Tracing “petrification” in prehistoric architectural processes
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2016-12-18

Even ephemeral archaeological remains of prehistoric buildings can be studied as evidence for architectural processes. In this definition, these processes started with thinking and shaping prehistoric space via a structure, but did not stop once this structure was built. Prehistoric architecture was also transformed by unplanned events during construction, use life and abandonment of the buildings. Architectural analysis reads these deliberate and fortuitous processes from pits and postholes, wear patterns and structural remains. In this way, the creating, shaping and sheltering of prehistoric life can be traced, as well as any changes in architectural practice.
The proposed paper will focus on such changes, specifically from fluid to more solid concepts of later prehistoric architectures, described in this session as “petrification”. It starts with recent work on Bronze Age timber roundhouses in northeast Scotland. This identified reactive, shape-shifting architectures responding to the activities and energies produced inside. The fluidity of form seems, however, unrelated to the building materials as such practices can also be recognised in roughly contemporary Scottish stone houses. Yet by the Iron Age, external shape and form seemingly had solidified. The paper will map such developments of architectural concepts through time and space, from organic and dissolved plans to more resolved layouts within apparently rigid structural shells. Drawing on later prehistoric and early medieval evidence from Britain, Scandinavia and the continent for comparison, architectural analysis will trace such patterns of “petrification” within the domestic sphere.