Tracking the social lives of things: biographical insights into Bronze Age pottery in Spain

Antiquity ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 88 (340) ◽  
pp. 441-455 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonio Blanco-González
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Living Organism ◽  
Late Bronze Age ◽  
Central Spain ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Social Lives ◽  
The Social ◽  
Biographical Approach ◽  
Coarse Wares ◽  
The Individual

Pottery has sometimes been compared to a living organism in its cycle of birth, life and death or discard. A biographical approach to an unusual assemblage of pottery from the Late Bronze Age site of Pico Castro in central Spain suggests that they had been used together at a communal feast. The shared social memory that they acquired thereby conferred on them a special status that resulted in their eventual placement in the pit, fine wares and coarse wares together. Thus the varied biographies of the individual vessels—and the individual sherds—eventually converged not only in their discard but in the episodes that preceded it.

scholarly journals 5. White Hair and Feeding Bottles: Exploring Interactions Between Children and the Elderly in the Late Bronze Age Aegean

AmS-Skrifter ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 61-76
Author(s):  
Chrysanthi Gallou
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
The Elderly ◽  
Late Bronze Age ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
The Social ◽  
And Gender ◽  
First Time ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Shed Light

Scholarship on age and gender in prehistoric Greece has taken an adult-centric approach with focus placed mostly on young to middle-aged men and women and, as a result, two significant age groups – children and the elderly – have been widely neglected. Lacking a strong insight into attitudes that were shown towards these two age groups, however means that archaeologists do not really harbour a concept of the whole span of life in the cultures that developed in the Aegean region during the Late Bronze Age. Making children and the elderly visible in the archaeological record and examining their social roles, agency and interactions is vital for a better understanding of the social workings of the prehistoric Aegean world. Integrating an interdisciplinary methodology with a systematic study of the available material remains – ranging from the study of funerary contexts to iconographic sources and textual references, this study seeks to assess the evidence for childhood and old age in the Late Bronze Age Aegean, and to shed light − for the first time − on the interactions between the younger and older segments of the population in both life and death from the mid-seventeenth to the twelfth centuries BC.

Fragmentation, Personhood and the Social Construction of Technology in Middle and Late Bronze Age Britain

2006 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 297-315 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna Brück
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
Bronze Age ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Late Bronze Age ◽  
Social Construction Of Technology ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Bronze Age

This article examines a range of practices involving the deliberate fragmentation of human bodies and objects in Middle and Late Bronze Age Britain. Focusing on evidence from settlements and mortuary sites, it is suggested that metaphorical links were drawn between people and things, and that productive processes such as potting and metallurgy provided potent metaphors for the construction of the human self. Building on these points, it is argued that current models which posit the rise of an ideology of the ‘individual’ during the Bronze Age may be inappropriate in this cultural context.

AESTHETIC AND ART EDUCATION AS A SOCIOCULTURAL PHENOMENON

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 6-17
Author(s):  
S. I. Kolbysheva ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Art Education ◽  
Informal Education ◽  
Social Role ◽  
Leisure Activities ◽  
Living Organism ◽  
Cultural Value ◽  
The Social ◽  
Human Creativity ◽  
Classical Culture ◽  
The Individual

The article analyzes the phenomenon of aesthetic and art education in the context of postnon- classical culture, which most fully reflects the peculiarities of the worldview orientations and values of a modern man, and is a kind of reference point for determining the scientific and theoretical basis for the development of this phenomenon at the present time. The article reveals the reasons for strengthening the social role of aesthetic and art education, which connects it with the values of the family, leisure activities and informal education. Aesthetic and art education is considered as a “living” organism that is in constant motion, able to respond to sociocultural changes, and in its rhizomaticity does not ignore the heterogeneity of the surrounding world; as an integral component of education in general, which is found in the community of key tasks focused on “human creativity” in the context of value and meaning categories of culture. It is justified the shift from information and knowledge pedagogy to pedagogy of meaning, actualizing the importance of processes of self-identification, harmonizing the relationship between man and the world, itself based on the parity of dialogical forms of cognition; the transfer of dynamics of artistic and creative activities to the internal world of the individual and the updating on this basis of strategies of irrational thinking. In conclusion, the author is concerned about the level of humanitarian culture in the society and studies aesthetic and art education as an effective mechanism for its development, as a general cultural value internalized by society.

