Dragoş Gheorghiu | Universitatea Nationala de Arte Bucuresti (original) (raw)

Call for Papers by Dragoş Gheorghiu

30th EAA Annual Meeting in Rome, Italy 28 -31 August 2024EAA Session, 2024

The horse has been part of human history for thousands of years, having multiple roles: prey, sou... more The horse has been part of human history for thousands of years, having multiple roles: prey, source of raw materials and food, mount, "war machine", co-worker, and companion are just a few examples of the outcome of horse and human relations through the millennia. This large diversity can be analysed through e.g. economic, social, artistic and mythological aspects. The horse-human interactions are visible in many different types of sources: archaeological, historic, iconographic, symbolic and technological, just to mention a few. We invite speakers to explore this grand area of different aspects of this long history and relationship in a session with two main focuses:

The archaeological, historical, cultural and artistic study of horses in its different contexts. Iconography available on several archaeological and historical remains such as prehistoric art, sculptures, numismatics, mosaics, and frescoes, among other artistic manifestations of very different chronologies allows us to understand better the importance of the horse in the History of Humankind and development of civilization, mainly after the domestication process.
Equestrian archaeology in the 21st century with the starting point in the horse as an animal. This highlights the need to bring horses, horse-related artefacts and ‘horse people’ within archaeology into a disciplinary field of research. Topics such as horse breeding, the evolution of horsemanship, and the art of riding, just to mention a few examples, cannot be studied based on archaeological artefacts only. In the growing field of equestrian studies, all types of sources and methods that help us to understand past relations between horse and man are welcome and needed.

Parmi les structures néolithiques de la Méditerranée et de l'Europe et de leurs marges (construct... more Parmi les structures néolithiques de la Méditerranée et de l'Europe et de leurs marges (constructions, habitations, sépultures parfois) certaines ont été, à l'évidence, détruites par le feu. Cette session envisagera les aspects méthodologiques : comment fouiller, étudier, analyser, enregistrer et sauvegarder des vestiges architecturaux brûlés ? et archéologiques : incendies naturels ou volontaires et leurs motivations. Call for Papers-Session 291324 The burned structures in the Neolithic Among the neolithic structures of the Mediterranean and Europe and their margins (buildings, houses, burials sometimes) some were obviously destroyed by fire. This session will consider the methodological aspects: how to excavate, study, analyze, record and save architectural remains burned? and archaeological: natural or voluntary fires and their motivations. Organisateurs-Session Organisers Pr. Dragoş GHEORGHIU (National University of Arts, Bucharest, Romania, secretary of the « Neolithic Civilizations of the Mediterranean and Europe » commission) gheorghiu_dragos@yahoo.com Pr. Olivier LEMERCIER (university Paul Valéry-Montpellier 3, France, President of the « Neolithic Civilizations of the Mediterranean and Europe » commission) olivier.lemercier@univ-montp3.fr Online submission NOW / Soumissions en ligne ouvertes : https://uispp2020.sciencesconf.org/

This session shall examine the relationship between material culture and rhythms, from visual art... more This session shall examine the relationship between material culture and rhythms, from visual art to music in an attempt to define and express common components. Rhythm in painting is expressed as pattern distribution. In sculpture, rhythm is locked temporally, fusing the expression of a moment with timelessness, bringing forth a new expression from movement and being. Musical instruments convey the rhythmic movement of the breath or the hands through their shape, illustrating that existence as we know it is meaningless without rhythmic cycles which power life and beingness. The rhythms of place, of architecture and urban planning, shall be considered here; objects divided by space are experienced as related through rhythm, and temporality as a sense is quantified as movement, beats and rests. The manner and methods through which rhythm is integrated with objects of creation is here explored. We invite archaeologists, anthropologists and artists to contribute to this debate.

CALL FOR PAPERS EAA 2018 Barcelona, Session #223. DEADLINE 15 February 2018 ANTHROPOMORPHISM ... more CALL FOR PAPERS EAA 2018 Barcelona, Session #223.
DEADLINE 15 February 2018

ANTHROPOMORPHISM IN MATERIAL CULTURE AND LANDSCAPE: APPROACHING A FUNDAMENTAL OF HUMAN COGNITION

Coordinators: Professor Dragos Gheorghiu (Romania) - National University of Arts – Bucharest, and
Dr. Vincent Paladino (United States) - American Anthropological Association

