EAA 2020
Budapest
26-30 August
Session #161
Shaping Cultural Landscapes:
Connecting Agriculture, Crafts, Construction, Transport, and Resilience Strategies
Theme
1. Networks, networking, communication: archaeology of interactions
Format
Session with keynote presentation and discussion
Organisers
Ann Brysbaert (Netherlands) and Jari Pakkanen (United Kingdom)
Any activity requires the expenditure of energy, and the larger the scale of the undertakings, the more careful and strategic planning in advance is required. In focusing on labouring by humans and other animals, this session investigates how past people achieved their multiple daily tasks while remaining resilient in anticipation of adverse events and periods. It investigates the minimum resource requirements of combined activities of conducting agriculture, crafts, constructing houses and monumental buildings, and how the available resources were employed successfully. Multi-layered data can be employed to illuminate the many interconnected networks of humans and resources that impacted on people’s day-to-day activities, but also to discuss the economic, cultural and socio-political relationships over time in different regions.
We aim to discuss novel perspectives in which the landscape in its widest sense is connected to interdisciplinary architectural and/or crafting perspectives. Rural landscapes and their populace formed the backbone of pre-industrial societies. Analyses of the rural ‘hinterland’, the foci of cities and other central places (often with monumental architecture) and the communication between these are essential for the papers of this session. These different agents and phenomena and their connections are crucial to our understanding how political units functioned at several socially interconnected levels. Bottom-up approaches can dissolve “monolithic” understandings of societies, the elite-labour/farmer and the centre/rural dichotomies because the many social groups co-depended on each other, albeit perhaps in unequal measure depending on the given context.
This session aims to discuss how the landscapes were modified through building, agriculture and other activities, mobility, transportation and infrastructure, land-use and resilience strategies, and carrying capacities. We welcome case studies that investigate rural and urban populations and their interactions with their land, their built environments and their societies.
Keynote Speakers
Prof. Ch. Scarre & Prof. Paul Erdkamp
Keywords
culturally modified landscapes, cross-craft interaction, labour cost studies, mobility and transport, resilience strategies