Materialitas
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Materialitas

Working Stone, Carving Identity

Gabriel Cooney, John Chapman, Blaze O'Connor, John Chapman

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Materialitas

Working Stone, Carving Identity

Gabriel Cooney, John Chapman, Blaze O'Connor, John Chapman

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Stone monuments and objects are highly accessible today and formed a focus for engagement, transformation and re-use in the past. Stone is inextricably linked to ideas of monumentality and remembrance. It formed an active medium in the creation of identities and memory in a range of social contexts and practices, including the embodied, performative and incorporated practices of daily activities and traditions. It can be argued that the material presence and physical character of stone objects and monuments were not only actively harnessed in these encounters, but were also the very stuff from which social relations were derived, perceived and thought through. This volume explores the power and effect of stone through the meanings that emerged out of peoples engagement and encounters with its physical properties. Focused primarily on the Neolithic and Bronze Age of Atlantic Europe it brings together authors working on the materiality (materialitas) of stone via stone objects, rock art, monuments and quarrying activity. This highlights the connections that cross-cut what are traditionally seen as disparate research areas within the archaeological discipline.

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Publisher
Oxbow Books
Year
2009
ISBN
9781782973614
Part 1
Stone Quarries and Monuments
Introduction: Materialitas and the significance of stone
Blaze O’Connor† and Gabriel Cooney
Materials and materiality
The concepts of material engagement and materialisation have come to the fore in archaeological debate about past societies. Renfrew (2005, 159) has argued that these concepts provide us with a more rounded understanding of the nature of the human engagement with the world by seeking to overcome the duality implied in the contrasts of mind:body, cognition:material world. Hence this engagement is seen as not only being based on informed and intelligent action but also involves the use of symbolic values with a social dimension that is specific in time and place. Such an approach also resolves the problematic divide between mind and matter, which might otherwise be seen as hierarchical, with the former imposed on the latter. As inseparable entities, thinking, expressing and feeling takes place in the material world.
Thus, as DeMarrais et al. (1996, 16) put it, materialisation can be seen as: ... ‘The transformation of ideas, values, stories, myths and the like into a physical reality that can take the form of ceremonial events, symbolic objects, monuments and writing…we emphasise the ongoing process of creation and do not assume the primacy of ideas. In fact ideas and norms are encapsulated as much in their practice and in the conditions of daily life as in individuals’ minds. To materialise culture is to participate in the active, ongoing process of creating and negotiating meaning.’ Hence materialisation emphasises the active interplay between people and their material worlds which contributes a critical part of generating habitus (DeMarrais 2004, 20).
This volume takes as its theme the materiality – or materialitas – of stone (this term was noted by Scarre in 2004, 151). It is focused on the role of material culture in the creation, maintenance and contestation of identities and specifically on people’s engagement with stone. The unifying concept underlying the contributions is that, rather than thinking of stone simply as a blank and passive ‘slate’ (as it were) onto which meanings were inscribed, we can explore its power and effect in terms of the way meanings emerged out of people’s engagement and encounters with its physical properties.
In an important recent discussion, Ingold (2007a) calls for a focus on materials rather than materiality, on the properties of materials as against the materiality of objects. He argues that we need to work practically with materials if we want to learn more about the material composition of the inhabited world (Ingold 2007a, 3). This is not the place to comment in detail on Ingold’s perspective or its critique (Tilley 2007; Knappett 2007; Miller 2007; Nilsson 2007), but rather to agree with Knappett (2007, 20–2) that there is no necessary opposition between materiality and materials. We would argue that we need both to engage with and understand the use of materials in specific social and historical contexts and to work practically with and understand the particular properties of different materials that people used (eg, Hodges 1964; Hurcombe 2007).
This focus on both materials and materiality is a theme that runs through the contributions to the volume. The authors explore and identify evidence for people’s relationships with the material world and the particular characteristics and qualities of materials (and their sources). The geographical focus is on Atlantic Europe and chronologically the coverage is primarily on the Neolithic and Bronze Age, with some consideration of the earlier, Mesolithic world. As pointed out above in material terms the emphasis is placed on stone. So why stone?
Romancing the stone