Keywords: anthropomorphism, cognition, material culture, landscape

Anthropomorphism is one fundamental example of the analogous thinking of humankind: that of projecting a human corporal image over the surrounding world.
Anthropomorphism contributes to the human sense of control over the environment and an increased sense of knowledge and insight about the world they inhabit. It is a characteristic of thought that bestows a feeling of protection through understanding, and thus represents the human capacity for reasoned thought as a tool for defense and survival. Anthropomorphism is an aspect of human cognition that displays a unique capability and inherent bias toward creating a conceptual framework first, then modeling material culture and society. For a mental control of cosmic phenomena, supernatural entities, geomorphs, and up to spatial organizations or objects, humanity used anthropomorphic images or symbols. Anthropomorphism is also a type of self-reflection, whereby humans can contemplate the verities of their lives through projection onto other species.
Although less studied, anthropomorphism is a significant cognitive subject for archaeology, being present in material culture and landscape, both as icons and diagrams, from early prehistory up to the modern world.
This is the reason why the present session proposes archaeological approaches to the anthropomorphic images that are determined by nature or culture.

The relevancy of archaeology has been increasingly questioned in recent years, because the discip... more The relevancy of archaeology has been increasingly questioned in recent years, because the discipline has traditionally been an intellectual investigation into the mysteries of the past, without a purpose, even one just perceived or imagined. The present time enables us to record and investigate reality in ways impossible just a few years ago, and yet the loss of natural environments and cultural heritage has never been larger.
The very concept of culture is threatened by a globalized and homogenizing world that produces uncertainty, fear and dissatisfaction. In a world that has never been more connected and similar, there is a sense of despair brought up by detachment with any environment or culture, people are not any more part of something defined, they feel part of an undistinguishable mass.
This session wants to bring together papers that focus on past cultures and characterising environments to (re-)discover our roots and cultural individuality, providing a meaning to what we are losing. If we are to halt and reverse this trend towards cultural and environmental destruction, we need to explain why such things matter, to us today, and the answers are locked in the past. Papers concentrating on the choice of the environment populated by people or cultures that should distinguish a place or existing people, ignoring the artificial constructs of modern nationalism are invited. They should identify historical identities that can be translated to or reproduced for use by local communities, aside from commercial exploitation (e.g. tourism).

Organizers: Suzie Thomas, Luiz Oosterbeek, Dragos Gheorghiu, Styliani Kaltsogianni (Session) ... more Organizers: Suzie Thomas, Luiz Oosterbeek, Dragos Gheorghiu, Styliani Kaltsogianni

(Session)
EAA, 20th annual meeting, 10-14 September 2014, Istanbul Call for Papers & Posters
Deadline January 27, 2014
Contact: gheorghiu_dragos@yahoo.com

Call for paper & poster proposals now open. All paper and poster proposals should be submitted online by filling the Paper Submission Form: https://www.eaa2014istanbul.org/submission_form

The discovery, reconstruction, display, and transmission of material heritage constitute a major cultural problem of the 21st century.
A similar tendency could be identified with immaterial heritage. Ancient technologies, as well as those of traditional societies are recovered and presented to the public by means of scientific experiments and re-enactments.
The last decade digital technologies allowed the development of a new archaeological discipline, Virtual Archaeology, whose role is to represent, reconstruct, and preserve the [incomplete] material heritage. The amount of information offered can be augmented by mixing different media, producing an augmented or a mixed reality.
Taking into account these contemporary trends to approach both material and immaterial heritage, the present session is an invitation to propose and discuss new methods to improve the “reality” of the Past, as well as to present current research which brings new contributions to the 21st century research on this subject. It will also discuss the epistemological implications of the new virtual reconstructions of the Past.

Papers by Dragoş Gheorghiu

Arts / Culture / Design, 2021

Ruins were a fascinating subject for the last half millennium culture in Europe. Their rhetoric s... more Ruins were a fascinating subject for the last half millennium culture in Europe. Their rhetoric structure, determined by the work of Nature-Time upon materials, stimulated the arts and architecture between the Middle Ages and Post-Modernism. The paper discussed the analogy between the human body and architecture, together with the material tropes identified in iconography and illustrated with two iconic sites, Aquaba and Palmyra. An example presented to show the use of the tropes of ruins in creating Modern Art is Constantin Brancusi’s monumental work for the World War I soldiers.

