Filed under: museum displays
Spondylus at the permanent exhibition ‘Shells and Sea’ at the Public library of Poros Island, Greece.
More info on http://www.poroshellmuseum.gr/
Filed under: conferences
Call for papers kindly submitted to the Spondylus blog by Stephanie Koerner:
Re-Visiting Pandora’s Hope. Technological Choice and Re-constructing Plurality of Human Expertise and Aspirations
Organisers:
Stephanie Koerner (University Manchester) and Laurent Olivier (MAN, Saint-Germain-en-Laye)
Discussant: Tim Darvill (Bournemouth University)
Until rather recently, few archaeologists are likely to have envisaged evidence of the plurality of technological choices, which have shaped the extraordinary diversity of past and present day human life ways, as bearing very directly upon such immediately pressing challenges as:
- facilitating sustainable development under pressures of climate change, techno-science (nuclear, chemical biological) hazard, and of the problematic ethics and politics motivating much competition between powerful agencies of today’s ‘global knowledge-based’ political economies
- exploring the social embeddedness of technological choices in deeper comparative historical perspectives
- challenging the narrow ways in which many local, national and international expert policy advisory agencies frame ‘public issues’
- promoting public participation in such ‘upstream’ policy processes as deliberating commitments to social ends and accountabilities
In addition to proposals of presentations relating to these themes, suggestions of additional topics and case studies variously illustrating the socially embedded nature of technological choice are most welcome.
Case studies might focus on such topics as:
- Technology’s roles in archaeological classification and periodisation
- Style–function, technological choice and communication
- Specialisation and socio-cultural complexity
- Production, consumption, and social boundaries
- Technological choices, chains of operation, and social agencies.
- Plurality of cultural understandings of the environment
- Social and symbolic aspects of technological innovation and expertise
Please write in these connections – and with comments to:
Stephanie.Koerner@manchester.ac.uk
For conference details see: http://www.e-a-a.org
Selected references:
Beck, U. 1992 Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage Publications.
Latour, B. (1999). Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press.
Lemonnier, P. (ed.) (1993) Technological Choices: Transformation in Material Culture since the Neolithic. London: Routledge.
Filed under: spondylus displays
A Spondylus gaederopus valve interred on an anchor monument at the bay of Poros Island, Greece.
Caroli Linnæi ‘Systema naturæ’ is now digitized and available at the Gottinger Digitalisierungzentrum. That is for those that ever wondered what that ‘1758′ means…
ARQUEOLÍTIC – Estudi i Difusió de Patrimoni, is a team based on Banyoles (Girona, Spain), that since 1992 works on many different projects concerning the archaeology of Catalunya. Experimentation and reproduction of artifacts, is one of these projects (the snapshot depicts among others the reproduction of a Glycimeris bracelet).
Poznań Archaeological Museum, Poland
Known as the ‘princesses’ grave’, this burial is the only one of its type to have been found in Poland. It was discovered at Krusza Zamkowa in the Inowrocław District and is contemporary with the settlement at Racot, Czempiń district. The older of the two females, aged 25-30 years at death, had earrings of copper and calcite beads, a bracelet made of Spondylus shells, a hip belt comprising several strings of Spondylus shell beads (these items are imports from beyond the Carpathians) and a number of ornate armlets made of deer antler (probably acquired from a hunter-gatherer community).
The younger ‘princess’ was a girl aged 7-8 years, who was buried with a diadem of copper beads, a necklace consisting of copper plates, two pendants made of Theodoxus shell, antler armlets and a hip belt comprised of several strings of Spondylus shell beads and fringed with Theodoxus shells. This assemblage is a loan from the Institute of Prehistory of the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań.
[http://www.muzarp.poznan.pl/muzeum/muz_eng/wyst_wlkp/neolit/fot59.html]
Spondylus and other ornaments (mainly from the prehistoric sites of Sitagroi and Arkadikos) exhibited at the Archaeological museum of Drama, Greece.
Spondylus and Glycimeris ornaments from the prehistoric site of Catignano, Italy. Official website of the excavations found at http://www.arch.unipi.it/Tozzi/web_catignano/presentazione.htm
Paper by Sergiu Haimovici pdf-availabe at http://www.bio.uaic.ro/Anale/Bio_Anim/files/2007/Haimovici.pdf
Abstract:
The paper deals with five Mediterranean species from Dobrogea Neo- eneolithic pre – history period. These species are: a sea shell Spondylus gaederopus, a sea fish – Sparus auratus found on the Black Sea coast and three terrestrial species: two of them better known, with a popular name – the lion and the fallow deer, and the third Equus (Asinus) hydruntinus, disappeared a few millenniums ago. All the species are nowadays considered Mediterranean. Their presence in Dobrogea in far away times was due to geographical events: the Bosfor Strait formation as a result of tectonic movements, this causing important changes in Black Sea`s characteristics and the post glacier optimum climate that extended to the north the Mediterranean climate.
