Rockart: Foot prints

all rights reserved by D C M Britton

The concepts of place and space are basic elements of landscape studies that need to be continually challenged at different scales of analysis and in varying contexts if we are to fully grasp their meaning. This is especially true for studies into prehistoric and non-literate societies, where being able to decipher the interaction between people and landscape still poses methodological challenges.

In this conference we aim to address these challenges by going beyond the limits of seeing place as small, culturally significant locales within a specific temporal setting. Instead we explore how place has been subject to temporal, social and ideological changes brought upon by the appropriation of visual signs by specific cultures that prevailed in different regions at different times. The rather broad term “visual signs” is consciously chosen to include every means of visual marking or transformation of the environment that includes but is not limited to rock art, modified and anomalous natural features, and architecture. To achieve these aims we encourage participants to envisage how these different kinds of visual signs were positioned within the physical and morphological features of the landscape; how the landscape was chosen or modified to accommodate them; what value or information these signs provided for the place in which they were created, and how they have been socially, culturally and spiritually appropriated through time.

Ultimately, our concern is to provide a platform for interested researchers from all disciplines to contribute new methodologies and interpretative approaches to the understanding of places and place-making. We envisage that the interdisciplinary nature of this conference will provide a stimulating setting for enriching discussions and helping promote studies of visual signs, place and landscape within a multidisciplinary research arena. This will, in turn, allow for interesting heuristics that can help challenge and transcend many of the common regional and conceptual departmentalisations plaguing academic discourse.

Program

27.10.2016
09:00 - 09:10
Registration
09:10 - 09:30
Welcome Address
Michael Meyer
09:30 - 10:00
Perceiving and Creating Terrestrial Dialogues with the Cosmos in the Protohistoric Levant
David Ilan
10:00 - 10:30
A look at the roll of agricultural abstract imagery in the conception of a transversal and traditional linguistic thought: some Sumerian and Latin references for the symbolic meanings of landscapes
Nelson Henrique de Silva Ferreira
10:30 - 11:00
Coffee Break
11:00 - 11:30
Ruminations on Sacred Landscapes of the Galilee
Jacob Ashkenazi
Nimrod Luz
11:30 - 12:00
"Beyond the Walls"- Locating the 'Common Denominator' in Herod's Landscape Palaces
Evie Gassner
12:00 - 12:30
Post-Actium Place Making: Octavian and the Ambracian Gulf
Kristian L. Lorenzo
12:30 - 13:00
Social discourses embedded in tumuli landscapes of early Hellenistic Kallatis
Valeriu Sîrbu
Dan Ștefan
Magdalena Ștefan
13:00 - 15:00
Lunch
15:00 - 15:30
Reconstructing Landscapes: Archaeological and Geographical Approaches to Ancient East Syria Using Modern Satellite Imagery
Artur Mazurek
15:30 - 16:00
Shifting meanings: life of monuments through time
Mike Freikman
16:00 - 16:30
Appropriation of Space and Time through Built Environment: The Case of the Pyramid of the Paintings, San Bartolo, Guatemala
Sanja Savkic
16:30 - 17:00
Coffee Break
17:00 - 17:30
The Road of Trajan, a timeless sign in the Romanian Plain
Eugen Teodor
Dan Ștefan
Magdalena Ștefan
17:30 - 18:00
Rock-cut sanctuaries of Demeter
Aynur-Michèle-Sara Karatas
28.10.2016
09:00 - 09:30
Interpreting prehistoric art through the archaeology of sound: looking at the intangible context of prehistoric art in the Western Mediterranean
Margarita Diaz-Andreu
Tommaso Mattioli
09:30 - 10:00
Orchestrated views of pastoral rock art in the Ennedi Highlands, Chad
Tilman Lenssen-Erz
10:00 - 10:30
Landscape Monuments of Southern Cappadocia Between Innovation and Continuity
Anna Lanaro
10:30 - 11:00
Coffee Break
11:00 - 11:30
Rock Art of Egypt – Signs of a Social Landscape
Rebecca Eugénie Döhl
11:30 - 12:00
Sacred Cavescapes of Socotra
Julian Jansen van Rensburg
12:00 - 12:30
Lives of a Funerary Landscape: Graffiti Making at the Pyramids of Meroe in Diachronic Perspective
Cornelia Kleinitz
12:30 - 13:00
Pictographical Mason’s Marks from Musawwarat es Sufra
Tim Karberg
13:00 - 15:00
Lunch
15:00 - 15:30
The shape of water: Comparative perspectives on place-making in the Mediterranean islands
Helen Dawson
15:30 - 16:00
“Placing” a Maritime Territory at Hellenistic Miletos
Lana Radloff
16:00 - 16:30
Water as a Landscape Morphogen in Sasanian Iran
Giulio Maresca
16:30 - 17:00
Closing Remarks
Julian Jansen van Rensburg