Session: #584

Content:

Archaeological surveys have the power to generate important information about the human past. On the one hand, extensive surveys are the main source of information to gain insights in large-scale phenomena such as settlement dynamics and to generate regional historical narratives. Intensive, intra-site surveys, on the other hand, can develop knowledge on internal organisation and structuring of individual sites. Intra-site surveys can fine-tune observed larger scale, regional phenomena obtained from regional surveys.
With this session, we aim to explore how archaeological work evolves from actual field work, in particular survey, to knowledge production, and eventually the construction of historical narratives, following the chaine-operatoire system proposed by Gardin. We will overpass the stadium of data collection, which has been explored elsewhere (García Sánchez 2017). This is an occasion to study the passage from data to knowledge in the many theoretical approaches present nowadays in archaeology. Here the concept of space is relevant, since any human action has a spatial dimension. Nevertheless, as Hacıgûzeller (2012) has pointed recently, current archaeological GIS tools are uncritically bonded to positivism. We wish to focus on how visual narratives (i.e. mapping approaches and geovisualisations) can generate archaeological knowledge and historical narratives, in particular related to archaeological survey. The session will explore how theoretical decisions assumed or latent within cartographical representations and how does these representations of knowledge influence historical narratives.
The session looks for papers on:
•Theoretical insights on representationalism of spatio-temporal phenomena in survey archaeology;
•New ideas, methods, techniques to publish survey spatio-temporal knowledge.

Session: #584

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