 Ladies and gentlemen, dear colleagues, today my role to introduce our keynote speaker is somewhat unnecessary because our speaker needs no introduction in the world of archaeology. Marie-Louise Sörensson is professor of European Prehistory and Heritage Studies at the University of Cambridge. And many of us know her through her extensive contributions related to the Bronze Age, especially excavations of the fabulous site of Saas-Hallumbatta. She has also given huge contribution to archaeological theory in aspects related to gender and link between materiality and identity, as well as practices of memorization and monuments. She has contacts and managed scientific networks across Europe from Denmark, where she studied her work to Croatia and many other countries. We, EAA, have recognized her immense contribution also to heritage studies, and that is why she received the European Archaeological Heritage Prize in 2014. However, her influence reached scope and interest reached far beyond that, and she is also directing the Project of Early Colonial Expansion in Cape Verde. Our intention to have keynote speakers also is related to this year's motto, and we are trying to connect teams of our keynote speeches to this year's motto, which is networking. We chose this motto even before COVID-19 pandemics, but recent developments only made it more relevant. Using experience on this contemporary crisis, where all our networks are being questioned and remodeled from our the most intimate one, like with our families up to this annual meeting, which is taking virtual form, our speaker will reexamine our concepts of human interaction and notion of networks in the past. Her reflections will be grounded in her Bronze Age research, especially at the Bronze Age tell at Saas-Hallumbatta. Unfortunately, this year we are not in Hungary, so we will not be able to have unique experience of visiting this many people, right? But I cannot imagine better presenter of one of the many scientific implications of that research. Therefore, my honor and privilege is to announce Marie-Louise Sernsson. Marie, the floor is yours. Thank you very much indeed. It was very lovely, very generous introduction and I'm extremely pleased and feel very honored for that you invited me to give this talk and it has of course become an even more demanding and challenging but also inspiring thing to do it in this very weird period we are in. For many of us, I think for all of us going to the EAA is about meeting people, friends and colleagues and sometimes also people you didn't know about. It's always exciting to meet and listen to the young students. So it is very regretful that we can't do it this year but also I think therefore an extra expectation of us to try to think about archaeology and sharing that thinking in a way which cross-court those personal relations. So I will try and go through my presentation with you. As you can see on my title slides, I have now two titles. The first one was before I had started really working on it, where I was concerned about the reductive tendency of language. I was concerned about us simplifying the past and how we can react to that and the challenge of capturing social relation in actually 2D. But as I thought more about it, I was getting concerned about trying to ground it and for that I therefore wanted to use the Bronze Age site to act to think about network, networking and interaction bottom up in terms of how one experiences it or might see it through a particular community. So I made you a paper of six points and this is really meant as an opening up for discussion. It's not about me having an authority view of this. I want to think with you. I want to try to scrutinize some of the way of thinking and whether we can use various type of challenges to move forward together. So my very first point is going to be about some of our challenges. My second very brief point is about network and I'll briefly just mention people. I then share three maps as three ways of representing and then I'll try to think through some of the issues through the Bronze Age tell and then at the end very briefly a concluding reflection. So challenges, it is very obvious as already said, we are at a time of challenge. We are at a time where our relationship to others from the intimate to the most wider to the stranger to the people you pass in the street has been opened up to discussion for concern. Certainly people are risk, certainly people are your support system, etc. So at experiential and in many cases existentialistic levels we are being challenged to think and rethink and remodel our social relations and in various ways I think that also will challenge how we think about relations in the past. So the pandemic and our experience of that is now part of the thing we use to draw on when we understand. At the same time over recent years there have been various movements which also challenge our production of knowledge, how we produce knowledge and what we take for granted and what we bring into in terms of pre-understanding. And I would particularly focus on or emphasize decolonization and particularly the decolonization of the mind, the way we think and the thing we take for granted, whether that should be taken for granted and what luggage of past that brings into our thinking. I think that's enormous challenge, it's not clear how one would respond to it but it's important to recognize that it is a genuine challenge. There are also claims about cultural appropriation which wants in some way or challenge the chair picking of other cultures, items and cultural forms that you cannot just go into other culture and take out what you would like to use in their kind of context. And that also could maybe apply to how we use ethnography to think about past, the issue there about appropriation which I think we should maybe develop some sensitivity about. And then finally the concept of reframing particularly in terms of history and in terms of interpretation which particularly Black Lives Matters have brought up, that sense of it's not about a subjective versus an objective history, it's about history, understanding history from different point of views that there is not just one way of understanding and accounting for and and outlining history. I think in various ways these three things together, these three movements are really very constructive also very difficult challenges to other production of knowledge. It's challenges to what we take for granted, it's substantial challenges to the language we use and how meaning are already built into the terminology and challenge in terms of embracing the implication of the kind of thing we say of the past that we are constructing. My second point and many of you will know much more about this than I but that are just about networks. So the terms of the conference network networking and interaction, there we have to recognize that they are not just simple descriptive terms but also tend to introduce a range of assumptions, ideas of causality and general interpretation and that this makes them powerful but also potential troublesome or difficult. They are not just descriptive, they do something when they are used and some of the obvious challenges is about how in this language we can embrace diversity and different kinds of networks and interactions beyond economy and trade for example, how we can incorporate time in a non-linear manner rather than linear or how in at all it engages with time, how we value and weight the relationship between agents and nodes on the one hand and the links and relationships between them. So for example is prime focus the agent interacting or the links between them can those two actually be separated. So the language tools and I would talk about refer to network networking and interactions as language tools. There in the use of them we have to balance the usefulness, how they help us to understand versus the burden of presumption, assumption, understanding, simplification, etc that they bring with them. They are not just