Cultures of Stone : An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Materiality of Stone

This volume establishes a rich cross-disciplinary dialogue about the significance of stone in society across time and space. The material properties of stone have ensured its continuing importance; however, it is its materiality which has mediated the relations between the individual, society and stone.

Bound up with the physical properties of stone are ideas on identity, value, and understanding. Stone can act as a medium through which these concepts are expressed and is tied to ideas such as monumentality and remembrance; its enduring character creating a link through generations to both people and place.

This volume brings together a collection of seventeen papers which draw on a range of diverse disciplines and approaches; including archaeology, anthropology, classics, design and engineering, fine arts, geography, history, linguistics, philosophy, psychology and sciences.

Table of Contents

List of Figures
Contributors
Acknowledgements

Introduction: Constructing Identities through Stone

Part 1. Quarrying and Moving Stone

Labour and Limestone: the relationship between stone and life in the 19th- and 20th-century quarry town of Texas, Maryland.
Adam Fracchia

Yapese Stone Money: local marble as a potential inspiration for producing limestone exchange valuables in Palau, Micronesia.
Bosiljka Glumac and Scott M. Fitzpatrick

Roman Colours of Power: Egyptian stones for the imperial metropolis, and beyond.
Hazel Dodge

Travelling Stone or Travelling Men? Models of Sculpture Production in the Early Middle Ages (8th–9th centuries).
Michelle Beghelli

Part 2. Making, Building and Re-imagining in Stone

MAN MADE: contemporary prehistoric stone-tool design.
Dov Ganchrow

Stone Fisheries and Their Role in Shaping the Cultural Landscape of the Minho River Valley, Portugal.
Rui Madail and Miguel Malheiro

Stormont’s Stones: the oratory of power through form and materiality.
Suzanne O´Neill

City of Stone: dialectics of impermanence in Josef Sudek’s Prague.
Adele Tutter

‘The Living Stones’: encountering the prehistoric past in West Cornwall.
Elizabeth Pratt

Sacred Granite: preserving the Downpatrick High Cross.
Michael King

Part 3. Stone in Ritual Space and Practice

‘Living Stones Built Up’: symbolism in Irish round towers.
Sarah Kerr

Flaming Torches: the materiality of fire and flames on Roman cinerary urns.
Liana Brent

Stone-Grave Building at the Cemetery of Les Tombes at Estagel (Pyrénées-Orientales, France): some economic, visual and symbolic aspects.
Joan Pinar Gil

Worship and Stones on the Cycladic Islands: a case study of the aniconic cult of Apollo and Zeus.
Erika Angliker

All of a Heap: Hermes and the stone cairn in Greek Antiquity.
Jessica Doyle

Looking through the Crystal Ball: ethnographic analogies for the ritual use of rock crystal.
Thomas Hess

Is It from The Dreaming, or Is It Rubbish? The Significance and Meaning of Stone Artefacts and Their Sources to Aboriginal People in the Pilbara region of Western Australia.
Edward McDonald and Bryn Coldrick

Afterword

The Flexibility of Stone
Gabriel Cooney

Index

Bernard completed his BA, MA, and PhD in University College Dublin (UCD). His PhD focused on the manufacture and range of uses of Irish Mesolithic and Neolithic shale and porcellanite axes and adzes. This utilised a series of methodologies including quantitative and qualitative analysis, and the manufacture and use of experimental replicas. Bernard is an assistant keeper of antiquities in the National Museum of Ireland. He is also a member of the North Roe Felsite Project which is studying stone axe manufacture and use on the Shetland Islands. He is a member of the Mesolithic in Mar Lodge project, looking into early Holocene hunter gatherer activity in the Scottish uplands. Bernard is also a researcher and contributor to the Irish Stone Axe Project (ISAP), a leading research programme focusing on recording Irish stone axes ‘in order to provide a better understanding of the people and societies who used them’.

Niamh Kelly is a PhD researcher with the School of Archaeology in University College Dublin. Her current research focuses on coarse stone tool technology from Ireland and the Irish Sea region, and the roles they play in defining task, self, culture and ritual. She has worked as a researcher and specialist on numerous projects across Ireland, Britain and wider Europe including the North Roe Felsite Project on the Shetland Islands, the Mesolithic in Mar Lodge in the Scottish uplands and Priniatikos Pyrgos in Crete. Niamh also has over ten years teaching experience at third level and is currently the Coordinator of a pre-university programme in Cultural and Heritage Studies based in the National Print Museum, Dublin.

Sol Mallía-Guest is a current PhD candidate at UCD School of Archaeology, exploring the role of flint artefacts in the Irish Neolithic from a comprehensive biographical approach, merging technological and use-wear analyses. Her current research builds on her MA work (UCD, 2011) that revealed the intricate life-paths of ‘everyday’ flint tools from Irish Early Neolithic rectangular timber houses. Trained as a lithics specialist and introduced to experimental and use-wear studies in Argentina (UBA; INAPL; CADIC-CONICET), she initially developed an interest in the significance of stone for early farming communities facing environmental risk and uncertainty. She has been involved in research for over 15 years both in academic and large-scale development projects, from rockshelters in the southern Argentinian Puna to prehistoric settlements and portal tombs in the eastern lowlands and the west coast of Ireland.