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Materialitas: Working Stone, Carving Identity

edited by Blaze O'Connor, Gabriel Cooney and John Chapman

Stone monuments and objects are highly accessible today and formed a focus for engagement, transformation and re-use in the past. Stone is inextricably linked to ideas of monumentality and remembrance. It formed an active medium in the creation of identities and memory in a range of social contexts and practices, including the embodied, performative and incorporated practices of daily activities and traditions. It can be argued that the material presence and physical character of stone objects and monuments were not only actively harnessed in these encounters, but were also the very stuff from which social relations were derived, perceived and thought through.

This volume explores the power and effect of stone through the meanings that emerged out of people's engagement and encounters with its physical properties. Focused primarily on the Neolithic and Bronze Age of Atlantic Europe it brings together authors working on the materiality (materialitas) of stone via stone objects, rock art, monuments and quarrying activity. This highlights the connections that cross-cut what are traditionally seen as disparate research areas within the archaeological discipline. 208p, 93 b/w illus, 8p of col illus. (Oxbow Books 2009)

Review Quotes

"It is good to see the historical potential of stone at last being tapped so imaginatively."

Mike Pitts
British Archaeology 112 (April 2010)

"[Many] papers in this anthology deserve to be mentioned, all supporting the conclusion that ‘stone rocks’. I found myself absorbed by reading this well composed anthology. If you are interested in exploring what a good interpretative archaeology could or ought to look like, some two decades after its inception, I suggest that you put Materialitas on your ‘must-read’ list."

Joakim Goldhahn
European Journal of Archaeology, 14.1-2 (2011)

"Overall, the volume offers many promising lines of enquiry and demonstrates just how much information can be extracted from a seemingly intractable material, if one approaches it with a wide range of questions. There is a refreshing willingness to take a critical view of theories of materiality, and an honesty about the purely speculative aspects of wringing meaning out of stone... This well-produced book - with its useful index and its initial overall abstracts in English, French and German - contains much valuable information and many fruitful approaches, and will be of lasting value to researchers."

Alison Sheridan
Archaeological Journal, no. 166 (2010)

Table of Contents

Introduction: Materialitas and the Significance of Stone (Blaze O'Connor and Gabriel Cooney)
Part One: Stone Quarries and Monuments
Dead Stone and Living Rock (Richard Bradley)
Stones with Character: Animism, Agency and Megalithic Monuments (Chris Scarre)
Preserved in Stone: Material and Ideology in the Neolithic (Muiris O'Sullivan)
The World of the Grey Wethers (Joshua Pollard and Mark Gillings)
Megalithic Technology: A New Approach to the Earliest Stone Architecture of the West of France. Issues, Methodology and Results (Emmanuel Mens and Jean-Marc Large)
Building the Great Stone Circles of Northern Britain: Questions of Materiality, Identity and Social Practices (Colin Richards)
Mundane Stone and its Meaning in the Neolithic (Gabriel Cooney)
Carneddau: Stone (Aaron Watson)
Part Two: Worked and Carved Stones
Help, I’m a Rock! The Materiality of Stone in the Mesolithic of Britain and Ireland (Graeme Warren)
Black is the Colour … Chert, Concave Scrapers and Passage Tombs (Stefan Bergh)
Neolithic Fibrolite Working in the West of France (Yvan Pailler)
The Ideological Significance of Flint for Neolithic and Bronze Age Communities in the Rhine/Meuse Delta of the Netherlands (Annelou Van Gijn)
Speaking of Stone, Speaking through Stone: An Exegesis of an Engraved Slate Plaque from Late Neolithic Iberia (Katina Lillios and Jonathan Thomas)
Re-collected Objects: Carved, Worked and Unworked Stone in Bronze Age Funerary Monuments (Blaze O'Connor)
Breaking Down and Cracking Up: Rock Art and the Materiality of Stone in Kilmartin, Argyll, Scotland (Andrew Jones)
Signs on a Rock Veil: Work on Rocks, ‘Prehistoric Art’ and Identity in North-West Iberia (Lara Bacelar Alves)
Afterword (Chris Gosden)

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