Plants are essential to life. We depend upon them for the oxygen we breath, for sustenance and for the materials required to produce the ‘stuff’ of human existence. Plant life is vulnerable to human existence, but is also highly adaptable, emerging in a multitude of ways as relations of co-dependence develop, are erased and mutate. This session seeks to explore the intersections between archaeology and plant life in two ways.
Firstly, we ask how can we develop approaches to archaeobotanical and wider environmental datasets which engage with the precarity, resilience and emergence of forms of plant life in the past, to better understand the forms of more-than-human life that they sustain, stimulate or place under threat. Examples might include the impact of cultivation on species diversity and relational dependencies, the ways in which plants life makes new spaces and the responses of plant life to anthropogenic processes which both create potential for emergent co-dependencies between forms of life, and threaten their very existence.
Secondly, we ask how the plant-based thought of writers such as Emanuele Coccia, Michael Marder and Lesley Stern might shape the way in which we approach the past beyond the study of plants themselves. For example, within Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage thought the rhizome is a key concept which has been adopted by archaeologists, whilst they also use other botanical processes as touchstones in their writing. Thinking through plants opens us to worlds of co-dependence, complexity, temporality and becoming which create the potential to understand past lives, past becoming(s), from novel perspectives, creating a means to effectively de-stabilise the anthropocentrism of archaeological thought by approaching life differently.
It is our hope that this session will stimulate archaeologists to think through more-than-human life in novel and exciting ways, which take seriously the contribution of plants both to how we live in the world, but also how we think about it.
2:10pm | A Lasting and Bitter Relationship: Hops and Humans in the past | Brian Costello & Barry Taylor
2:30pm | Compost Communities: Reconstructing Biorhythms of Medieval English Towns | Kate Autumn Evetts
2:50pm | Cropmarks as autographic memories: plants, growth, and duration in archaeological research | Andrew Jones & Paul Reilly
3:20pm | Disturbance and Urban Atmosphere in Medieval England | Ben Jervis
3:40pm | Reconstructing Past Entanglements in the face of Climate Devastation | Anna Den Hollander
4:00pm | Plant Encounters: Engaging students with the botanical world through archaeological accounts of plant lives | Amy Gray-Jones & Barry Taylor
4:20pm | Discussion |
Full paper abstracts available here: https://tag2024.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/tag-2024-session-abstracts-1.pdf
