Dear Zooarchers,
My colleagues John Chapman and Bisserka Gaydarska are organising the conference,
whose details you can find below, and they are looking for a zooarchaeologist
prepared to talk about 'Animals, people and homes'. Should you be interested in
participating please do get in touch directly with them (copied in here and
also see email address below).
Cheers,
Umberto
JOINT RESEARCH DAY, PREHISTORIC SOCIETY and DURHAM UNIVERSITY INSTITUTE OF
ADVANCED STUDY & DEPARTMENT OF ARCHAEOLOGY, Durham, 27/II/2010
The creation of ‘homes’ in the earliest farming period in Eurasia
One of the long-term global issues of continuing significance to the human
sciences is the origins of agriculture some 12,000 – 5,000 years ago. One of
the key debates concerning agriultural origins concerns the impact on farming
of sedentism - setting down into permanent communities consisting of
family-sized ‘homes’. There is still considerable disagreement over the causal
priority of sedentism and population growth over agriculture or vice versa, as
indeed on the ideological and symbolic significance of the home in comparison
with settlement and subsistence factors.
While new and general hypotheses purporting to ‘explain’ agricultural origins
continue to appear, a minority of recent approaches to the issue start from the
bottom-up approach of the formation of homes as distinctive places creating
unique relationships with the human groups (households) living there. Novel
approaches focussed on personhood, the biographies of buildings, personal
agency and the objectification of humans in things, structures, plants and
animals have yet to be applied to the homes attested before, at and after the
transition to farming. There is a clear research opportunity to develop a new
framework that will set the agenda of studies in the emergence of agriculture
in any region in the world. This would link homes to the creation of houses, as
well as notions of place, dwelling, land, boundaries, defences, families,
mobilities, senses of security, comfort and belonging. Moreover, such a project
would provide a social context for the innovative reseach into the
bioarchaeology of agricultural origins.
This meeting stems from a High-Level Symposium organised under the aegis of the
Institute of Advanced Study of Durham University and part-funded by the British
Academy, entitled ‘Dwelling in long-term perspective’ (March 2009). We are keen
to develop the broader perspectives established in that meeting within the key
research theme of the origins of Eurasian farming.
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CONFERENCE PROGRAMME
10.00am Mark White (Durham) Welcome
10.10 Alasdair Whittle (Cardiff) ‘The significance of place’
10.50 Glynis Jones (Sheffield) Plants, people and homes
11.15 Coffee / Tea
11.45 xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Animals, people and homes
12.10 Fiona Coward (Royal Holloway) The Levant
12.35 Trevor Watkins (Edinburgh) Anatolia
1.00 Discussion
1.30 Lunch
2.30 Stella Souvatzi (Athens) Greece
2.55 John Chapman (Durham) The Balkans and Hungary:
3.20 Dani Hofmann (Oxford) Central Europe
3.45 Tea / Coffee
4.15 Robin Skeates (Durham) Central Mediterranean
4.40 Chris Scarre (Durham) Atlantic Europe:
5.05 Chris Fowler (Newcastle) Northern Europe:
5.30 General discussion
6.00 Wine reception
7.00 Conference closes
JOHN CHAPMAN [log in to unmask] 0191 3341122
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Umberto Albarella
Department of Archaeology
University of Sheffield
Northgate House
West Street
Sheffield S1 4ET
United Kingdom
Telephone: (+) 44 (0) 114 22 22 943
Fax: (+) 44 (0) 114 27 22 563
http://www.shef.ac.uk/archaeology/staff/albarella.html
For Archaeologists for Global Justice (AGJ) see:
http://www.shef.ac.uk/archaeology/global-justice.html
"only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned
and the last fish been caught we will realise we cannot eat money"
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