 My presents are going to deal with what I regard to be the contribution, y f Hero ddod that you may not regard it as such a sensory archaeology to central Mediterranean prehistory. My aim in this presentation is certainly to challenge but also to encourage central Mediterranean prehistory Sut yw'r gweithio'r dweud ddiogelol o'r gweld o'i hyfforddol? Rwy'n gweithio'r ddiogelol o'r ddiogelol o'r ddiogelol, os yw'n gweithio'r ddiogelol o'r ddiogelol o'r ddiogelol o'r ddiogelol ar hyn o'r pethau mynedd, o'r medytrowniol yn y pryd o'r hefyd, ac mae'r ddweud i'r holl yn rhanio'r ddiogelol o'i effaith yn ei ddysgu'r ddiogelol o'r ddiogelol. Y ddiogelol o'r ddiogelol, Be gydrodd ar sefylliant cwy changing ac eich argynwys yn eich debyg a'r ddarparu hefyd, y hall gyrfa ddeicol, lle ddweud a'r ddaw i'w ddweud i ddweud eich ddweud a'r ddweud ac eich graif am y cael iechyd, eich wrth gwrs, ein dweud, ac yn ddiwych gan ganddochau hwn, yn..] rhai cymdeithasg yn y cyfnodwch yn eich gyrwch. Second, in sensory studies we can foreground the senses, both as an object of study and as a means of study, so we can study through our senses as well. Thirdly, sensory studies have an emphasis on the socio-cultural formation of the senses we shouldn't take for granted in others. So, turning to sensory archaeology, this may seem risky and experimental. Certainly the difficulties of sensory studies can't be underestimated. However, hope is offered by an increasingly explicit range of research methods now being brought into the service of sensory archaeology. These include critique of previous academic traditions and studies that have denied the senses, as they were in a lot of history of multisarchaeology, which is primarily visual. Reflexivity, reflecting upon our own practices. Incorporation of thinking about sensoriality into existing research methods so we don't have to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Ethnographic insights and analogies. Direct bodily experience. You go into those rocket tombs with your body, pushing with your feet sometimes, your hands. Experimentation and reconstruction. Imagination and artistic creativity. Do you dare? Do you dare even aim to evoke possible past sensory experiences rather than I suggest? We don't need to produce exact reproductions of past sensory experience, but to evoke. Finally, empathy. Do you have any empathy with the people who you are studying? For example, do you relate your own experiences of death and loss to archaeologists of death and burial? From the perspective of sensory studies, a basic distinction might be drawn between two different representations of life in the central Mediterranean region. For archaeologists, there's a long established scholarly tradition of primarily visual engagement with Mediterranean prehistory. A way of seeing characterised by a central concern with many of the themes we've heard today. Narratives about the sea and early boats and sailors, navigation shipwrecks and so on, island colonisation, the list goes on as it's there. This way of seeing can be contrasted, certainly in the contemporary world, to people's more full-bodied experiences of the Mediterranean today. A way of sensing, as opposed to a way of seeing, characterised by a more vibrant but also contradictory lived-in world. Summer sun and romantic sunsets, luxury yachts and all the rest of it, but also of course wildfires, violent political conflicts and boatloads of desperate migrants. The gap between these ways of seeing and ways of sensing should encourage us, I would argue, to produce new embodied narratives of the human past. So, I now want to take stock of current thinking on sensory central Mediterranean prehistory by looking at a series of overlapping themes that extend across a variety of scales. Actually, the themes we've been talking about this morning and a few more thrown in as well. So, to start with, let's say, landscapes and seascapes and their perception and experience, sensory approaches have contributed to landscape archaeology through their consideration of people's perceptions and experiences of central Mediterranean landscapes. For example, Matthew Fitzjom has questioned the visual bias inherent in GIS applications used to examine the perception of space in Mediterranean landscape archaeology, emphasising instead the importance of memories of the past and experiences of the everyday and making sense of landscapes and places in the mountains of Sicily. Partly informed by critiques like this, a number of studies have also focused on the phenomenological or experiential dimensions of central Mediterranean landscapes. For example, in thinking about the early Neolithic maritime colonisation of the Maltese islands we've been hearing about by small groups of farmers in southern Sicily, I've considered not only the logistical aspects of their sea crossings, but I've also imagined the intense multi-sensory experience of voyagers, especially in terms of the techniques of the body that it took and upon which their lives depended to actually get to the Maltese islands. A third example is provided by Sue Hamilton, Mike Seager Thomas and Ruth Whitehouse, who have characterised different sensory environments and experiences around Grotta Scalloria, the Neolithic ritual cave in southeast Italy. They have contrasted journeying through open ground on the Tavoliere plain and then through wooded ground on the lower slopes of the Gargano uplands through the confined area of the Swallow Hall and then in through the dark, cramped and humid cave interior. Dwelling is another theme. We haven't touched upon it so much, but let's talk about settlements there. Sensory archaeology has also begun to contribute to studies of settlement forms and processes in central Mediterranean prehistory by considering past embodied experience of dwelling in these physical and social environments. For example, again, Sue Hamilton and Ruth Whitehouse have undertaken phenomenological experiments in and around the Neolithic ditch settlements on the Tavoliere plain in southeast Italy, which have revealed that the distances over which it would have been possible for their inhabitants to register sounds and vision across them would have varied according to the size and landscape setting of the site. I've also considered how people ordered and experienced dwelling places in prehistoric mortar