Abstract
This chapter furthers recent attempts to theorize archaeological actors as emotional beings. For quite some time, archaeologists have included allusions to emotional states or emotive drivers in their renderings of past societies. Yet, in these discussions, emotions have been largely unfocused and implicit. Recent efforts to engage more explicitly with the interpretation of emotions in archaeology have sought new approaches and terminology to encourage archaeologists to take emotions seriously and this chapter thus opens with an exploration of the evolving understanding of emotions and their materiality. It uses the firm connection between emotions and things to work through how communities use material objects and cultural landscapes to negotiate the senses. The chapter then moves to the ways that contributors address past emotional communities and the geographically and temporally variable ways that people experienced the world. It then points to spaces, residues, and collections of things that archaeologists may use in identifying anxiety in the archaeological record.
It is…important for us to theorize the materiality of emotional practice s. What are the relationships between spaces, architectures, artefacts, and emotions? How do things become emotionally meaningful? How do they structure and represent people’s emotional experience? (Tarlow, 2000, p. 729)
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Fleisher, J., Norman, N. (2016). Archaeologies of Anxiety: The Materiality of Anxiousness, Worry, and Fear. In: Fleisher, J., Norman, N. (eds) The Archaeology of Anxiety. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-3231-3_1
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