Wykład otwarty / Keynote lecture
Data: 20.03.2024 (środa)
Miejsce: Europejskie Centrum Edukacji Geologicznej Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego w Chęcinach, sala: aula
Andreas Rau (Leibniz Zentrum für Archäologie, Zentrum für Baltische und Skandinavische Archäologie, Szlezwik, Niemcy)
Lakes full of information – on Iron Age wetland deposits
There are dozens of ways to classify archaeological source material. One of these is the epistemological manner that a group of sources provides. The extremes here are special finds that provide almost unique highlights and snippets of an sometimes biographical approach, the discovery of which is hardly predictable and expected. Other sources are particularly important because their potential lies in generating large amounts of data, in which the collected material either can be processed to confirm or modify previously known findings.
In the wetland archaeology of the Roman Iron Age in Northern Europe, these two extremes of both uniqueness and pattern-generating big data (or qualitative and quantitative approaches, if you will) come together in an unusual way. Over the last 35 years or so the bog archaeological sites of northern Germany and southern Scandinavia, the sites labelled as „post-battle ritual sites” in particular, offer thousands of pieces of information that have considerably expanded our knowledge of both the material culture and the socio-cultural backgrounds that can be derived from it. A discussion about the structures of barbarian societies without taking this type of source into account is hardly conceivable – knowing full well that with the bog sites we often only gain a specific perspective determined by ritual and dominated by artefacts of the male and military sphere.
The lecture will not only present the sources themselves and their potential but will also critically examine the research debate and the assumptions that are often (quickly) born out of it, as well as attempt to formulate open questions and new perspectives.