Material Mnemonics: Everyday Memory in Prehistoric Europe

by Katina T. Lillios, Vasileios Tsamis

Overview

How did ancient Europeans materialise memory? Material Mnemonics: Everyday Practices in Prehistoric Europe provides a fresh approach to the archaeological study of memory. Drawing on case studies from the British Isles, Scandinavia, central Europe, Greece, Italy and the Iberian Peninsula that date from the Neolithic through the Iron Age, the book's authors explore the implications of our understanding of the past when memory and mnemonic practices are placed in the center of cultural analyses. They discuss monument building, personal adornment, relic-making, mortuary rituals, the burning of bodies and houses and the maintenance of domestic spaces and structures over long periods of time. Material Mnemonics engages with contemporary debates on the intersection of memory, identity, embodiment, and power and challenges archaeologists to consider how materiality both provokes and constrains the mnemonic processes in everyday life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781842177839
Publisher:	Oxbow Books
Publication date:	09/12/2010
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

Katina Lillios is an Associate Proffessor of Archaelogy in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at The University of Iowa. Her research and teaching interests include Archaeology of complex societies, Memory and identity, Anthropology of death, Identity and social difference, Material culture, Museums, Politics of the past, Geoarchaeology; Iberian Peninsula, Europe.

Table of Contents

List of contributors vii

1 Introduction Katina T. Lillios Vasileios Tsamis 1

2 Natural substances, landscape forms, symbols and funerary monuments: Elements of cultural memory among the Neolithic and Copper Age societies of southern Spain Leonardo García Sanjuán David W. Wheatley 10

3 Mnemonic practices of the Iberian Neolithic: The production and use of the engraved slate plaque-relics Katina T. Lillios 40

4 The art of memory: Personal ornaments in Copper Age South-East Italy Robin Skeates 73

5 Burning matters: Memory, violence and monumentality in the British Neolithic Andrew Jones 85

6 Layers of memory: An embodied approach to the Late Bronze Age of Central Macedonia, Greece Vasileios Tsamis 103

7 Memory, landscape, and body in Bronze Age Denmark Janet E. Levy 123

8 Memory maps: The mnemonics of central European Iron Age burial mounds Bettina Arnold 147

9 Memories of features, memories in finds. The remembrance of the past in Iron Age Scandinavia Lars Larsson 174

10 Re-collecting the fragments: Archaeology as mnemonic practice Yannis Hamilakis 188

Editorial Reviews

Overall, I found the volume a thought-provoking read, with several papers showcasing the real utility of memory studies in explaining social change and continuity. Material mnemonics was an aptly chosen title; mnemonic devices were not elegant theoretical constructions floating above material evidence but were grounded in it, emergent from it. This rapprochement of theory and data often seems a rarity in archaeological literature and should be celebrated. I suspect it will also lend the volume a wider readership; the papers are short on unexplained jargon yet reasonably self-reflexive and critical of modernist preconceptions when dealing with data.'

Archaeological Review from Cambridge - Katie Hall