engleski

Archaeological Record in Karst Landscape: The Travels of Materialities

The paper explores the materiality of the landscape in a very specific Dinaric karst setting. A karst environment is specific in the sense that it is characterized by materialities and relational properties rather different than other geomorphological contexts. The materiality of karst and what it implies is often overlooked in archaeology. Hence, the constitution of the archaeological record in karst is treated as a disembodied set of highly generalized and reductive processes. The most prominent feature of karst as an archaeological environment is the lack of a sub – surface context and almost complete dominance of surface structures. Surface structures enable direct interaction with past landscapes which thus always already participate in the constitution of landscape as synchronous elements in a taphonomic process. Thus, the emergence of the karst landscape involves properties of various materialities which constantly interact with each other only to produce new contexts for new dynamics. The interwoven properties of various materialities include both human and non–human actors and actants. The elements in the taphonomic processes were identified and studied as to how various materialities interact through their properties to constitute new assemblages. The case studies selected to demonstrate these issues are considerably different in terms of materialities they entail.

Field survey, Karst landscape, Archaeological record

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