Material Worlds: Art and Agency in the Near East and Africa: Ethnographies of space, place, landscape II: Rock reliefs in Anatolia and Assyria

Questions, ideas, notes for discussion

In this last discussion conference, I hope we will go even deeper into discussing the issue of space, spatiality and landscapes as pasrt of the material worlds. I think in the first hour, we can start with discussing the basics, bringing the most elementary problems with concepts of space, place and landscape to the table in the light of Tilley and Casey readings. You will see there that an abstract, modernist, "Cartesian" notion of space and spatiality is contrasted with the phenomenological one, as a critique of the former. I hope we can specifically center our discussion on these issues, and the implications of these discussions to archaeology and the filed of material culture studies. In the second half of the class, I would like to share with you a case study, the Assyrian Source of the Tigris monuments from eastern Turkey, and hopefully attempt to connect our earlier discussion with a concrete case. Reading Stokkel and Marcus, you will get a good sense of the Late Bronze age - Iron age context of the practice of carving rock reliefs in remote but symbolically charged landscapes. What I will present is a paper I am currently working on, so your input would be tremendously valuable for me.