Rethinking ‘Shieldmaidens’ in Medieval Icelandic Literary Sources: Material Engagement Theory and the Dynamics of Mass Violence

Material Engagement Theory (MET) is a recent theoretical development in the field of cognitive archaeology. It represents an important new tool for sustainability theorists. MET overcomes the Cartesian conceptual separation of mind and matter, providing important insights into the cognitive nature of human-environment relations. If we recognize that we think with and through material tools and environments and not just about them, what does that mean for sustainability policy and social change theory? The example of a naturalized garden in a Canadian suburban community is used to illustrate what MET can do for sustainable development theory.

The application of design practice and theory has received little attention in the field of archaeology, despite the close and interdisciplinary connection of both disciplines working with material culture. Christina Unwin provides an up-to-date study that addresses this lacuna, by using a series of case studies from the Iron Age and early Roman period (c. 500 BC – c. AD 200) in different European regions. Giving the reader a concise overview of the relevant terminology and approaches in design theory, Unwin then applies these treatments in different archaeological contexts to reveal new aspects of how we can understand material culture. Design theory reveals that a material object may be understood beyond its material, form, function and period of time in which it was made, and invites archaeologists to re-evaluate their approaches to material things from a completely new perspective. Designed and made objects are immaterial in their planning, associations and effects – as well as material in their physical presence. The conceptual and terminological boundaries set by archaeological studies may therefore be challenged through the idea of design. This, in turn, enables the archaeologist to reconnect objects in terms of the people who made them, how they used them and how they interacted with them to build their sociality. This book is a significant intervention in the exploration of design and archaeological intersections across material culture. https://bibliores.bloomsbury.com/getimage.aspx?bibliologin=1&s=48cb8bfc-92e4-4f2b-a153-b3cea1f9da08&cat=default&class=books&type=jpg&mode=&size=original&id=833700 Research in the fields of design and archaeology will be used to explore the inter-relationship of the two disciplines in a broader way for the first time. This book explores how creative practitioners collaborate within their communities to strategically create objects to connect with other artefacts made in different media and also at different times and places. The concept of design allows artefacts to be explored in ways that are independent of the boundaries set by archaeological categories and typologies, while contemporary ‘ways of seeing’ constitute part of their emerging design. Designed things are immaterial in concept, associations and effects, as well as material in their physical presence. With particular reference to the Iron Age and early Roman period, this book explores how practitioners have contributed to building the sociality of their communities. It shows how people have chosen to live together through the collaborative, transmedial, polychronic and intrinsic-extrinsic practices and processes of design. By exploring artefacts made in a range of media in different regions, it may be seen that designed objects were created through collaborative strategies structured within wide-ranging socio-cultural networks. The design approach may also be applied to the study of buildings and landscapes, situating all constructed material-immaterial forms as assembled, associative devices of socio-cultural networks of communities interconnected locally, regionally and inter-regionally. This approach has the potential for studying how all past societies created and transmitted their concepts of community and identity in all aspects of their lives, and for exploring all periods of archaeological research.

We take this opportunity to reflect on the first year of publishing LALVC , plan for the future, and thank all of the contributors, peer reviewers, editorial board members, subscribers, and other supporters. The enthusiasm for LALVC 's content, as revealed by submissions, subscriptions, mentions on

This introduction takes as its central armature Karen Barad’s agential realism to provide a framework for understanding the essays brought together in this Special Issue under the rubric of pictures of conflict. The intention is to move the discussion with regard to picture making forward to more fully embrace the pictorial and the physical, the historical and institutional processes within apparatuses of picture-making. The attempt in ‘Ghost stories’ through the concept of a visual apparatus, is to shed new light and thinking on pictures as material objects; how they act and feed into our subjectivities, experiences and realities and to account for their currency, duration, affectivity and authority beyond transparent representation or symbolic meaning. In order to achieve this, Barad’s agential realism is inflected by insights from Malafouris’s (2013) material engagement theory; W.J.T. Mitchell’s (2005) image theory; Jens Eder and Charlotte Klonk’s (2017) image operations; Mondzian’s (2005) understanding of the economy of the image, as well as the ontological concerns of new German art history and image science exemplified in the work of Hans Belting (1996, 2011) and Horst Bredekamp (2017), for example. In this framework, the worlds pictures create, and the subjectivities they produce, are not understood to precede the phenomena they depict. The picture, as the outcome of the apparatus which produces it, makes an ‘observational cut’ that simultaneously excludes and includes certain elements from its frame. As such, it has to be comprehended as party to processes which are both ethical and political. A fact which is particularly important during times of conflict and war.

