Towards a hybrid approach in understanding long-term histories of caves and rock shelters
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2019-05-07

Full title: Vibrant Places: Towards a hybrid approach in understanding long-term histories of caves and rock shelters

Places are vibrant, hybrid, participant and continuously changing: they are made up of matter, meaning and memory; suffused with different temporalities; and entangled within a meshwork of multiple symmetric and fluid connections between people, animals, plants, materials, things, places and landscapes. How do we, then, as archaeologists, approach the task of recounting the big, long-term and non-linear histories of a particular place? Drawing on my own cave and rockshelter research, I examine the development of archaeological theory and modern scientific techniques that have influenced narratives on underground places, and argue in favour of a hybrid approach, where the place’s long-term mediation of the social is reconstructed through a multivocal discourse in which archaeological theory and various distinct analytical techniques engage in an active dialogue. 

Agni Prijatelj (Durham University)