CALL. 01.09.2020 [SESSION 2]: Historical Ecological Lives in a Digital Ethos: understanding past lif
FECHA LÍMITE/DEADLINE/SCADENZA: 01/09/2020
FECHA CONGRESO/CONGRESS DATE/DATA CONGRESSO: 18-19-20/12/2020
LUGAR/LOCATION/LUOGO: (Leicester, England)
ORGANIZADOR/ORGANIZER/ORGANIZZATORE: David Laguna Palma.
INFO: web - dlaguna@ugr.es
CALL:
Landscape Archaeology has greatly evolved since its inception. In such a development, however, there is one constant feature: technology. In this sense, Landscape Archaeology has been one of the most avant-garde subdisciplines within Archaeology. Currently, it is seemingly impossible to make top-tier landscape research without using digital technology (i.e. Digital Archaeology) -as it also happens in other archaeological subdisciplines. Our ethos, therefore, is immanently digital.
On the other hand, understanding past human-nature/non-human interrelationships has been one of the main concerns in Landscape Archaeology. This is also applicable to people’s and ideas’ movement. Archaeologists, aided by theories from diverse disciplines, have conceived different approaches which aim to address these fundamental questions. It is in this frame where Historical Ecology, Human Ecodynamics or Social-Network-Analysis emerge, shedding interesting light to the conundrum of past lives.
Ironically, there is some epistemological tension between the first and second paragraph. When we apply digital technologies to our analysis so that we can enhance our research, we do so at the peril of losing sight on past realities. For example, tension arises when we apply network-analysis to understand past movements, or for modelling human-non-human interactions: our research might yield quite complex and interesting results, yet they are a present-cognitive deformation of the past in itself.
In this session we aim to: 1. Elucidate how profound this tension is and what implications might this has on understanding past lives from a landscape perspective. 2. Discuss how to surpass this tension. 3. Give a thought to the implications of the “Digital” in deforming (or not) posthuman theory. 4. Debate about how different computational approaches enhance Landscape Archaeology.
If you are interested in presenting a proposal for this session, please send it to dlaguna@ugr.es no later than 1st September 2020. Proposals should not exceed 250 words. For more information about the congress, please visit https://tagleicester2020.wordpress.com/