An Introduction to Geomythography

The interpretation of prehistoric and later societies through a combination of oral tradition, place-names, landscape analysis and archaeology. The process is a means of finding new perspectives and interpretations to further the understanding of early societies.

Geomythology, 2021

, two weeks after the disaster Since geomythology is one of the most interdisciplinary of fields, I am considerably indebted to experts in areas outside my own specialities (literature and literary theory). The following reviewers were unfailingly generous with their time and comments as I worked to get the science right: Aley El-Shazly (geology), Duane Hamacher (astronomy), and Nick Freidin (archaeology). Thanks are due, as well, to my Routledge editor Michelle Salyga for her encouragement in the project's early stages. I am also heavily indebted to folklorist-historian Adrienne Mayor, geomythographer extraordinaire, whose remarkable work in this area sparked my initial interest in the subject. Her comments on this manuscript have been invaluable, and any remaining errors or shortcomings are, of course, my own. Finally, thanks to my wife Hannah for her support throughout the writing of the book.

Can we write a place-oriented history of our past? Our lives, the way we define ourselves, our memories and experiences are tightly intertwoven with the nature of places we live in, the history of towns and countrysides that we belong to, and the landscapes in which we grow up. The concept of place, as a site of human practice in and with the material world, has recently become a prevailing concept in the humanities and social sciences, a hot topic. In this course we will explore how archaeology and ethnographic research addresses material complexities and cultural meanings of places in the broader context of landscapes. We will investigate critical theories of place, space and landscape, while working with case studies from the ancient Near East and the Eastern Mediterranean as well as the contemporary world. We will seek the question, how through particular fieldwork practices of archaeologists, anthropologists, contemporary artists, geographers and mapmakers, one can access and document the rich meanings, stories, and memories of places, their layered material corpus. Particular attention will be given to Anatolian landscapes through its long-term history with a special focus on springs, caves, sinkholes, river valleys and river sources distributed in the landscape, and various ways such geological features and "natural" places are inscribed with human practices. Using a multi-sited approach to archaeological and ethnographic fieldwork, we will investigate in detail various practices of place-making. We will also be concerned about cultural biographies of sites, diachronic change in the landscapes and explore how they were used and re-inscribed by various societies in a long-term perspective.

Contributions in New World Archaeology, 2015

Recent advancements in the field of non-invasive archaeological prospection methods significantly facilitated their use in archaeological landscape studies. Growing awareness of their potential can be also observed among Polish archaeologists. For many years one of the most popular prospection methods applied in the so-called settlement pattern studies in Polish archaeology was fieldwalking. This influenced the analytical categories and archaeological landscape perspective. In this paper I aim to investigate the relationship between preliminary knowledge and interpretation of data collected through non-destructive methods. Resumen Los últimos avances en el área de las técnicas no invasivas de la prospección arqueológica han fomentado el uso de las mismas en los estudios arqueológicos del paisaje. El aumento de la conciencia acerca de su potencial puede observarse, también, entre los arqueólogos polacos. Anteriormente, durante varios años una de las técnicas de prospección muy popular que se aplicó en los denominados estudios de los patrones de asentamiento en la arqueología polaca fue la prospección superficial que influyó en las categorías analíticas y la perspectiva arqueológica del paisaje. En el presente artículo se pretende investigar la relación entre los conocimientos iniciales y la interpretación de los datos recogidos con las técnicas no destructivas. Palabras clave: técnicas no invasivas, técnicas de teledetección, geofísica arqueológica, arqueología del paisaje, estudios de los patrones de asentamiento, prospección superficial

The relationship between the geosciences and myths is studied by geomythology which is understood as an explanation of the geological and geomorphological features using the supernatural forces and beings. The geomythological aspect can be regarded in relation to cultural, historical and spiritual meaning or value of geodiversity and it can be included into the holistic concept of geotourism (that means that geotourism should contain abiotic, biotic and cultural components). The article briefly discuss the reasons why geomythological aspect could be used for geoconservation and geotourism purposes and it presents several examples (especially geosites and geomorphosites) from the Czech Republic where the geomythological value is (or can be) used for these purposes.