Ingold (2007a, 1) begins his paper by encouraging the reader to find a stone, wet it and then place it on the desk and ends the paper by returning to a discussion of this stone (Ingold 2007a, 15, fig.3). (GC chose one of many pebbles of porphyritic andesite (porphyry) that he has spread around the inside and outside of his office, whilst BOC chose a dark river pebble with a circular quartz vein that had been posted from New Zealand to Britain!). Ingold uses the pebble to back up his argument but what is relevant for the present discussion is his recourse to stone as a material to demonstrate his argument. Stone has featured prominently in the growing literature on materiality and materials. For example, a book that is credited as a key contribution to the recognition of the materiality approach is Tilley’s (2004) The Materiality of Stone. Here Tilley’s work demonstrated the richness of approaches that consider people’s sensuous experience of, and the potential meanings associated with stone, both in its natural and worked states. Furthermore many of the contributions to the archaeological debate about the human engagement with the material world rely on the discussion of stone objects and monuments (eg, Watkins 2004; Scarre 2004).
In seeking to understand this focus on stone in previous relevant discussions, to explain the focus on stone in this volume and to put the contribution it makes to the wider discussion in context, it is relevant to consider stone from a number of perspectives (see Cooney 2008). Stone survives very well and abundantly in the archaeological record, of which – certainly for the prehistoric period – it forms the most durable component (Hurcombe 2007, 146). Hugh MacDiarmid (1992, 178–88) in his poem On a Raised Beach comments that ‘….the world cannot dispense with the stones. They alone are not redundant.’ The permanency of stone, which both facilitate the long survival of stone objects and monuments and is the main reason why it has such a critical role in materialisation, also has significant implications for what it means to work this material. The enduring character of stone allows for the construction of meanings and symbolism that on the one hand promotes the notion of stability and a persisting relationship with the past but on the other facilitates it being open to inscription with new meanings over time, as the past is re-read for the present (Bradley 2002; Earle 2004, 154). In terms of time and duration, there is an interesting contrast with the use of soft materials such as textiles and string. For example, Hardy (2008), drawing on prehistoric and ethnographic evidence, has shown how string and string-making not only offered technical meanings of literally holding things together but also as a daily task, and in many societies an essential requirement, provided the metaphorical basis for shorter-term human relationships and was an important medium for social cohesion. Also, as Weiner and Schneider (1989) have shown, these contrasting types of materials are frequently gendered.
Stone monuments and objects represent material that is both highly accessible to archaeologists today and formed a focus for engagement, transformation and re-use in the past because of its paradoxically enduring yet malleable quality. This enduring character means that stone is inextricably linked to notions of monumentality and remembrance, and formed an active medium in the creation of identities and memory life in a range of social contexts and practices. It can be argued that the material presence and physical character of stone objects and monuments are not only actively harnessed in these encounters but are also the very stuff from which social relations are derived, perceived and thought through. As well as highly visible statements in the form of finished objects and monuments, stone was encountered in the embodied, performative and incorporated practices of daily activities and remembrance traditions (Connerton 1989; Van Dyke & Alcock 2003).
With respect to the complementarity of an understanding of materials and materiality, and in approaching the use of stone in prehistoric societies, we must appreciate the need for both correct petrological identifications on the one hand and the need to move away from our ingrained, modern Western view of stone as neutral and inert on the other. At the most basic level, the petrography of a rock will have a fundamental bearing on the character, scale and range of potential human use of that rock (eg, Garrison 2003). The variety and diversity of rock types, lithologies, texture, colour and physical characteristics indicates that there was potential for stone to be worked and used in a very wide range of ways. But while accepting the centrality of earth science techniques and scientific methodologies to understanding lithic materials and how they were used in the past, we also have to recognise that stone in many societies today and in all probability in the past would have been seen as active, animate and alive with potential power and sacredness (eg, Taçon 1991; Boivin 2004, 4). In embodying the enduring and the incorporal, stone may literally have stood for the ancestors (Helms 2004, 124; Tilley 1996, 323). Hence stones are more than just things; they are animate, objects that can both stir emotion and prompt connections to larger frameworks of meaning (eg, Kahn 1996, 180; Gnecco & Hernández 2008, 443). This ancestral nature of stone and the permanence of its character would again have allowed those connections to reach into the past, whilst its combined transformative yet durable capability also presented possibilities for new directions into the time ahead.
Putting the stones together; pulling the threads together
Given the interpretive potential of stone as an archaeological material and the research interests of the editors in this area (eg, Cooney 2008; O’Connor 2007), it is perhaps not surprising that it was chosen as the focus for an international conference and its proceedings. So the question could quite legitimately be asked; in what way do the papers here contribute to and take the discussion of materialitas further?
Much of the discussion of stone as an archaeological material and as a component of materiality has tended to focus on either objects or monuments. In the case of the former, the coming to the fore of the chaîne opératoire approach, referring to the way in which materials are selected, shaped and transformed into usable cultural products, (Schlanger 2005, 25; Chapman & Gaydarska 2006) and the concept of objects having a life cycle (eg, Appadurai 1986; Edmonds 1995) has tended to lead to a concentration of research on the production and deposition of objects (Bradley 1990, 33). In relation to monuments, the focus has shifted from classification and typology to seeing them as arenas for the gathering of people, ceremonial activity and the exchange of material culture, embedded in the wider social world (Cummings 2008, 155). But despite these innovative approaches, there is still a concentration on specific categories of data and a tendency to value some classes of evidence as having richer interpretive potential than others. For example we tend to privilege objects over débitage, worked stone (cultural) over unworked stone (natural), decorated stone over undecorated stone and monuments over production sites. This seems to miss a fundamental point that has been raised in the debate about materials and materiality; that the use of materials creates a network (Knappett 2007, 22) or meshwork (Ingold 2007b, 35) of relationships linking people and things and it is in the context and complexity of those webs of significance that we have to situate all the varied uses of stone and other materials.
Here, in relation to both materials and materiality, the papers focus on the value of working across traditional categorisations of archaeological evidence by type and scale. Accordingly, the volume draws together research across a diverse range of archaeological sites and materials: megalithic monuments, stone quarries, rock art and portable art, lithic artefacts, and worked and unworked objects. The significant connections between and the overlapping nature of these areas of research will be apparent throughout. What the contributions capture is some of the very exciting evidence arising from the active use and re-use of stone quarrying and carving locations, monuments, natural, worked and carved stone surfaces and quarried and fragmented stone objects. This area forms a rich arena within which current narratives and interpretations are developing and one that recognises the agency and effect of material forms in the creation of social relationships. Hence there are papers that demonstrate links between lithic artefacts and monuments and the stone quarries their materials are sourced from, rock art and the monuments that carvings are incorporated into, the quarrying and the re-use of rock art and megalithic blocks and the very specific ways that outcrops, débitage material and even ‘unaltered’ cobbles were treated in the past.
What links these various scales and categories of stoneworking is technique, and these embodied practices and traditions of stoneworking would have been learned by many people in prehistoric communities. Some techniques would have been carefully transmitted as a body of knowledge down the generations – knapping, cleaving, shaping, pecking, grinding, polishing – whilst others might have been more tacit, learned through unspoken means (eg, gestures, attitudes, customs and routines). They therefore would have formed particularly pertinent and efficacious means of materialising meaning, even in situations and during life events where those meanings may have been difficult to verbalise, such as commemorative ones: engagement with stone would have held deeply embedded connotations, associations and memories for many participants.
Also establishing connections across these scales, and between the chapters in this volume, is the recognition of the prior significance of the stone with which people engaged, before an engagement that left physical traces actually commenced. This provides us with a new way of thinking about the suitability of the stone materials people employed, that extends beyond their structural properties. Stones selected for monuments or used for worked objects have frequently been worked in ways that maintain aspects of their original aesthetic character, despite the existence of technologies and techniques that might have been used to entirely alter their surfaces. There are morphological and visual connections between natural and architectural forms, linking outcrop sources and the monuments that came to be sourced from them. These sources in turn became places deemed suitable for special depositional practices, perhaps sometimes as ‘readymade monuments’. Carvings were frequently made as respectful additions to stone canvasses already replete with (natural) markings, some of which formed equal roles in the compositions alongside the carved forms. The retention of their original shapes, textures, colours, fissures and other features, even their positions in outcrop formations, seem to have been important to those who worked these stones. This raises the idea of stones that were perhaps ‘known’ – spoken of, journeyed to, engaged with, recognised – before the decision was made to work them physically.
This volume is divided into two parts for ease of reference. The first deals with people’s engagement with stone at the monumental level, but includes within this category a range of scales – from massive landscape scale constructions to more subtle pit depositions – and considers both quarrying and architectural practices. Part two considers object-scale engagement with stone, from lithic working to the production of carvings on the surfaces of specific outcrops and boulders. However, as noted above, the overlaps and inter-relationships between these two parts are numerous and their significance should not be underestimated. Inevitably the volume raises the question of the relationship between stone and other materials – earth and ceramics, wood, textiles, water, as well as metals in periods later than that forming the focus in this volume. It also presents approaches that could just as succ...

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