Скачать или смотреть Liquid time, petrified objects. Concepts of historical change in archaeology

While we as session organisers are far from agreeing upon what ‘Petrifcation’ means, we were trying to circumscribe it with terms such as ‘consolidation’, ‘stabilisation’ and ‘classic style’, referring to changes both in societies and material culture. That said, we know that notions of stability, consolidation and steadiness are deeply linked to our understanding of both time and material culture. So this introductory talk addresses notions of time, change and material culture in archaeology: From traditional culture-historical archaeology to post-processualism and from spatial to cultural and other turns to current scientifically driven archaeology we as archaeologists need to connect the material culture we study to notions of transformation and development. How do we conceptualise periods of stability or ‘equilibrium’ vs. periods of change or break-up? How do we conceptualise periods at all? Which conceptual steps to we take to infer the petrification of a society from the archaeological record? Do we perceive petrification as one instant in a succession of distinct instants or as a process within a process?