of case studies and investigates the positives and negatives of network analysis. With contributions by leading experts in the field, the volume covers a broad range: from Japan to America, from the Palaeolithic to the Precolumbian.
While network techniques are now used with some frequency in archaeology for tackling questions of connectivity and mobility at regional and inter-regional scales, they are still somewhat ...underexploited for more local scales. The considerable potential for multiscalar analysis has recently seen some progress, however, wedded to the idea of communities of practice. In this paper, I consider how this multiscalar approach could aid in the study of ancient globalizations, with the particular case of Minoanization from the Aegean Bronze Age. Although this specific problem has seen some network applications, they have mostly not been multiscalar in nature. I address some of the reasons for this state of affairs, using a distinction between "theory" and "data" models—and suggest some possible outcomes of a more explicitly multiscalar approach to Minoanization.
Full text
Available for:
BFBNIB, DOBA, EMUNI, FIS, FZAB, GEOZS, GIS, IJS, IMTLJ, IZUM, KILJ, KISLJ, MFDPS, NLZOH, NMLJ, NUK, OBVAL, OILJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, SBMB, SBNM, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK, VKSCE, ZAGLJ
Full text
Available for:
BFBNIB, FZAB, GIS, IJS, INZLJ, KILJ, NLZOH, NMLJ, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK, ZRSKP
10.
From Coastscapes to Small Worlds Carl Knappett
South by Southeast: The History and Archaeology of Southeast Crete from Myrtos to Kato Zakros,
09/2022
Book Chapter
I begin not with the Southeast of Crete, but the Northeast. Here we find sites dotted regularly along the coast from Malia and Sissi, to Priniatikos Pyrgos, Gournia, Mochlos, and Pseira, to ...Papadiakambos and Petras, and then around Cavo Sidero to Palaikastro. Looking at this spread of sites it is hard to imagine maritime access not being a major factor in site location for Minoan settlements of whatever period. Furthermore, it is also easily imaginable how various kinds of interaction at multiple scales could have stimulated the position of such sites – from the very local level, to an intermediate