ACTA MUSEI TIBERIOPOLITANI, 2020

Water is one of the archetypal elements of all mythologies, to mention only the flood myth which ... more Water is one of the archetypal elements of all mythologies, to mention only the flood myth which is one of humankind’s most widespread myths.
The Epic of Gilgamesh’s depiction (3rd millennium B.C.) of a catastrophic event which occurred in Western Asia, is considered to have been one of the earliest versions of the Biblical flood, describing a calamitous inundation, probably in relation with the current overflows of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, that was preserved in the memory of the local populations. A reference to these disastrous inundations seems to have been recorded in the iconography of Göbekli Tepe’s enclosures, dated the 12th millennium B.C. .
Situated in the northern part of the Fertile Crescent in Upper Mesopotamia, near the Balich River, a tributary of the Euphrates, Göbekli Tepe represents one of the largest early PPN sites in the region (Çelik 2016: 361).
The irregularity of the Tigris-Euphrates river system floods occurring in spring, which are recorded in the mythology of Mesopotamia (Fiala 2005: 431) could not have passed unnoticed in the early local mythologies either.
An eloquent example could be the bas-reliefs of Enclosure D at Göbekli Tepe, which record an event similar to the one described in the Gilgamesh flood myth, illustrating with zoomorphic images the different stages of a flood. A zoo-semiotic analysis of the iconography of the bas-reliefs scenes carved on the T-shaped stone pillars of the monument reveals diverse types of flooded landscapes (Gheorghiu 2015), that can be perceived as components of a visual story about a flood.
By comparing the visual story at Göbekli Tepe with parts of The Epic of Gilgamesh, one can imagine the complexity of the mythology of the late epi-Palaeolithic – early pre-pottery Neolithic populations of Western Asia.

ICVL Conference Proceedings, 2018

In this paper the authors present a research investigating methods for achieving a more efficient... more In this paper the authors present a research investigating methods for achieving a more efficient immersion of the visitors in a set of historical reconstructions performed in online Virtual Reality (VR) using Unity3D. The approach was centred on augmenting the virtuality by means of "reality inserts", to enhance the veridicity of the overall 3D scenes and support an immersive setting for informal history learning. The current paper will describe a case study involving two Roman-Greek reconstructions in Mangalia and Albeşti, within the Time Maps (PN II IDEI) project.

eLSE Conference Proceedings, 2018

One of the roles of traditional museums was that to support cultural identities. According to UNE... more One of the roles of traditional museums was that to support cultural identities. According to UNESCO's definition, the heritage that generates the identity of a community is both material (objects, architectural constructions), and immaterial (represented by technologies, customs).In order to preserve today, and to transfer into the future the identity of a community, a solution is the digitalization of both categories of cultural heritage, complemented by a subsequent structuring of the information, starting from the objects and buildings, up to their utilization by people. This logical process outlines the possible structure of a virtual museum of cultural identity. The virtual museum we have implemented within the Time Maps Project (www.timemaps.net), following the above mentioned concept, in a first stage presents to the visitor the objects specific to the local history, virtually reconstructed in 3D. In a secondary stage, the visitor can study the technologies behind the manufacturing of the 3D objects, explained by means of a series of video films. In the third stage, the visitor will be immersed in the architectural contexts virtually reconstructed, in which the 3D objects have been introduced, as well as the human characters that utilize these objects, the latter being created with 3D photogrammetry techniques. The 3D content has been simplified for optimal utilization of the virtual museums in online and mobile environments. The e-learning experiments with the virtual museums of cultural identity have been performed in different rural and urban communities within the Time Maps project, and will be described and discussed in the current paper.

LUMEN Conference Proceedings, 2018

The present paper proposes a sustainable method for discovering, teaching and learning history us... more The present paper proposes a sustainable method for discovering, teaching and learning history using the authentic learning paradigm by means of a set of 3D historical reconstructions populated with virtual characters, whose purpose is to improve the authenticity of the reconstructions and to offer complex information on the historical contexts. The paper provides the details of two case studies of 3D reconstructions conducted in Vălenii de Munte and in Albesti, Dobrogea. To understand the functionalities of such a complex living system, real characters (actors dressed in epoch costumes), as well as real objects from ethnographic museums have been scanned in 3D and introduced in the virtual environment in Unity3D. The perception of usefulness is an essential indicator of the quality and efficiency of the digital learning environments and consequently of their subsequent acceptance by teachers and students. The research purpose of the paper was to conduct a process of assessment of the contribution of the virtual characters and objects to the realization of the authentic learning environment, and to present the research findings. The assessment of the usefulness of learning in virtual environments using 3D reconstructions and virtual characters by means of the learning outcomes is discussed to illustrate the research conclusions.

