While movement is fundamental to processes that archaeologists study, it also poses some of the greatest challenges: material records—in their many manifestations—rely on stasis as well as movement. Approaching movement entails engaging with scalar problems, as archaeologists “move” between isotopes, populations, artifacts, skeletal remains, infrastructures, texts, subjects and authors, and landscapes. We propose an exploration of the body and embodiment as entry-points into such interpretive challenges. Might the body be a locus at which wildly disparate scales intersect and can be made commensurate?Archaeologists are increasingly theorizing movement and mobility in their analyses of people and things. While engagements with the “new materialism” invite an exploration of the ways in which materials and substances are in flux, studies of globalization and the Anthropocene attend to global flows of people and things. The embodied subject—one that moves, perceives, dreams, does—adds another interpretive challenge in archaeological knowledge-making practices. Perceptions and experiences were not only situated in past bodies, but the reconstruction of those experiences is also situated in the embodied practices of archaeologists.
Organisers: Alanna Warner-Smith (Doctoral Candidate); Department of Anthropology, Syracuse University • Kate Franklin; Department of History, Classics and Archaeology, Birkbeck, University of London
14:00 | Alanna Warner-Smith (Doctoral Candidate), Department of Anthropology, Syracuse University; Kate Franklin, Department of History, Classics and Archaeology, Birkbeck, University of London | Introduction
14:05 | Alanna Warner-Smith (Doctoral Candidate), Department of Anthropology, Syracuse University | Aching Joints, Global Frictions: Preliminary Thoughts on a Bioarchaeology of Pain and Labor
14:15 | Rachael Kiddey PhD, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship Researcher, School of Archaeology, Oxford University | “It can go to Oxford, even if I can’t!”: the material culture of contemporary forced displacement in Europe
14:25 | Alexander Aston, School of Archaeology, University of Oxford | Scale and Scalability: A Novel Perspective on the Emergence of Cycladic Bodies
14:35 | Lesley McFadyen, Department of History, Classics and Archaeology, Birkbeck | The orientation and direction of force: volatile bodies revisited
14:45 | Kate Franklin, Department of History, Classics and Archaeology, Birkbeck, University of London | Silk Road synesthesia: embodied imaginaries and scalar transforms
14:55 | Colleen Morgan PhD, Lecturer in Digital Archaeology and Heritage, Department of Archaeology, The University of York | What and where is the digital body in archaeology?
15:05 | - | BREAK
15:35 | Session organisers | Panel discussion
17:30 | - | END
Speakers AW
Department of Anthropology, Syracuse University
KF
Department of History, Classics and Archaeology, Birkbeck, University of London
RK
School of Archaeology, Oxford University
AA
School of Archaeology, University of Oxford
LM
Department of History, Classics and Archaeology, Birkbeck
Tuesday December 17, 2019 2:00pm - 5:30pm GMT
Room 822
20 Bedford Way, Bloomsbury, London WC1H 0AL