Archaeological remains are ‘fragmented by definition’: apart from exceptional cases, the study of the human past takes into account mainly traces, ruins, discards, and debris of past civilizations. It is rare that things have been preserved as they were originally made and conceived in the past. However, not all the ancient fragmentary objects were the ‘leftovers’ from the past. A noticeable portion of them was part and parcel of the ancient materiality already in the form of a fragment or damaged item. In 2000, John Chapman, with his volume Fragmentation in Archaeology, attracted the attention of scholars on the need to reconsider broken artifacts as the result of the deliberate anthropic process of physical fragmentation. The phenomenon of fragmentation can be thus explored with more outcomes for a category of objects that played an important role inside the society: the figurines. Due to their portability and size, figurines are particularly entangled and engaged in social, spatial, temporal, and material relations, and – more than other artifacts – can easily accommodate acts of embodiment and dismemberment. The act of creation symmetrically also involves the act of destruction, which in turn is another act of creation, since from the fragmentation comes a new entity with a different ontology. Breaking contains the paradigms of life: creation and reparation, destruction and regeneration. The scope of this volume is to search for traces of any voluntary and intentional fragmentation of ancient artifacts, creating, improving, and sharpening the methods and principles for a scientific investigation that goes beyond single author impression or sensitivity. The comparative lens adopted in this volume can allow the reader to explore different fields taken from ancient societies of how we can address, assess, detect, and even discuss the action of breaking and mutilation of ancient figurines.
The book discusses the creative mental processes of the prehistoric and contemporaryartists, as well as of the archaeologists studying them from the perspective ofcognition and art. Its intention is to highlight the artistic thinking within theimagination of the archaeologist, as well as to discuss the concepts of imagination andart in the current scientific research.From this perspective the book suggests a type of research closer to the complexity ofthe human nature and human thinking that can approach cultural and psychologicalsubjects ignored until now.It is hoped that one of the results of the book will be the formulation of new meaningsfor art from the perspective of archaeology.Responding to the recent ongoing growing interest in the art-archaeology interaction,the editor has carefully selected papers written by a series of eminent European andAmerican scholars with a background in ancient and contemporary art, symbolicthinking, semiotics, and archaeological imagination, with the intention of introducingnew arguments and discussions into the emerging art-archaeology discourse. Thebook is composed of three parts: “Art and the ancient mind”, “Experiencing theancient mind”, and “Exploring the act of creation”.
The result is the present volume comprising 26 studies organized in three major sections related to regional studies on adornments, and their use and presence in everyday life and afterlife. Within one section, papers were organized in chronological order. The papers in the volume cover geographically the whole of Europe and Anatolia: from Spain to Russia and from Latvia to Turkey; it spans chronologically many millennia, from the Middle Palaeolithic to the Iron Age (2nd – 4th centuries AD). The volume opens with ten regional studies offering not only comprehensive syntheses of various chronological horizons (Palaeolithic – Daniella E. Bar-Yosef Mayer, Neolithic/Chalcolithic – Emma L. Baysal; Fotis Ifantidis; Selena Vitezović and Dragana Antonović; Sanda Băcueț Crișan and Ancuța Bobînă; Andreea Vornicu-Țerna and Stansislav Țerna; Roberto Micheli) but also new data on the acquisition and working of various raw materials or specific types of adornments (Columbella rustica shells – Emanuela Cristiani, Andrea Zupancich and Barbara Cvitkusić; wild boar tusk – Ekaterina Kashina and Aija Macāne; canid tooth pendants – Petar Zidarov). The unbreakable link between adornments of the everyday life and those of the afterlife it is also highlighted in some of the contributions. The following section – Adornments in settlement archaeology – includes nine studies, covering the archaeological evidence from specific settlement sites. Many studies focused on the adornments’ iconographic designs, meaning, and exchange but also on raw materials, technologies of production and systems of attachment. Chronology-wise, this section brings together the most varied range of ornaments, raw materials and processing techniques from sites in Spain (Esteban Álvarez-Fernández), Turkey (Sera Yelözer and Rozalia Christidou), Greece (Catherine Perlès and Patrick Pion; Christoforos Arampatzis) and Romania (Adina Boroneanț and Pavel Mirea; Ioan Alexandru Bărbat, Monica Mărgărit and Marius Gheorghe Barbu; Monica Mărgărit, Mihai Gligor, Valentin Radu and Alina Bințințan; Gheorghe Lazarovici and Cornelia-Magda Lazarovici; Vasile Diaconu). The last section – Adornments of the afterlife – focuses on ornaments identified in various funerary contexts allowing for a more detailed biography of ornaments through mostly use- and micro-wear studies, in order to reconstruct their production sequence and use life. Raw material availability and their properties, as well as contexts of deposition are also taken into account. In the seven studies of the section, different funerary contexts from Latvia (Lars Larsson), Ukraine (Nataliia Mykhailova), Hungary (Zsuzsanna Tóth) and Romania (Monica Mărgărit, Cristian Virag and Alexandra Georgiana Diaconu; Vlad-Ștefan Cărăbiși, Anca-Diana Popescu, Marta Petruneac, Marin Focşăneanu, Daniela Cristea-Stan and Florin Constantin; Dragoş Măndescu; Lavinia Grumeza) are discussed.
The Oxford Handbook of Prehistoric Figurines is the first text to offer a comparative survey of figurines from across the globe, bringing together myriad contemporary research approaches to provide invaluable insights into their function, context, meaning, and use, as well as past thinking on the human body, gender, and identity.
First comprehensive consideration of the role, function, social context and significance of pots shaped to mimic the human body or parts thereof among prehistoric communities
This is a collection of twenty-one papers deriving from talks given at conferences of the European Association of Archaeologists in 1997 and 1998. The papers discuss specific issues and case studies involving questions of "cult" and religion in the pre- and protohistory of southeast Europe and the Mediterranean, looking at sites in Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia, Moravia, Italy and Greece, southern Russia and Iberia, amongst others. The papers have been divided into three thematic sections: Symbols of the Other World: Representation and Imagery; Sacred or Profane: Conceptions of Cult Places; and Life and Death: Interpreting Mortuary Practice. As the editors note, studying prehistoric religion is an ambiguous procedure, necessarily mixing the practices of archaeology, anthropology, religious studies and psychology. Yet they anticipate the creation of a generally accepted theoretical framework for the archaeology of cult and religion, a method for reconstructing past belief systems from the contextual evidence of material culture, thus dragging the archaeology of religion back into the academic mainstream. The diverse range of methodological practices represented by these papers clearly highlight the difficulties involved in realising this objective.
Eastern Europe, in this book, embraces the area formally referred to as the ‘Marchlands of Europe’, sometimes as Eastern Central Europe, and which included, when this book was originally published in 1971, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Rumania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany and Poland. This book presented for the first time the archaeological material related to the prehistory of Central and West Europe, describing the evidence for the earlier prehistory – settlement patterns, means of subsistence and material culture – in the various natural environments of this area. It looks at the Baltic coast, the north and east European plains, the Carpathian mountain ring, the Danube basin and the Adriatic and Black Sea coasts. The evidence for late Mesolithic hunting-fishing groups is examined, their techniques and their reaction to the introduction and spread of agriculturalists, as well as the development and activities of both food-gatherers and food-producers until the early use and manufacture of metal objects. 3000 years of prehistory are covered in a way which is designed to be intelligible and useful to all those who are interested in prehistory and in eastern Europe.