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“How do we find (and live with) the meanings of the past?” is a two-days symposium on archaeological thought‘s ways to generate meaning out of the material data collected via excavations, surveys, analyses.

This symposium addresses the methods through which archaeology envisages those data as signs of ancient identities and explores how we live today with the arising meanings of the past.
Often referred to as a discipline of “things” – i.e. materiality of things, objects making history, comfort of things – this symposium will deal with archaeology as a discipline of traces left by ancient communities’ practices.
When focusing on reconstructing practice, archaeology brings out a crucial cognitive element that, if investigated in all its relational potential – with semiotic awareness – allows us to “understand social groups and cultures that did not have an opportunity to write their own histories” (E. Said 1978, 12-14): this is the kind of identity the symposium aims at defining.
Indeed, if the static “leftovers” of past practices are given the epistemological dignity of sign of something else, they can be investigated as dynamic hints of neglected histories, social structures, human choices, resistance, adaptation.

More at: https://www.unive.it/pag/44124

 

PROGRAMME

Panel 1: 26th May 2022, 9.00-13.00

Living with the past

Identity and human meaning through politics, colonization, heritage

  1. Practices and the politics of boundaries: identity in action in ancient and modern Britain
    Andrew Gardner, UCL Institute of Archaeology
  2. Signifying Environmental Harm: Toxic Heritage and the Anthropocene
    Elizabeth Kryder-Reid, IU School of Liberal Arts, IUPUI
  3. Reconstructing Palestinian identity, memory and space: preliminary thoughts and ideas
    Mahmoud Hawari, Bethlehem University
  4. Personal collection – Universal Connections: Identity and creation of meaning at the Museum of Broken Relationships
    Olinka Vistica, Museum of Broken Relationships, Zagreb
Panel 2: 26th May 2022, 15.00-18.30

Signs of identity

Interpreting and translating the sands of time

  1. Semioidentity: Archaeological Perspectives
    Robert W. Preucel, Brown University
  2. Neolithic traces of spatial privatization and property
    Manar Hammad, Université Sorbonne Nouvell Paris III
  3. Shaping the identity of the Urbino International Center of Semiotics. Its Archive through the lens of the Foucauldian dispositive of “table” (tableau)
    Tiziana Migliore, Carlo Bo University of Urbino, CiSS
  4. Translating Arslantepe
    Marcella Frangipane, Accademia dei Lincei, and Dario Mangano, University of Palermo
Panel 3: 27th May 2022, 9.00-13.00

When is identity

Embodying and overcoming the materiality of bones, faces, voices  

  1. Tracing identity: the semeiotics of the biological profile
    Zoë Crossland, Columbia University, NYC
  2. Notes for a forensic semiotics. Aesthetics and ontologies of forensic archaeology and their influence on processes of memory-making
    Francesco Mazzucchelli, University of Bologna
  3. From Skulls to Numbers: Measuring, Calculus, and Meaning of the Face from Early Modern Dissections to AI Reconstructions
    Massimo Leone, University of Turin; Shanghai University; Cambridge Digital Humanities; Bruno Kessler Foundation
  4. Decolonising silenced music and musicians
    Marilena Delli Umuhoza, Ian Brennan
Panel 4: 27th May 20228, 15.00-18.30

Mending subaltern identities and identifications

of crops, memory, symbols, and bodies at work

  1. Of Figs and Pomegranates: Exploring Subalternity in the Ancient Mediterranean
    Peter van Dommelen, Brown University
  2. Nuraghi and the knots of Sardinians’ identification
    Franciscu Sedda, University of Cagliari
  3. Politics of the Underground
    Dima Srouji, Royal College of Arts London
  4. The Body of the Archaeologist: Exposing A Long-Overlooked Semiotic Interpretant
    Mauro Puddu, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice