Technology and Regions in a long time Perspective

Bergen 22.-23. November 2007

The aim of the conference Technologies and regions in a long time perspective is to discuss and probe archaeological relevant understandings of technology that encapsulate time and space: technologies in a regional long time perspective. An overall aim is to look into regionalism and processes of continuity and change in discussions of technology and materiality – in terms of long time regional similarities and variations but also micro, meso and macro scale diversity. How can we grasp these variations in theory and methods and how can we make them archaeologically as well as ethnographically relevant? What is technology in a regional perspective and in pre-modern contexts and how does it contrast with modern industrial technology – or does it?

Several of our speakers have previously used well known methods already developed within archaeology and social anthropology. Chaînes Opératoires was developed to document technological processes in a detailed step by step mode. Technological style was developed to better include rituals and meanings as relevant components along with practical dimensions in technological processes and phenomenological approaches that grasp the actual experience in making a tool as a physical, bodily based experience has been applied. Finally social agency and engendered approaches to technology have more recently further developed the perspective.

But there has been less focus on processes of change within several of the more recent studies of technology and less focus on short term vs. long term change and continuity. Are these differences in terms of gradual changes from one technology to another dependant upon regional differences and how different regions develop? How does a new technology ‘win’ over an old one – is it the social actors or something in the technologies themselves that guide these processes?

The 14 speakers at the conference will approach such questions from different angles and perspectives – theoretically, methodologically but also illuminated by cases and technologies from different regions and periods from the Palaeolithic up to the Middle Ages – from Fennoscandia to the north to Africa in the south, from England in the west to Finland in the east.