The world is an awesome and wondrous place. Harris and Sørensen (2010) describe emotion as the “act of being moved,” and human encounters with places of beauty and magnificence, monumentality and atmosphere, whether natural or anthropogenic, invoke sensorial and emotional responses. Though emotion is often considered to be high on archaeology’s “ladder of inference,” recent works, especially in the realm of death and burial, have demonstrated the potential to understand emotions in the archaeological record. This session seeks to expand upon that work to explore the human relationship to landscape, place and space through those sensual encounters. Many places are imbued with magic and wonder and draw people together through communal experience. How can we archaeologically interpret the impressions left on the ancient observer? How can we identify the affective fields and atmospheres that stimulate emotional responses to past environments? This session welcomes varied approaches to understanding the emotional resonance of places, whether through theoretical understanding, material culture and iconography, or computational approaches such as viewshed analysis or spatial reconstruction.
11:00am | Marks of affect, awe, violence and wonder | Rachel Crellin, Oliver Harris, Matt Hitchcock, Dawid Sych and Christina Tsoraki
11:20am | The Ruthwell Cross: Early Medieval Emotions, Written in Stone | Ciarán Walsh
11:40am | Monument construction in 6th century Scandinavia: bringing people together as the world fell apart | Andreas Ropeid Sæbø
12:00pm | Spectres of the Past: Uncertainty, Awe, and Haunting | Anna Collar
12:20pm | Seeing the Sea: an awesome and emotional experience | Max MacDonald
12:40pm | “It may be awesome …but you’d better not believe it!” Overcoming the denial of belief and emotional affectivity in archaeological thought. | Farès K Moussa
2:00pm | Becoming Affective Through Rock Art: A Material & Sensorial Case Study in Guanajuato, Mexico | José Chessil Dohvehnain Martínez-Moreno
2:20pm | Being moved, on the move: a case for ‘persistent routeways’ and ‘natural avenues’ in Neolithic Britain | Jack Rowe
2:40pm | A Groovy Kind of Love with the Tangible World. | Sarah Botfield
3:15pm | Triple Bronze and Oak: Emotion in Ancient Mediterranean Seafaring | Madison Scrabeck
3:35pm | Discussion |
Full paper abstracts available here: https://tag2024.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/tag-2024-session-abstracts-1.pdf
