Research Archive - ReForm

Ceramics in Cyprus: attending the ICAS-EMME

Andreas Angourakis — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 13:31:00 +0000

Ceramics in Cyprus: attending the ICAS-EMME

Attending the International Congress on Archaeological Sciences in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East (ICAS-EMME) in Nicosia (May 2024) was a great place to share some of the results from my PhD project. As a representative of ReForm, I had the opportunity to present my research on the prehistoric settlement of Dzedzvebi, Georgia, specifically focusing on the analysis of materials from Iron Age pits. The conference provided a platform to exchange ideas with esteemed scholars and researchers, broadening my understanding of the region’s archaeological dynamics.

The session I participated in, dedicated to premodern plasters and ceramics, was a great fit for my work and allowed me to engage with others exploring similar topics across the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. The intellectual atmosphere was inspiring, and I left with new perspectives on my research. Additionally, the event. Overall, the conference was invaluable for both my academic development and the advancement of my project.

During the stay in Nicosia there was also an opportunity to visit the archaeological museum, and get to know the city.

Anamarija Belošić

is an archaeologist and currently a PhD student at Ruhr University Bochum and a research associate at the German Mining Museum. She specializes in material culture analysis, with extensive field experience across Croatia, Italy, and the Czech Republic and more recently in Georgia.

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ReForm in Rome

Andreas Angourakis — Fri, 21 Mar 2025 11:14:29 +0000

ReForm in Rom

A record-breaking 5000 archaeologists met digitally and on-site for 4 days this summer in the Eternal City to discuss current topics in archaeological research at the 30th Annual Meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists (30th EAA Annual Meeting in Rome, Italy 28 – 31 August 2024) (link to the abstracts[1]). Apart from highly diverse sessions all over the campus of Sapienza University, delegates were able to visit several archaeological sites in Lazio and beyond and enjoy Rome’s vast heritage.

Funded by ReForm, I was able to contribute to this variety of topics and research by presenting my ongoing dissertation project in session #895 “Perceiving and Shaping Landscapes” organised by Stefanie Schaefer-Di Maida (Institute for Pre- and Protohistoric Archaeology, CAU Kiel; CRC 1266), Gianpiero Di Maida (CCEHN Project – Niedersächsisches Landesamt für Denkmalpflege, Hannover) and Gustav Wollentz (Nordic Centre of Heritage Learning and Creativity).

By reimagining mining landscapes beyond technological and functional perspectives, the paper summarized the theoretical framework of social spaces and cultural appropriation and its practical implementation to traditional GIS-analysis in the Siegerland (North Rhine-Westphalia). Further, it explored the potential of including sensual experiences gained by experimental archaeology to reconstruct areas of perception on smelting and forging sites and thus analyse mining sites as diversley perceived and shaped spaces. By combining these aspects, the interrelationships of different sites become clearer and reveal how sensual perception and spatial practices relate to one another.

Annotations

[1] https://www.e-a-a.org/EAA2024/Programme.aspx

Carmen Maria Stähler

is doing her doctorate on the topic of "Settlement dynamic processes of the Iron Age in South Westphalia - An investigation into the appropriation processes in settlement landscapes of the low mountain range on the right bank of the Rhine" and has been a member of ReForum since 2022.

Der Beitrag ReForm in Rome erschien zuerst auf ReForm.

Conference: Resource – Event – Practice

Pia Patrizia Weber — Wed, 19 Apr 2023 08:01:00 +0000

Resource – Event – Practice. Interdisciplinary Perspectives on New Materialism

Workshop by the Leibniz ScienceCampus Resources in Transformation (ReForm), University of Hagen, Germany, June 22–24, 2023

Keynote – Ian Hodder (Stanford University)

Registration

Please register by sending an email to reform@ressourcencampus-bochum.de.

Announcement

Placing the intertwining of different aspects of materiality (things, artefacts, bodies), which are understood as symmetrical, at the center of its theory, New Materialism represents an important reference point for the cultural and social sciences. Exemplary of the field are the writings of Donna Haraway and Karen Barad, who—despite their theoretical differences—can be described as the two most important exponents of this way of thinking. For instance, Karen Barad proposes a “new” concept of (distributed) materialism in critical demarcation or radicalization of Judith Butler‘s very prominent focus on the effectiveness of apparatuses (for example, with regard to instruments in scientific laboratory situations in physics). Here, the intertwining of the various material particles of practice that inevitably arise when apparatuses and other material things become effective in practice is conceived as a dynamic event in which things, artefacts, and bodies mutually affect and are affected. It is precisely from this intertwining that an intense transformative potential emerges, though the quality of the assemblages that occur varies widely.

Such an understanding of entanglement, inspired by New Materialism in social sciences, is of great interest for the study of resources as those material things to which cultural and discursive expressions and articulations ascribe a central importance and particular value for social practice. Indeed, New Materialism allows us to grasp resources as occurring particles of practice that become possible through situational entanglements of things, artefacts, bodies, expressions, and articulations.

