Convenors: Alexander Herrera (Colombia) and Manuel Arroyo-Kalin (UK)
Technologies of water, earth and fire are fundamental to the history of humanity. In their study, however, archaeology often privileges the artefactual or the production and extraction of environmental resources, applying and reifying a modern “engineering-inspired” separation between the technical, social, experiential, and symbolic aspects of technology. Even narratives that wield a contrast between techné and logos or examine technology as social process can be determinist in the ways they see landscapes, hydroscapes and pyroscapes, for instance, without examining their familiarisation, domestication, or transformation as embedded aspects of technological practice and lived experience. Here we call for sessions that invite deep reflection, based on archaeological evidence, of technologies mediated or wielded through people’s use of water, earth and fire. They may restrict themselves to specific technological domains or blur their boundaries. The theme also invites broader critical introspection regarding how the technologically-mediated historical setting in which archaeology emerged as a discipline, imbibed in a perspective of technological progress that distorts the richness and nuance of past technological practices.
Contacts:
Prof. Alexander Herrera
Departmento de Historia del Arte, Universidad del los Andes, Colombia
alherrer@uniandes.edu.co
Prof. Manuel Arroyo-Kalin
Department of Archaeology, University College London
m.arroyo-kalin@ucl.ac.uk
THEME 23 SESSIONS
T23/Session 01: Technofossils of the Anthropocene