Session: #485

Content:

Aim of the session is to reconsider specific triggers, factors or components of infrastructure transformations and related processes observed in the scale of archaeological sites. The attention is drawn to a more comprehensive understanding of the connectivity of social relations, culture, and economy, and natural environment revealed by intra-site infrastructures and underlying socio-enviromental dynamics.
We welcome contributions adressing the practical application of environmental, social and cultural change theories on cases of infrastructure transformation processes observed in intra-site variability, including moments of crisis and collapse. The session intends to persue a diachronic perspective on Neolithic to pre-state site infrastructures.
Quite often, researchers discover settlement units of different complexity enclosed within one archaeological site. Their main interest is to explore human infrastructures: remains of buildings, enclosures, production facilities, places of consumption, or the identification of economic, social and ritual activity areas. For providing the context of human behaviour, studying these infrastructures is accompanied by extensive investigations of the geographical setting and natural resources in order to reconstruct past environmental conditions. In many cases, the traces of human activity recorded at these sites give evidence of different occupation phases and thus the opportunity to study infrastructural change in time and space. Often, the variability of the assessed parameters points to random processes of change. In other cases, there are interdependencies of environmental and infrastructural parameters and trends can be detected.
Most of these changes are enduring and substential, thus leading to various transformations, whose main characteristics shall be discussed in the contributing papers.

Session: #485

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