This article develops a framework for analysing how digital software and models become mediums for creative imagination in architectural design. To understand the hermeneutics of these relationships, we develop key concepts from Material Engagement Theory (MET) and Postphenomenology (PP). To push these frameworks into the realm of digital design, we develop the concept of Digital Materiality. Digital Materiality describes the way successive layers of mathematics, code, and software come to mediate enactive perception, and the possibilities of creative material engagement actualised in work with software. Just as molecular materials come to transform action with material objects, so digital materiality comes to enable and transform creative practices with computers. Digital architectural design form a new space for ongoing enactive discovery and creativity through manipulation of digital models and their underlying software environments. By shifting relationships within their digital models, architects can direct their attention, intention, and imagination towards widely different aspects of the model. Here, creative imagination becomes a fundamentally situated activity where mind emerges through dynamic interaction between a variety of embodied, material, and cultural domains.

The cultural heritage was defined in the 19th century in many European countries and the United States as “objects of cultural value.” In the context of building national states mostly material objects, archaeological sites and historical monuments, were marked as heritage. Further transformation of the concept of heritage took place after the World War II, when not only national and mostly European states, but also new international organizations (United Nations, UNESCO and later European Union) began to re-define and revise cultural heritage. The large-scale transformations in the social sciences and the humanities in the 1960–70s influenced the formation a new research field in the 1980s, heritage studies. Using the approaches taken from public history and cultural, memory, postcolonial and gender studies, heritage studies conceptualize heritage in more broad temporal boundaries and network of agents involved in the process of its formation. Within heritage studies, cultural heritage covers the sphere of ordinary and everyday life, distant and recent past, different social groups and their vision of heritage. In the 2000s, heritage studies were debated. As a result, a new field of critical heritage studies emerged. The key task put in the field was to analyze discursive practices of defining and using heritage primarily by state and international institutions (the so-called “Authorized Heritage Discourse”). The scholars conceptualize heritage as a process, discourse and participatory cultural phenomenon. So, heritage is understood as a constant rethinking and redefinition cultural values by different agents––social groups, media, institutions, which are also constantly changing. The paper examines the research fields of heritage studies and critical heritage studies in Europe. It provides an overview of their development and subsequent changes, as well as the main research issues and problems.

Hijas, novias y esposas: Familia, matrimonio y violencia doméstica en el Valle Central de Costa Rica (1750–1850)

This article surveys a number of approaches in complex systems thinking and their relevance for applications in the field of archaeology. It focuses in particular on the fundamental role of social interactions and information transmission as constituent elements for the development of organizational complexity on a community level. Given the impossibility of direct observations of these constituent interactions and practices, it is then outlined how this theoretical model can be applied on the material remains found in the archaeological record. It is discussed how material surroundings – including architectural structures and material objects – are used to shape and structure social interactions and practices in various ways. It is shown how complex organizational structures develop through underlying mechanisms of change such as diversification, connectivity and standardization, and how these can be applied in archaeological case studies. The presented framework will thus show how structures of social organization and development of social complexity can be inferred from the archaeological record.

Sexual Politics, Organizational Practices: Interrogating Queer Theory, Work and Organization

Drawing from an exploratory study carried out in Italy, this article analyses the phenomenon of Goddess spirituality, based on the re-interpretation or re-creation of spirituality centered on the worship of female divinities. The article first analyses the main drivers for the insurgence of the Goddess movement in relation to feminist theology and to archaeological and anthropologic studies. Second, it contextualises Goddess spirituality in relation to second wave feminism. Third, it presents the results of the study by asking to what extent these experiences can lead to women’s empowerment or whether they risk essentialising women around the concepts of care and maternity. The translation of these spiritual experiences into the political and social sphere is also explored. This article argues for the relevance of Goddess spirituality both in relation to the study of gender and religion and to feminist theories and practices. Keywords: Goddess spirituality, second wave feminism, religion, gender roles, eco-feminism

In the last thirty years, North American and European scholars of material culture have begun to cross disciplinary boundaries and to develop multidisciplinary methods for studying objects.1 In doing so, they have defined an autonomous field of scholarly inquiry that has become part of the academic landscape in much the same way that semiotics and cultural and gender studies have. An increase in the number of publications and journals specializing in material culture mirrors the growing interest in the object as a vehicle for new and innovative ways of understanding societies past and present. In the United States, examinations of artifacts are now pursued within a wide range of disciplines: history,2 folklore,3 cultural geography,4 art history,5 archaeology,6 museum studies,7 and anthropology.8 Canada has a journal specializing in the investigation of material culture, the Material Culture Review, and two French journals have recently published special issues on objects and museums: Ethnologie francaise (1996 and 1999) and Geneses (1994). Additionally, two new journals dedicated to the study of material culture have been founded in Great Britain since 1995: Things and the Journal of Material Culture. In the 1970s and 1980s, scholars of material culture studied objects to interpret the world views, mind-sets, desires, traditions, and hidden codes of specific social and cultural groups.9 Material things were a privileged means for historians, folklorists, and archaeologists to reconstruct the everyday life of illiterate groups, such as rural folk, urban workers, and Native Americans. Objects were considered to be reliable first-hand evidence of popular culture, and were often opposed to the written sources produced by literate elites, sources thought to be permeated with social and ethnocentric biases. Material objects and written sources were regarded as providing discrete categories of information; one type of source was used to reinforce or refute the conclusions derived from the other. Whether scholars preferred one source over the other or used both on an equal footing, however, some had a tendency to read culture through its material production, without showing much interest