The current IT and digital technologies such as Mobile Augmented Reality (MAR), enable the overla... more The current IT and digital technologies such as Mobile Augmented Reality (MAR), enable the overlap of digital and real world information, in relation with a topic, in an engaging and efficient manner, and therefore can be used to store intangible heritage, as well as study it in context. The current paper refers to such an augmentation of cultural information, performed at the Kallatis site, whose ruins, today mostly covered by the modern town, do not offer sufficient information on the complexity of the Greek civilization. The implementation of the MAR application consists in defining several points of interest of the important local archaeologic discoveries, which can trigger, for the visitors using our application, an augmentation of the historical site with images and videos.
With the current research work, the authors propose and demonstrate that a mobile MAR application can constitute a modern method for providing visitors an immersive and holistic experience for understanding the local material and intangible heritage.

Conference Proceedings, 2019

The last few decades have seen the rise of a new archaeology characterized by a propensity for hi... more The last few decades have seen the rise of a new archaeology characterized by a propensity for high realism in the representation of the past under the form of virtual reconstructions, which allow the viewer to have an immersive experience. Our project proposes the insertion of experiments performed in real reconstructed contexts inside complex 3D virtual reconstructions, thus augmenting the degree of " reality " and of immersion. The result is a creative mix of virtual reality and reality (mixed reality) under the form of " windows of immersion " , which can stimulate the archaeological imagination.

30th EAA Annual Meeting in Rome, Italy 28 -31 August 2024EAA Session, 2024

The archaeological, historical, cultural and artistic study of horses in its different contexts. Iconography available on several archaeological and historical remains such as prehistoric art, sculptures, numismatics, mosaics, and frescoes, among other artistic manifestations of very different chronologies allows us to understand better the importance of the horse in the History of Humankind and development of civilization, mainly after the domestication process.
Equestrian archaeology in the 21st century with the starting point in the horse as an animal. This highlights the need to bring horses, horse-related artefacts and ‘horse people’ within archaeology into a disciplinary field of research. Topics such as horse breeding, the evolution of horsemanship, and the art of riding, just to mention a few examples, cannot be studied based on archaeological artefacts only. In the growing field of equestrian studies, all types of sources and methods that help us to understand past relations between horse and man are welcome and needed.

CALL FOR PAPERS EAA 2018 Barcelona, Session #223. DEADLINE 15 February 2018 ANTHROPOMORPHISM ... more CALL FOR PAPERS EAA 2018 Barcelona, Session #223.
DEADLINE 15 February 2018

ANTHROPOMORPHISM IN MATERIAL CULTURE AND LANDSCAPE: APPROACHING A FUNDAMENTAL OF HUMAN COGNITION

Coordinators: Professor Dragos Gheorghiu (Romania) - National University of Arts – Bucharest, and
Dr. Vincent Paladino (United States) - American Anthropological Association

Keywords: anthropomorphism, cognition, material culture, landscape

Organizers: Suzie Thomas, Luiz Oosterbeek, Dragos Gheorghiu, Styliani Kaltsogianni (Session) ... more Organizers: Suzie Thomas, Luiz Oosterbeek, Dragos Gheorghiu, Styliani Kaltsogianni

(Session)
EAA, 20th annual meeting, 10-14 September 2014, Istanbul Call for Papers & Posters
Deadline January 27, 2014
Contact: gheorghiu_dragos@yahoo.com

Call for paper & poster proposals now open. All paper and poster proposals should be submitted online by filling the Paper Submission Form: https://www.eaa2014istanbul.org/submission_form

Arts / Culture / Design, 2021

ACTA MUSEI TIBERIOPOLITANI, 2020

ICVL Conference Proceedings, 2018

eLSE Conference Proceedings, 2018

LUMEN Conference Proceedings, 2018

Conference Proceedings, 2019

The research presented is based on a series of educational experiments spanning 4 years, conducte... more The research presented is based on a series of educational experiments spanning 4 years, conducted in rural communities in Southern Romania with students of various ages in primary and secondary schools. The objective was to evaluate teaching and learning approaches in context using mobile devices and interactive and adaptive learning applications.

Encountering Imagery. Materialities, Perceptions, Relations, 2012

The paper discusses the use of art metaphors to create an augmentation of reality. By using mater... more The paper discusses the use of art metaphors to create an augmentation of reality. By using material metaphors positioned on archaeological sites, a hybrid of the real and the artificial is created in the mind of the performer, developing the imagination. In this way it is possible to better understand human behaviour, especially during rites of passage. A case study presents the archaeological site as a map where each metaphorical element exists in close relationship with the others.