Within the framework of the Leibniz Science Campus Resources in Transformation (ReForm), this conference will bring together various scholars from the cultural, social, and historical sciences in order to approach the coming into existence of resources from an interdisciplinary perspective at a theoretical and empirical level. First, the concept of materiality will be clarified and the problem of its linguistic comprehensibility will be discussed. Secondly, corporeality, sensuality, and affectivity within the material accomplishment of practice will be thematized. And thirdly, it is important to trace the material and corporeal entanglements together with their different forms and qualities. In doing so, it is also important to clarify the significance of cultural expressions and articulations for the manifold entanglements of practice particles. In the frame of New Materialism, they must be consistently understood in physical terms—hence material and corporeal.

This raises the following central questions for the conference:

What are the possibilities and limits of New Materialism in the cultural and social sciences? What differences and similarities are there with the conceptual materiality of archaeology and sociology, for example?
How can georesources be understood as material particles of practice? What meshworks are necessary for resources in the sense defined above to occur? How, if at all, can georesources like coal, farmland, metal, and water be distinguished from other kinds of resources, such as digital data?
How can corporeality, sensuality, affectivity, and perception—terms currently being intensively discussed in the context of a new debate over the concept of aesthetics—be grasped as particles of practice? What kind of meshwork is necessary for corporeality to occur and have lasting effects on practice?
What is the significance of cultural, theoretical, and sociological concepts such as expression, articulation, and aesthetics for the further development of a concept of resources aligned with New Materialism?
What kinds of interweaving of practice particles can be empirically identified and investigated?
What perspectives on New Materialism can be identified and pursued in response to these questions?

The conference addresses these questions to sociologists, archaeologists, cultural scientists, historians, and scholars from related disciplines. It will take place within the semester program 2023 of the Leibniz ScienceCampus Resources in Transformation (ReForm) (www.reform.ressourcencampus-bochum.de).

Organizers

Prof. Dr. Frank Hillebrandt, FernUniversität in Hagen

Dr. des. Johannes Jungfleisch, Ruhr-Universität Bochum

Prof. Dr. Constance von Rüden, Ruhr-Universität Bochum

Programme

22 June 2023

17:45–18:00

18:00–19:30

Greetings

Keynote: Towards a More Materialist New Materialism

Ian Hodder (Stanford University)

23 June 2023

09:00–09:30

Opening and introduction

Session 1: Materiality from a Sociological and Archaeological Perspective

09:30–10:30

Socialized Material in Practice. What Kind of Materialism Does Social Theory Need?

Frank Hillebrandt (University of Hagen)

11:00–12:00

Memories of Another World: Deleuze, Leibniz and the Object’s Point of View

Oliver Harris (University of Leicester)

12:00–13:00

Materialities and Human Life. The Perspective of a Theoretical Empiricism

Herbert Kalthoff (Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz)

Session 2: Corporeality, Sensuality, Affectivity and Perception

14:00–15:00

From the Materiality of Practice to the Practice of Matter: Reflections on Corporeality, Affectivity and Perception in Dealing with Active Materials

Christiane Schürkmann (Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz)

15:00–16:00

Spirited Metals and Resource Affect: Perspectives from Early Modern Mining

Tina Asmussen (Ruhr University Bochum/German Mining Museum):

16:30–17:30

Entangled Ressources in Utopian Design Spaces – Generating and / or Analysing UDS in the Field of Sustainable Food Practices

Franka Schäfer (University of Siegen)

24 June 2023

Session 3: Material Entanglements

09:00–10:00

Eventful Histories: Thoughts on the Material-discursive and Corporeal Becoming of ‘Aegean’ Wall-paintings in Tell el-Dab‘a/Egypt

Constance von Rüden & Johannes Jungfleisch (Ruhr University Bochum)

10:30–11:30

The “Cloud” and Its Material Entanglements with Data Centres

Estrid Sørensen (Ruhr University Bochum)

11:30–12:30

Beyond the Separation of Matter and Practice: Archaeological Thoughts on Resources as Material-discursive Apparatuses

Stefan Schreiber (Leibniz-Zentrum für Archäologie)

13:30–14:30

Panel Discussion

Moderation: Reinhard Bernbeck & Susan Pollock (FU Berlin)

Der Beitrag Conference: Resource – Event – Practice erschien zuerst auf ReForm.

Three Days of TAG Edinburgh 2022 – “Revolutions”

Pia Patrizia Weber — Mon, 06 Feb 2023 09:44:50 +0000

Three Days of TAG Edinburgh 2022 – "Revolutions"

According to the motto ‘Thinking outside the box’ and thankfully to ReForum, I was able to participate in the 43rd conference of the Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG) in Edinburgh. Against the picturesque backdrop of Holyrood Park in the heart of the city, I plunged into three intense days full of curiosity, diverse topics, professional discussions and cheerful conversations, which were accompanied by the recurring realisation, that British folks can’t manage to make a decent coffee.

