CALL FOR PAPERS -- EAA 2024 -- ROME, ITALY 

Christina Cowart-Smith and Alexander D'Alisera invite abstract submission to session #643 ("The Experience of Stone II: Sculpting Comparative Phenomenologies") at the 2024 annual meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists in Rome, Italy. Please see the text below for further details. Any questions may be addressed to the organizers at christina.e.smith@durham.ac.uk and alexander.dalisera@bc.edu.

Session Title and Number
#643. The Experience of Stone II: Sculpting Comparative Phenomenologies

Organizers
Christina Cowart-Smith (Durham University, UK)
Alexander D'Alisera (Boston College, USA)

Deadline
8 February 2024

Submissions
https://submissions.e-a-a.org/eaa2024/

Abstract
The Experience of Stone hits Rome! Building upon the success of last year’s all-day panel, this session offers explorations into the phenomenology of stone sculpture and monuments, stone artefacts, stone buildings, and natural landscapes of stone. In the words of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘The body is our general medium for having a world.’ Centred on EAA 2024’s theme ‘persisting with change’, this session explores how stone constructs (and is mediated by) a viewer's sensorial experience. Phenomenology offers a way for thinking about the affective presence of stone, stone monuments, and natural stonescapes, and proves particularly important for periods and places where the textual record is scant.

We invite scholars of all time periods, geographies, and disciplines—but especially archaeologists, historians, and art historians working from the prehistoric to medieval periods—to contribute papers exploring comparative phenomenologies of stone. Papers that examine geographically or temporally cross-border case-studies are particularly welcome. Possible subjects include, but are not limited to: comparative stonescapes; reuse of hewn or sculptured stone; epigraphy through changing viewership; sculpting memory; textual references to the experience of stone; stone and empire; agentive stone; the application of viewsheds in spatial analysis; a theology of stone; multi-media stone monuments; and, landscape archaeology. As with last year’s panel, this session aims to offer a forum through which history, archaeology, and other disciplines may continue to develop further scholarly discourse and collaboration.

Keywords
stone and stone sculpture, phenomenology, comparative studies, landscape archaeology, monumentality, architectures of stone