scholarly journals The Social Role of Non-metal ‘Valuables’ in Late Bronze Age Britain

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 665-688 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna Brück ◽  
Alex Davies
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Social Role ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Early Bronze Age ◽  
Late Bronze Age ◽  
Cultural Meanings ◽  
Social Agents ◽  
Prestige Goods ◽  
The Social

Bronze Age metal objects are widely viewed as markers of wealth and status. Items of other materials, such as jet, amber and glass, tend either to be framed in similar terms as ‘prestige goods’, or to be viewed as decorative trifles of limited research value. In this paper, we argue that such simplistic models dramatically underplay the social role and ‘agentive’ capacities of objects. The occurrence of non-metal ‘valuables’ in British Early Bronze Age graves is well-documented, but their use during the later part of the period remains poorly understood. We will examine the deposition of objects of amber, jet and jet-like materials in Late Bronze Age Britain, addressing in particular their contexts and associations as well as patterns of breakage to consider the cultural meanings and values ascribed to such items and to explore how human and object biographies were intertwined. These materials are rarely found in burials during this period but occur instead on settlements, in hoards and caves. In many cases, these finds appear to have been deliberately deposited in the context of ritual acts relating to rites of passage. In this way, the role of such objects as social agents will be explored, illuminating their changing significance in the creation of social identities and systems of value.

Grave Structures and Altars: Archaeological Traces of Bronze Age Eschatological Conceptions

1998 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anders Kaliff
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Early Iron Age ◽  
Late Bronze Age ◽  
Burial Site ◽  
Mortuary Practice ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Southern Scandinavia ◽  
Different Types ◽  
People’S Perceptions

Mortuary practice can be interpreted as a system of rituals based on people's perceptions of life and death. There is a great deal to suggest the prehistoric find sites we usually call cemeteries also had an important function as ritual sites. Several types of structure occurring at cemeteries from the late Bronze Age and the early Iron Age in southern Scandinavia favour a broader interpretation of these sites. This article is based on the results of the excavated ritual and burial site at Ringeby in Kvillinge parish, Östergötland, an excavation which was undertaken with the express purpose of studying the archaeology of religion. The article also includes a general discussion of the concept of ‘grave’ and different types of structure which can be interpreted as places for cults.

THE KING'S MEN IN UGARIT AND SOCIETY IN LATE BRONZE AGE SYRIA

2002 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ignacio Márquez Rowe
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Debt Service ◽  
Late Bronze Age ◽  
Social Categories ◽  
The Social ◽  
Modern Economic ◽  
King's Men ◽  
New Interpretation ◽  
Cette Notion

AbstractThis paper examines the sector of society generally known as the "palace dependents" in Late Bronze Age Syria. The discussion, however, is not centred on the notion itself (and the whole model of two economically divided sectors of society), but rather on the empirical evidence found in the cuneiform archives of Ugarit, Alalakh and Emar. Therefore, the social designations "king's man" in Ugarit (Ugaritic bunušu malki), and (Hurrian) eǵelli in Alalakh are revaluated, with the result of a new interpretation which seems to find confirmation in the terminology used in Emar. Rather than a designation based on modern economic notions, the dependent nature of these social categories seems to reveal a juridical ground, namely antichretic debt service. Cet article examine le secteur de la société connu généralement comme les "dépendants du palais" en Syrie à l'âge du Bronze récent. L'étude, cependant, n'est pas centrée autour de cette notion-ci (ou de l'idée plus générale qui met en cause une division bipartite de la société selon des critères d'ordre économique), mais vise plutôt à analyser l'évidence empirique des textes cunéiformes d'Ougarit, Alalakh et Emar. Il s'agit, donc, d'un réexamen de la terminologie sociale: d'une part les "hommes du roi" à Ougarit (en Ougaritique, bunušu malki), et, d'autre part, la désignation hourrite eǵelli à Alalakh. Le résultat c'est une nouvelle interprétation qui semble trouver une certaine confirmation dans la propre terminologie attestée à Emar. Plutôt qu'une terminologie basée sur des notions économiques modernes, la nature dépendante de ces catégories sociales semblent révéler une base d'ordre juridique, notamment le service antichrétique pour dettes.