trying to compare and contrast what it might have felt like for different members of society to dwell within the walled villages and how the walled enclosures and houses on the one hand of Neolithic Scalloria and on the other hand of Bronze Age Borgin Nadur, trying to breathe, therefore, into these old plans and sequences of structures excavated these sites, trying to breathe into those new life and new understandings. Turning to rituals, the archaeology of ritual in the central Mediterranean region has defined very ritual practices and performances at particular places and times and discussed their social implications. Experiential and sensory perspectives have successfully taken this thinking one step further, focusing on some distinct architectural spaces. Underground sites tend to be relatively well preserved and therefore offer good opportunities to consider in the present as well as past experiences of their space and materiality. For example, Ruth again has characterised Neolithic cult caves such as Grotta di Porta Badesco and Grotta Scalloria as relatively inaccessible, spatially zoned, cool, humid and dark, resonant environments elaborated with cast formations and symbolic installations that lent them an awe-inspiring sense of otherness and liminality. Features that were exploited by ritual leaders to have a discomforting and highly emotional impact on younger male initiates made to move through these spaces to acquire successive levels of secret religious knowledge. For my own part, I've built on this kind of thinking in my Seulu caves project in Sardinia where, for example, I've examined how particular effects of light and of darkness in ritual caves might have been actively used and experienced by later prehistoric people. Above ground as well, in prehistoric monumental buildings in the region, we're turning from what these monuments might have looked like to what they might have felt like, particularly through theatrical performances, for example, through the Maltese so-called temples. Turning to food and drink and other substances, sensory studies are now taking archaeological thinking about the social significance of food and drink one step further by emphasising people's ability to exploit the powerful sensory dimensions of consumption. For example, John Robb has touched on the social significance of the colour-flavour world of Neolithic cuisine in Italy, contrasting green-gathered vegetables and fruits, brown-cooked meat and grains, and red-wark and cooked meat. The archaeology of death and burial is becoming ever more sophisticated, as you know, and sensory archaeology has a part to play here in raising our awareness of the sensorially and emotionally charged encounters between the bodies of the living and the dead, particularly during mortuary rituals. This is expressed well by Caroline Malone and Simon Starrart in their thick descriptions of the funerary procession in the Shara circular towards the end of their excavation reports, their excavation volume. Turning to materials, cultural materials that we've heard a lot about this morning, artefact studies, of course, occupy a central place in central Mediterranean prehistoric archaeology. Sensory studies have a part to play here, combined with detailed materials science analyses, by looking at the multi-sensory properties of these cultural materials. I say that visual culture studies are a step in the right direction with the highlighting of the attractive appearance of special materials. So, for example, John Robb and others have described blood red ochre, translucent black obsidian, and so on. But these descriptions still prioritise visual experiences. So, going one step further, a few central Mediterranean prehistorians have begun to write more sensitively about the materiality, production and consumption of later prehistoric artefacts. For example, Susanna Harris reminds us of the multi-sensory dimensions of the alpine of iceman's clothing. It's now widely accepted that miniature prehistoric figurines would require interpretation in terms of themes such as materiality, manufacture and so on. And it's recognised that they can appeal to the senses, particularly of sight and touch, and that they were subject to manipulation in performative context. So, Isabella Gregory and Caroline Malone, for example, have reconsidered the large corpus of multi-use temple culture figurines in terms of their aesthetics and their related sensory dimensions. So then, here's my argument. What then do sensory approaches bring to our studies? I want to argue that they highlight biases and limitations and gaps in traditional archaeological methods, including interpretations the way we write and illustrate as well. I think they bring together an extent recent thinking, archaeological thinking about the body, phenomenology, memory, emotion and the senses. They encourage us to produce new full-bodied narratives of past people, people who actually we've only had implied this morning rather than referred to directly in so many of our presentations. People and their material remains, and they direct us to play closer attention to the sensory properties, practices, experiences and perceptions inherent in a range of archaeologically visible human behaviours. So for later prehistory, where I mainly work in the central Mediterranean region, these approaches reveal people participating in everyday and seasonal routines of dwelling and mobility interspersed by rituals performed at special places and times, involving a multitude of embodied practices and sensuous materials. This anthropological perspective is complemented by a uniquely archaeological one in which local dynamics and long-term transformations can be identified, provoked by different categories of people redefining themselves cooperatively and competitively across competing sensory domains. For central to conclude then, for central Mediterranean prehistory, there remains plenty of scope to put into practice new sensory studies. An undertaking who's apparently risky and experimental nature is mitigated by incorporating sensoriality into the full range of existing archaeological methods that we already use. I encourage you then to take up this challenge and in the process enrich our understandings of what it felt like to live in the prehistoric societies of the central Mediterranean. Thank you.