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METAGEUM '07
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Conference session:Trying to Make Sense of the Maltese Temples Book now for whole or part of the Metageum event. |
About Robin Skeates
Dr Robin Skeates is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Archaeology, at Durham University.
Through his research over the last fifteen years, he has contributed in particular to the prehistoric archaeology of Italy and the Central Mediterranean region. His publications explore a wide variety of themes within the overlapping inter-disciplinary fields of material culture, visual culture, museum and heritage studies.
A central concern is with interpreting social relations, strategies and transformations between the Upper Palaeolithic and the Bronze Age, including those relating to age, gender and the body. This relates to my interest in ritual performance, including mortuary practices and meanings, and in the cultural construction and transformation of landscape, including liminality, the underworld, the social dynamics of enclosure, and commemoration.
It equally relates to my interest in the biographies and power of objects, including the production, exchange and ascription of value to early copper artefacts, greenstone axe-amulets, flint arrowheads, decorated pottery, shell trumpets, coral, and prehistoric objects in museum collections. Out of this has evolved my strong interest in archaeologies of art and visual culture, including ways of seeing, creativity and tradition, visual communication and transformation, the politics of representation and display, and the symbolising of social boundaries, identities, status and prestige.
I am interested in settlement strategies and resource exploitation, including transitions to agriculture in Italy, and upland archaeology in Wales where I have undertaken extensive field-survey work. I work on radiocarbon chronologies relating to prehistoric Italy, and promote a more widespread and critical use of them. More generally, I am interested in the history of archaeological thought, including the intellectual and political history of archaeological collectors, museum collections and exhibitions in the Mediterranean and beyond. I am also concerned with archaeological ethics, and have contributed to debates surrounding public archaeology in Britain and abroad.
At Metageum '07
At the the Metageum '07 conference, Dr Skeates will be giving a presentation on the archaeology of sensory experience and perception, with particular reference to the Megalithic temples in Malta, where he has done a great deal of fieldwork.
Trying to Make Sense of the Maltese Temples
An Archaeology of Sensory Experience and Perception
"This presentation offers a new synthesis of Maltese prehistoric archaeology, and of the Maltese temples in particular, with reference to the emergent academic field of sensual culture studies. ‘Sensual culture’ can be defined as peoples’ multi-sensory experiences and perceptions of the world and their construction of culturally diverse sense-based values and orders. Informed by this perspective, this presentation has two main aims.
The first is to critically explore the history of prehistoric archaeology in Malta and its prioritising of the sense of sight at the expense of the other human senses (hearing, smell, touch, taste, intuition, balance, movement, etc.). A key question here is, what human senses have previous generations of archaeologists considered in their interpretations of the lives of prehistoric people in Malta, and to what extent have their conceptions of these been biased by conventional Western thinking? Also, to what extent have their writings, illustrations, site management plans and museum representations prioritised the sense of sight, distanced the full-bodied sensory engagement of locals and visitors, and caused the development of fringe archaeologies, based upon competing multi-sensory, performative and religious, experiences and understandings of Maltese prehistory?
The second aim is to present a detailed archaeological reconstruction of the rich sensual culture of the prehistoric Maltese Temple Period (dated to between around 3800 and 2500 BC), with particular reference to the monumental shrines or ‘temples’. This raises another set of key questions. What was the approximate sensory impact of the natural and cultural environment of the Maltese archipelago, at different times and places? How did people use all of their senses to routinely and ritually experience, inhabit, selectively exploit, construct and structure this sensuous material world, including its surrounding sea and connections to other people and worlds? Which senses were repeatedly and deliberately evoked, emphasised and associated in the Temple Culture’s rich material symbolism, and how might they have contributed to cultural expressions, understandings and orderings of the human and social body, its identity, its relations to This World and the Other, and its potency, over space and time? How were sensory resources, practices and values used and restrictively controlled as instruments of power and ideology, to what extent did they structure relations and rivalries between locals and others, religious élites and commoners, men and women, adults and children, and did any of these social groups establish alternative ‘sensual cultures’? Also, why did a distinctive, highly ritualised, multi-sensory culture develop in the Temple Period, and to what extent was it underlain by sensory stresses in the cultural environment that contributed to the Temple Culture’s eventual demise?"