This one-and-a-half-day workshop, organised by the Visual and Material History Working Group in collaboration with LARHRA-CNRS (Lyon, France), seeks to situate the understanding of lithic entities through their natural history, socio-technical, and confessional frameworks.
History tends to be increasingly nourished by material, anthropological, and ecological approaches to the past. From this perspective, the Visual and Material History Working Group, in collaboration with LARHRA-CNRS (Lyon, France), brings together a variety of historians and scholars from different backgrounds (history of knowledge, literary studies, social history, anthropology) to rework the comprehension of earth materials and the underground environment by early modern and modern actors.
The speakers and discussants will address how these main frameworks, among others, were challenged, across Europe and beyond, by the significant enlargement of the diversity of lithic entities since the early modern period. In particular, they will discuss how Earth’s materials rooted the local and challenged other socio-spatial configurations under historical construction (regional hinterlands, long-distance or global geographies). In other words, by studying practices of extraction, crafting, and classification of stones, we seek to understand how different forms of spatiality were territorialised. The analysis of these processes of appropriations and experiences with lithic materials will open the perspective over how these operations give depth, relief, and, in some cases, life, to ideas about the (under)ground, the land, and the Earth itself.
The workshop will be mainly, but not exclusively, conducted in English. Other languages (French and Italian) are allowed and welcomed, especially during the Q&A.
Please register to get a seat or to receive the ZOOM link. Where the stones lie: between historical practices and spatialities • European University Institute
Scientific Organiser(s):
Alexandre Claude (European University Institute)
Leonardo Ariel Cataldi Carrió (CNRS researcher and permanent member of the LARHRA research lab)