Of Rocks and Water: Towards an Archaeology of Place, 2014

Places are small, culturally significant locales that exist within a landscape. They are meaningful to specific cultural groups through everyday experience and shared stories associated with them. Places therefore gather a vast range of things in their microcosm: both animate and inanimate entities, residues, materials, knowledges, and stories. The material residues and cultural associations that cluster around places run deep in their temporality. Places are then generated and maintained by a spectrum of locally specific practices, from the situated activities of daily users of space, on the one hand, to the grandiose interventions of the political elite on the other. Combined, these social practices continually produce hybrid material forms and spatial configurations over time, and anchor communities to particular locales with a sense of cultural belonging. They become assemblages of shared memories, always pregnant for improvised events, despite the common essentialist notion of local places as static or conservative. Places thus serve as meaningful nexuses of human interaction, and as sites of immediate everyday experience. This edited volume is the outcome of a workshop/colloquium that tookplace at Brown University in March 2008, with the title Drawing on Rocks, Gathering by the Water: Archaeological Fieldwork at Rock Reliefs, Sacred Springs and Other Places. That event was intended to bring together academics who worked on similar questions concerning archaeological landscapes across the globe and specifically to focus on the making and unmaking of places of human interaction such as rock reliefs, sacred springs and lakes, cairns, ruins, and other meaningful places. The colloquium also provided a platform to discuss the experiences, the challenges, and the theoretical implications of working in the field and specifically at such unusual sites and landscapes. The intention was to bring to the table new archaeological perspectives on working at geologically and culturally distinctive locales where the particular geologies are encountered and uniquely reworked by local practices. This chapter is an introduction to the anthology of articles gathered under this topic.

History and Anthropology, 2003

Palikur historical knowledge is overwhelmingly recorded spatially in landscape, but given that the map‐maker's vision of the world is a product of a discourse about space and time, is a map an appropriate medium on which to base an archive of historical knowledge? This article explores aspects of Palikur speakers' experiences of landscape and historical time in the region known as “Arukwa” along the Rio Urucau´a in the state of Amap´a, Brazil, and contends that the canon of stories is organized spatially more than it is organized chronologically. Based on ethnographic data, several dimensions of Palikur spatial history are explored. These include the contentions that location and events may not be historically coterminous, although they may be used to imply one another; and that landscape may be considered to be agentive in the sense in which it constitutes a resource for memorializing societies, environmental skills and political capacities of people who have dwelt on it in times past. In addition, the article notes that landscape knowledge and orientation can be considered embodied knowledges; places in landscapes may be seen as animate and as extensions of human community; landscape is connected to upperworlds and underworlds, much as they are on the horizon; and time, in the Palikur language, is spatialized. The article contends that many of these issues would be elided by substituting a cartographic/spatial approach to the recording of a non‐chronological history. The aim, then, is to establish a spatio‐temporal understanding of heritage without resorting to cartographic understandings of space, in order to explore whether—and how—those might be represented in a multimedia archive that aims to work within a local historiographic idiom.

1992

Geographic information systems (GIS) have considerable potential for extending the study of spatial processes in archaeology. However, the present structure of GIS is currently atemporal and consequently only able to deal with spatial phenomena in a single instant of time. If past events and processes cannot be linked to each other, or to the present, we cannot hope effectively to model trends in the past, nor understand fully the nature of dynamic process. This is a problem which has been recognised within the GIS community and a considerable degree of research is currently being directed toward the operational development of a temporal dimension in GIS (cf. Langran 1989a, 1989b, forthcoming; Barrera & AlTaha 1990; Barerra et al. 1990). Because archaeologists are beginning to make considerable use of GIS (cf. Kvamme 1986a, 1986b, 1989; Peregrine 1988; Wansleeben 1988; Allen et al. 1990), and because archaeologists have a significant interest in cultural change over time, the search...