Even though the nationwide strikes in the transport and health sectors led to cancellations of some lectures, this hardly diminished the range of international and interdisciplinary contributions (link to abstracts [1]).

Despite the challenges of session hopping, I was able to listen to many different topics that opened new perspectives and ideas for my own theory work and its implementation. I would like to highlight some aspects, apart from David Wengrow’s[2] opening keynote and several Iron Age topics.

The session ‘Absence: perspectives from archaeology and heritage’ focused on individual finds as well as entire regions and discussed the possibilities for archaeology arising from dealing with absence. For example, Rebecca Rennell and Emily Gal[3] debated the remoteness of the Outer Hebrides in the Bronze Age and modern times. They raised the question of whether islands as remote places, rather reflect a modern filter of discovery than a lived prehistoric understanding of space. ‘Remoteness’ in this sense plays a significant role for South Westphalia from the point of view of research history. It can further lead to investigations about how the everyday spatial practices of the Iron Age produced the ‘seclusion’ of certain places and how this affected settlement dynamics.

The full-day session ‘An Archaeology of Non-human Life’ was particularly exciting. The analysis of chalcolithic fortifications as living architectures[4] and of a Cretan Bronze Age burial complex with regard to its various effects on movements, sensory perceptions and specific burial practices[5], gave new impulses for my own methodology. But above all, it were the approaches to the relationship between humans and other living beings that caught my attention independently of my own research questions. Beavers with their ‘landscaping geopractices’[6] and interdisciplinary research on reindeer-human relationships[7] were discussed in several papers. Even though there are hardly any direct references to human-non-human relations in South Westphalia (apart from a few pollen analyses), they should always resonate in a practice-space-related landscape archaeology in the sense of ‘Life Worlds’.

Also with regard to hoards and their specific practices (‘Deposition in detail – has there been a revolution, or have we missed it? ‘) interesting approaches emerged from the work of Lindsey Büster[8] and Sabrina N. Autenrieth[9]. Büster discussed the emotionality and practices behind individual deposits in Late Iron Age round houses, the majority of which belong to groups of objects that are considered of little material or symbolic value. She argued that through associated personal memories and feelings, these become relics of everyday life and therefore receive special treatment. Autenrieth questioned the conventional categorization of Bronze Age hoards into type or function groups in the Rhine Valley and offered alternatives by pointing out the relation of the finds to the human body (on-body, in-hand, non-body). In combination with Edward T. Hall’s idea of proxemics (intimate space, personal space, social space), she also discussed more private practices of depositions ‘close to the body’ versus public group activities. The socio-spatial aspects, which arise especially from the second example, could open up a new component for the hoards and single finds of South Westphalian hillforts.

Last but not least, a few words about the, as the organizers ironically admitted themselves, nerd session ‘The Elder Trowels: What have archaeologists learnt from time spent in Tamriel (etc.)?’, which I spontaneously joined in. The ‘etc.’ referred to virtual space in general or to computer games such as The Elder Scrolls and The Legend of Zelda, to comic superheroes but also to the fantasy world of Game of Thrones. While the castles of the latter were mapped and analysed with all GIS has to offer to investigate the materiality of an immaterial world[10], Mikel Herrán[11] discussed the temporality and dynamics of reimagined landscapes. Stephanie Aulsebrook[12] dealt with the perceptions of metals and the question of who needed which (socially acquired) skills in order to be allowed to use the different products at all. This session shows how much potential there is in ‘thinking outside the box’.

I would like to thank ReForum for the opportunity to participate in this conference and I hope to include some of the ideas and perspectives presented above into my own work. Although I couldn’t hold a candle to the winners of the Antiquity Quiz, it were the personal encounters over the much tastier tea or cider in the breaks and evenings that count at the end.

Annotations

[1] https://tagedinburgh2022.files.wordpress.com/2022/12/tag-2022-abstract-book.pdf.

[2] University College London.

[3] University of the Highlands and Islands.

[4] Ana Vale, University of Porto.

[5] Anastasia Chysanthi Solomou, Independent Researcher.

[6] Nick Overton, University of Manchester; Shumon T. Hussain, Aarhus University/Kamilla Lomborg, Aarhus University/Nathalie Brusgaard, University of Gronningen.

[7] Anna-Kaisa Salmi/Emily Hull/Päivi Soppela/Sanna-Mari Kynkäänniemi/Henri Wallén, University of Oulu; Morgan Windle, Christian Albrechts University of Kiel; Sarah Pleuger/Robin Bendrey, University of Edinburgh.

[8] Canterbury Christ Church University/University of York.

[9] University of Bourdeaux.

[10] Jorge Rouco Collazo, University of Granada, Project link: https://digibug.ugr.es/handle/10481/58562.

[11] University of Leicester.

[12] University of Warsaw.

Carmen Maria Stähler

Der Beitrag Three Days of TAG Edinburgh 2022 – “Revolutions” erschien zuerst auf ReForm.