REV. ROUM. ART HIST. Serie Beaux Arts, Tome XXXVIII, 2001

History of the Knowledge of Animal Behaviour. Colloques d’histoire des connaissances zoologiques, 4. Proceedings of the International Conference, University of Liège, University of Liège, 1993

ANN. ROUM. ANTHROPOL., 32, 1995

Revue Roumaine d’Histoire de l’Art, Série Beaux-Art, tome XXXII, 1995

Archaeology of the first millennium A.D.. Nomads and autochtonous in the first millennium A.D., Istros, 2015

$Research paper thumbnail of Flexible implants for stable flexible osteosynthesis of femoral tibia fractures and working instrumentation$

Art in the Archaeological Imagination, 2020

Art as formal analysis and as an analogical way of thinking has existed for a long time in the aw... more Art as formal analysis and as an analogical way of thinking has existed for a long time in the awareness of archaeologists and in their research, namely the fundamental principles and elements issued from the different types of visual art: shapes, forms, space, textures, colours, whose combinations form the immaterial basis of imagination. And imagination exists both in art and science.
Consequently, the purpose of this book is to present the archaeological research functioning as a sort of artistic creation. It will be a book on imagination in archaeology, including also the artistic process as an archaeological subject.
The structure of the book offers new perspectives on the archaeological imagination, as an exploration of the symbolic thinking, the possibility of finding inspiration in experientiality, and a re-approach to the act of creation as a subject for archaeological research.
When analysing the art of the past, or when using art methods to approach the past, we are facing an act of creation where imagination, emotion, and creativity combine under the form of an experiential instrument of investigation.
The book offers a vision of archaeological research closer to the complexity of the human nature, and consequently, to a human thinking structured on similarity and symbolism, being able to detect cultural and psychological subjects ignored until today, and, at the same time to offer a series of definitions for art, seen from the perspective of archaeology.

Archaeopress Publishing Ltd, 2019

The book attempts to present the entanglement of the physical phenomenon of fire, the pyro-techno... more The book attempts to present the entanglement of the physical phenomenon of fire, the pyro-technological instruments, i. e., its material supports, and the human being.

Augmented Reality Art, 2014

This chapter proposes a new method for evoking the complexity of the Past from the archaeologic... more This chapter proposes a new method for evoking the complexity of the Past from the
archaeological record, based on a transdisciplinary approach linking science, art and
technology. Inspired from the fractal-theory, this method employs different levels of
augmentations from general context to detail and uses a combination of Augmented Reality
techniques and visual media, with a high artistic quality, to create a Mixed-Reality user
experience. The paper presents an experimental Augmented Reality application on ...

Archaeopress Publishing, 2019

The experiments designed to produce images by blowing colours, as well as the archaeoacoustic exp... more The experiments designed to produce images by blowing colours, as well as the archaeoacoustic experiments carried out in order to explain the art of Palaeolithic painted caves, point to the important role of the performer in the creation of synaesthetic visual and acoustic productions. This chapter analyses the creative process of generating images-sounds animated by the breath of the performer and by the fire light, and proposes a shamanic model for the synaesthetic performers of the Palaeolithic.

Archaeopress Publishing, 2019

The experiments of Augmented Virtuality of the authors created a real-virtual continuum, by inser... more The experiments of Augmented Virtuality of the authors created a real-virtual continuum, by inserting 3D scanned objects and characters into the virtual spaces. This type of intermedia is a form of a new virtual art that augments the experience of archaeological [virtual] spaces.

Springer Nature, Geroimenko Vladimir (ed.). Augmented Reality Games II, 2018

Throughout the world, settlements invisible to the contemporary eye exist hidden under layers of ... more Throughout the world, settlements invisible to the contemporary eye exist hidden under layers of soil and debris, waiting to be discovered. Their discovery can precede the archaeological excavation through the use of ground radar for scanning and points-of-interest (POIs) for delineating their shape in space. Once discovered with the use of smartphones, these POIs display augmented information. If the presentation of the invisible settlement can be achieved as a playful activity of discovery, the impact on the player may have a stronger cultural, and possibly identity, value.