Examination of direct forms of control in the bioarchaeological record has been limited to physical violence identified as traumatic bodily injury, and seen on the skeleton as healed defensive fracturing, cut marks, blunt force trauma, and in some cases, burial position. But there are indirect modes of control that present as skeletal deformation that occur over long periods of time, but are not often included in the suite of bioarchaeological indicators of violence. This “chronic violence” manifests as both physiological and psychological control, and when read properly can reveal structural inequalities that are often disguised as either expected social performance as dictated by the elite or ruling class or as social control over those on the margins: purposeful pain. Until recently, these markers of social control have lacked a strong framework for consideration in bioarchaeology. This chapter explores how purposeful pain can be read in the subornation of females, as reflected in the cultural performance of beauty. Weaving together skeletal markers of deformation, ethnology, and historic contexts, the structural violence inherent in the performance of beauty, through the binding and shaping of the female body to fit social standards, is revealed. Examples of indirect cultural violence that asserts control over female bodies, specifically foot-binding, neck rings, and corset use, are examined through the physical body as well as the narratives of mothers who engage in these practices to assure that their daughters adhere to social expectations. These examples also offer a new way to consider how androcentric typological approaches have been widely accepted as truth and continue to be used to support the notion that females are truly problematized by their physical body, instead of considering the complexities of social performance and identity. Weaving embodiment and gender theory with structural violence theory, bioarchaeological analysis can reveal how indirect cultural violence that asserts control over female bodies forged in the industrial era has influenced how females in the archaeological record have been, and continue to be, assessed.

Este artigo parte de várias perguntas e inquietações que dizem respeito ao lugar dos estudos sobre sexualidade na arqueologia brasileira. Iniciamos apresentando a relação entre os estudos de gênero e os estudos de sexualidade, um pouco do legado da crítica feminista na formação da teoria queer e da perspectiva construtivista em bioarqueologia no que diz respeito às (re)considerações de sexo, sexualidade e gênero. Em seguida, mostramos como se instituiu, ao longo da década de 2000, nos Estados Unidos e nos países de língua inglesa em geral, o que vem se convencionando chamar de queer archaeology ou uma arqueologia informada pela teoria queer. Por fim, terminamos com a análise da exígua produção brasileira sobre sexualidade no âmbito da arqueologia e exortamos para que um campo de estudos de sexualidade comum à arqueologia e à antropologia seja constituído no Brasil.

This paper focuses on the use of film and audio-visual media in an exhibition context, as a means for mediating the objects of culture on display, which in turn supports the narration of the exhibition. The paper focuses on two German museums, one of archaeology and the other of prehistory, to examine exhibition practices through the different functions of audio-visual media. How does audio-visual media help to visualise the past? How do they contribute to unveil the immaterial side, i.e. the “meaning” and significance of the objects on display? What kind of picture does the synergy between material objects and audio-visual media paint of our ancestors? Moreover, how can audio-visual media help museums to deal with the basic problem of archaeology (and historiography in general) and the representation of history? Finally, in what ways are audio-visual media used to inform the discipline and methods of archaeology, as a process for gaining knowledge? The analysis will demonstrate how the exhibition spaces of prehistory museums have distinct ways of integrating moving images, thus reflecting the different attitudes they have towards the materiality and mediality of the museum object and, as a consequence, the representation of history in the museum space.

This paper discusses the present state and future directions of gender studies in archaeology. I identify two distinctive approaches, characterised here as ‘archaeology of women’ and ‘gender archaeology’ and suggest that, while they have rather different aims and methodologies, both have a role to play in what is still a developing field of study within the discipline of archaeology. The archaeology of women concentrates on making women visible in the archaeological record and reconstructing their roles and experiences in past societies. Gender archaeology is more inclusive, involving men as well as women, masculinity as well as femininity; it focuses on different aspects of gender, including roles, relations, ideologies and identities, as well as the intersection of gender with other categories of social organisation such as age, status and ethnicity. It also examines how gender is constructed, which is understood variously in terms of negotiation, transaction or performance. Gender archaeology is in many ways a more developed approach, less naive and essentialist than the archaeology of women and more in line with post-modern (‘post-processual’) scholarship generally. However, I argue that in archaeology there are dangers in pursuing the more philosophical aspects of gender in the absence of a solid body of work on women in the past, conducted within earlier and theoretically simpler frameworks. While it is important to continue to explore all the ramifications of gender in the past, there is also a case for ‘strategic essentialism,’ assuming that women (and men) existed in the past and that we can and should study their roles, relations and experiences.