Join us in the last 2022-23 GIAP Seminar!
Sixth GIAP Seminar this 2023 will be on June 15, at 18h CET. Open, online session: no need to register, just pop in!
Dr Dan Stewart, from the School of Archaeology and Ancient History, University of Leicester, will hold the talk:
‘Counting the Cost: Time, Event, and Process in Landscape Archaeology’.
Abstract:
This paper wants to interrogate the idea of the archaeological ‘event’ in relation to Landscape Archaeology, especially in relation to Classical Archaeology. In history, the event serves as a node in the construction of a scalar and linear view of time, a point for a discussion of the before and after. In archaeology, ‘event’ has become elided with process and structure (Lucas 2008), as short- to medium-term recurrences of similar activities. In archaeology, ‘event’ as a particular, singular occurrence has fallen by the way-side, and many now use Sewell’s (2005: 227) definition of the event as “sequences of occurrences that result in transformation of structures”.
Within landscape archaeology in particular, it’s easy to see that the data lends itself to the view of event as process or sequence. Pedestrian field survey identifies and records aggregate artefactual data, a smear on the landscape created by repetition through time (Stewart 2013). Geophysical data is the result of different sequences and processes that exist beyond the particular – no matter the method, it doesn’t measure points in time but relationships between contrasting materials that are the result of decades and centuries of varying but repeating processes, both cultural and natural. Despite this, our visualisations of that data are rooted in the historical notion of event: a Roman phase, a Hellenistic destruction, a Classical sherd; the particular and not the process often take precedence in the presentation of interpretation.
Keywords: Knossos, Field Survey, Legacy Data, Greece, Landscape Archaeology, Geophysics.
Access the webinar here: https://bit.ly/JoinGIAPseminars
No registration is required. Hosted in Microsoft Teams (no Microsoft/Teams account needed).
* Leaflet’s background picture: Survey tape at Knossos, 2016. Courtesy of Dr. Stewart.
Check here full GIAP Seminars 2023 calendar
About the seminars
Born in 2021, the GIAP Seminars are organised by our predoctoral and postdoctoral researchers as a reflection of their current research interests. We aim to provide glimpses of original and current research across the world, opening up new horizons in Landscape, Computational and Palaeoenvironmental Archaeology, and Bioarchaeology.
Regardless of career stage or academic position, we invite prominent researchers that reflect the interdisciplinarity and diversity of the field. Overall, the GIAP Seminars are an excellent opportunity to foster talent, broaden interests and network.
The 2023 series is organised by: Theoni Baniou, Konstantina Venieri & Maria Ferrer Bonet.