This chapter proposes a new method for evoking the complexity of the Past from the ... more This chapter proposes a new method for evoking the complexity of the Past from the
archaeological record, based on a transdisciplinary approach linking archaeological
science, art and IT technology. Inspired from the fractal-theory, this method employs
different levels of augmentations from general context to detail and uses a combination of
Augmented Reality techniques and visual media, with a high artistic quality, to create a
Mixed-Reality user experience. The paper presents an experimental Augmented Reality
application on mobile devices, and discusses the efficacy of the method for an
educational strategy to help communities recover and transmit their immaterial heritage
to future generations. The research was based in Vădastra village, southern Romania, in
an archaeological complex of a prehistoric settlement.

This book discusses both ancient and modern shamanism, demonstrating its longevity and spatial di... more This book discusses both ancient and modern shamanism, demonstrating its longevity and spatial distribution, and is divided into eleven thought-provoking chapters that are organised into three sections: mind-body, nature, and culture. It discusses the clear associations with this sometimes little-understood ritualised practice, and asks what shamanism is and if tangible evidence can be extracted from a largely fragmentary archaeological record. The book offers a novel portrayal of the material culture of shamanism by collating carefully selected studies by specialists from three different continents, promoting a series of new perspectives on this idiosyncratic and sometimes intangible phenomenon.

This book gathers the most recent studies on a subject which has only recently been approached by... more This book gathers the most recent studies on a subject which has only recently been approached by archaeology. Today, the current literature on the topic of shamanism is not current compared when with other subjects studied by archaeology. Therefore, since it existed in all the regions of the world, we think it necessary to update the subject and to offer a global view of it. By putting together experts from three continents who have studied the phenomenon of shamanism, we hope to offer a novel approach on the worldwide material culture of shamanism. Recent interdisciplinary studies support the idea of the existence of shamanistic representations as long ago as the Middle/Upper Palaeolithic, but at the same time, do not follow developments during the history of the development of humankind. As ethnographic evidence shows, shamanistic activity represents a complex phenomenon that is extremely diversified, its spiritual activity possessing a large variety of expressions in the materia...

Prehistoric Stamps: Theory and Experiments

BAR S2138, 2010

The present volume is mainly the result of two symposia held at the European Archaeological Assoc... more The present volume is mainly the result of two symposia held at the European Archaeological Association meetings in Krakow (2006) and Zadar (2007), respectively, which gathered studies on the function, morphology, materiality, technology, ritual, function and context of figurines, whether made of clay, wood, metal, stone, bone or shell.

At the end of the Pre Pottery Neolithic in the Near East, and during all the Neolithic and Chalco... more At the end of the Pre Pottery Neolithic in the Near East, and during all the Neolithic and Chalcolithic in South Eastern Europe, an original social and semiotic phenomenon emerges together with the first forms of sedentism: the emergence of overlapped settlements or tells. Such phenomenon which includes a temporal trait cannot be understood without a longue durée approach, which will reveal the ritual / cyclical phases of construction and deconstruction of the material process of dwelling, as well as the discontinuities existing in some places. A tell settlement is, from a semiotic perspective, a sort of attractor positioned in a landscape, which will catch the materiality of the environment, transforming it with the help of tools and geometry into a domesticated object. One should perceive the material transformations of construction and deconstruction, as ritual combinations of various materials, followed by their alchemic transformation through a process of combustion, which are also part of the domestication process. In all these processes the chaîne-opératoire of making and dismantling had a ritual character, since both were operations with very well determined stages. The two antagonist processes are characterized by a rhetoric structure, using synecdoche, metonymies and metaphors. The transformation of the rough material into a composite substance by combining water with clay and straws, followed by its alchemic transformation into a material with a new quality which is ceramics, are all stages of a ritual technological process. A house built from the composite material mentioned, as well as a settlement, has a limited life span, which ends with a rite of passage, i.e. a symbolic sacrifice through fire, followed by a volumetric transformation, because a tridimensional clay object became a two dimensional layer of ceramics. This new material was recycled later in the process of re-dwelling the place. To approach the technical and the ritual processes mentioned I used experimental archaeology: I built replicas of prehistoric wattle-and-daub houses surrounded by palisades and ditches, granaries and kilns, and after a period of use I deconstructed them with fire, to understand the process of combustion, the dynamic of the collapse, and the material transformation, as well as recycling. But to approach prehistoric materiality, the archaeological method is not complete without the phenomenological experience of the performer, which is an alternate instrument to understand through embodiment the rituality of the diverse materialities of the past.

Lascaux et le ciel de la préhistoire, 2020

Introduction: Lascaux et le ciel de la préhistoire by Chantal Jegues-Wolkiewiez