Material Mnemonics: Everyday Memory in Prehistoric Europe

How did ancient Europeans materialise memory? Material Mnemonics: Everyday Practices in Prehistoric Europe provides a fresh approach to the archaeological study of memory. Drawing on case studies from the British Isles, Scandinavia, central Europe, Greece, Italy and the Iberian Peninsula that date from the Neolithic through the Iron Age, the book's authors explore the implications of our understanding of the past when memory and mnemonic practices are placed in the center of cultural analyses. They discuss monument building, personal adornment, relic-making, mortuary rituals, the burning of bodies and houses and the maintenance of domestic spaces and structures over long periods of time. Material Mnemonics engages with contemporary debates on the intersection of memory, identity, embodiment, and power and challenges archaeologists to consider how materiality both provokes and constrains the mnemonic processes in everyday life.

Table of Contents

edited by Katina T. Lillios and Vasileios Tsamis

1. Introduction
(Katina T. Lillios and Vasileios Tsamis)
2. Natural substances, landscape forms, symbols and funerary monuments: Elements of cultural memory among the Neolithic and Copper Age societies of southern Spain
(Leonardo García Sanjuàn and David W. Wheatley)
3. Mnemonic practices of the Iberian Neolithic: The production and use of the engraved slate plaque-relics
(Katina T. Lillios)
4. The art of memory: Personal ornaments in Copper Age South-East Italy
(Robin Skeates)
5. Burning Matters: Memory, violence and monumentality in the British Neolithic
(Andrew Jones)
6. Layers of memory: An embodied approach to the Late Bronze Age of Central Macedonia, Greece (Vasileios Tsamis)
7. Memory, landscape, and body in Bronze Age Denmark
(Janet E. Levy)
8. Memory maps: The mnemonics of central European Iron Age burial mounds
(Bettina Arnold)
9. Memories of features, memories in finds. The remembrance of the past in Iron Age Scandinavia
(Lars Larsson)
10. Re-collecting the fragments: Archaeology as mnemonic practice
(Yannis Hamilakis)