scholarly journals Objects with Attitude: Biographical Facts and Fallacies in the Study of Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Warrior Graves

2002 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-232 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Whitley
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Early Iron Age ◽  
Late Bronze Age ◽  
Cultural Changes ◽  
Or Practice ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Burial Rituals

Aegean prehistory still has to deal with the legacy of ‘Homeric archaeology’. One of these legacies is the ‘warrior grave’, or practice of burying individuals (men?) with weapons which we find both in the Late Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age in the Aegean. This article suggests that the differences between the ‘weapon burial rituals’ in these two periods can tell us much about the kind of social and cultural changes that took place across the Bronze Age/Iron Age ‘divide’ of c. 1100 BC. In neither period, however, can items deposited in ‘warrior graves’ be seen as straightforward biographical facts that tell us what the individual did and suffered in life. Rather, the pattern of grave goods should be seen as a metaphor for a particular kind of identity and ideal. It is only in the Early Iron Age that this identity begins to correspond to the concept of the ‘hero’ as described in the Iliad. One means towards our better understanding of this new identity is to follow up work in anthropology on the biography of objects. It is argued that the ‘life cycle’ of ‘entangled objects’, a cycle which ends in deposition in a grave, provides us with indispensable clues about the nature of new social identities in Early Iron Age Greece.

scholarly journals Hunting Warriors: The Transformation of Weapons, Combat Practices and Society during the Bronze Age in Ireland

2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 280-316 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry P.C. Molloy
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Peer Relations ◽  
Social Activity ◽  
Late Bronze Age ◽  
Martial Art ◽  
The Social ◽  
Training Resources ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Bronze Age

Warfare is increasingly considered to have been a major field of social activity in prehistoric societies, in terms of the infrastructures supporting its conduct, the effects of its occurrence, and its role in symbolic systems. In the Bronze Age many of the weapon forms that were to dominate battlefields for millennia to come were first invented—shields and swords in particular. Using the case study of Ireland, developments in Bronze Age warfare are traced from the Early to the Late Bronze Age. It is argued that during this period there was a move from warfare that made use of projectiles and impact weapons to warfare that used both defensive and cutting weapons. This formed the basis for a fundamental reorganization in combat systems. This in turn stimulated change in the social organization of warfare, including investment in material and training resources for warriors and the development of new bodily techniques reflecting fundamental changes in martial art traditions. Metalwork analysis of bronze weapons and experimental archaeology using replicas of these are used to support this position. The article explores how developments in fighting techniques transformed the sociality of violence and peer-relations among warriors and proposes that these warriors be regarded as a category of craft specialist exerting significant social influence by the Late Bronze Age.

Petrological Examination of Coarse-ware Stirrup-jars from Mycenae

1981 ◽  
Vol 76 ◽  
pp. 335-340 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. A. Riley
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Elemental Analysis ◽  
Optical Emission ◽  
Emission Spectrometry ◽  
Late Bronze Age ◽  
Geological Evidence ◽  
Spectrometry Analysis ◽  
Objective Evidence ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Coarse Wares

Elemental analysis of coarse-ware stirrup-jars from Thebes provided the first objective evidence for the movement of coarse wares in the Late Bronze Age Aegean. While the evidence of the optical emission spectrometry analysis indicates that stirrup-jars occur in several fabrics, the assignation of these fabrics to specific sources has been the subject of some debate, summarized and discussed in the light of fresh evidence by Catling and Jones but continued by McArthur.It was to cast more light on the general questions that a large sample of stirrup-jars from Mycenae was analysed by petrological analysis. This method of analysis involves the identification of the rocks and minerals within the clay and relates them to geological sources most compatible with the archaeological evidence. Recent discussions of the method include Courtois, Peacock, and de Paepe.With considerable help and collaboration from Dr. E. French and Lord William Taylour, and permission from the Greek Department of Antiquities, 37 samples were taken from stirrup jars from the House of the Wine Merchants (= HWM; dated LH IIIA/B), 25 from the House of the Oil Merchants (= HOM; dated to the end of LH IIIB1), and ten samples from stoppers found in the stirrup jars in the House of the Oil Merchants. The aim was to define the fabrics petrologically in order to relate these to the typology proposed by Haskell (this volume), and to suggest possible origins for them based on geological evidence.

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