tools for ordering data, they are tools which create certain kind of meaning avenues out of that data. So network citing but also a challenge in terms of the problematics. However, a third point which is about people, however we criticize networks we have to remember that people are social. They do create networks and they do interact with other methods can act good enough well attuned to what those interactions are about that's a different thing but people do interact they do relate to each other and it's important there to recognize that the reasons for that are wide ranging and in our analysis we often capture only a very narrow range of those reasons and the range from biological reproduction to gossip and I have to say I like the idea of gossip because I think it's such an important social mechanism and it's very often totally kept out of sight. So the challenge when we try to interpret those obvious social relations is in terms of motivation how do we understand the motivation how do we make them rational rather than chaotic complex diverse etc and do are we critical enough about our ability to identify who or what were the agents or modes who defined those agents how do we define them and on what grounds how do we define these other agents and for example in terms of listening to the current discussions on ontology they may be that agents are not all the time sites of people or objects they're also more wide ranging and do we need to or is that not helpful to listen to those and again what are the implication what are the impacts of those networks we don't just reconstruct network we should also use that to think about the impact and the results and consequences how it ties people together in various ways so there are really substantial issues at play when we start to talk about network or interactions so I just wanted to share three maps the one is the map of the distribution of health that seesaw but it could be a map a distribution map of anything this is a very normal conventional way of archaeology is to present data and to present spatial relationship but in this map in this type of map the relationships are not mapped they are in our discussion of the map but not presented in the map so it's only indicated for example by a group or a limit or something like that but that is so that is map which focus on the physical presence of something at a particular point in landscapes and then it generate interpretation of as kind the kind of network analysis that we now start to see have shifted the emphasis from the points to the relationships or the links between the points and they are in a very interesting way totally abstract it's very interesting that the language is often about relationship but this line is of course not at relationship the relationship are not like that they're not just a straight line so it will present something in quite abstracted way particular when we'll take it away from the modern communications where networks are used to which networks are used to analyze to into past landscapes with the messiness of movements and links of relationships so methodological very strong but actually much more abstract that they might sense they very easily look very precise this map is a painting that Chris Evans my husband and I have at home it's Australian Aboriginal map showing the constellation and underneath that in just you can't see it here very faintly in the sand is drawn out on the water courses so this is a map which is even more abstract than the network it shows the constellation as if it has connections which it doesn't have and it doesn't show the ground the surface it shows under the ground so it shows above and below and they use that connection as a way of mapping a guidance so here we get more towards an ontological difference and towards maybe a cognitive map a way of thinking about the world and using mapping as a way of guiding yourself and presenting yourself and presenting your understanding so three different ways of using maps each of them is a too deep presentation none of them have true dynamics but they had different degrees of abstraction so let me take you to a site I found that actually thinking about what the issues were I had to ground it and the Bronze Age tell apart from being right now my favorite kind of site is very useful to think with because they're probably also among the site was the most typically seen to be part of that work there the Bronze Age tells or tells come in as one of the top candidates they are presented as fears of interaction they are about interaction in our traditional interpretation of them so let me just remind you of some of the characteristic their settlements with houses built upon each other through time which mean time is present there are shared modes of fashion or templates for settlements over wide regions they're densely inhabited so there's a strong need for social regulation and a strong expression of interaction within sites and they're central a place to be often a major rivers and that is one of our sort of core ideas of a link is of course the river the roots of communication so they have some of many of those traditional elements of a network so let's go to the site Chastrol on butter which had things been normal we would have hoped you had all come out to visit it is a Bronze Age tell early and middle Bronze Age about 30 kilometers south of Budapest on the river Danube you can see it here on the map and the director McDonald visit from the Matricum Museum join us a fair from the University of Southampton and myself and it is in many many way a classic tell and the map I show you give a classic sense of a network of these particular settlement types we need to look closer and I'll do that at three level I'll one talk about the big general map then I'll talk about the evidence of imports to the site itself and then certainly I'll talk at the level of interaction with insight and I'll try to use these three levels to think about the challenge we have of understanding interaction and networks this is another distribution map example of the distribution of tells is by Alexander Gavin from her important study of the metalworking evidence on tells and when you start looking into it you see that not all tells have evidence of metalworking so the traditional model of tells being lined up along the river and playing important central role in the Bronze Age economy based on the exchange and trade in topmost metal actually fragment a bit these sites don't seem to do the same thing if I had been able to produce a map which shows the subsistence basis I think we would also find differences of thing we would find the tells up in this area being much more focused on using the river and riverine resources than we have down here at Cheshire on butter so at different levels in terms of the economy and interaction the idea of a network based of it's based on notal point interacting with this other is not sustainable we cannot we don't have evidence to say that at the same time it is clear that in terms of a template a way of life these sites are very similar and they're different from sites around them so at the level of culture in terms of ecological thinking in some way a very traditional old-fashioned way of thinking about culture as cultural behavior norms and value at that level these could be think thought about as a network they have great similarities so the network become much more about cultural behavior about norms meaning ways of life than it actually is about exchanges we cannot see anything going up and down those lines the presumably were but what we mainly see is something we'd have to do something would have to do with communication around cultural behavior so that I think is a really interesting challenge in terms of two mechanistic understanding of networks so if you then move inside the site and think about what evidence do we have inside the site of its role in networks what imports do we have and this is referred to the first phase which is about six level of five levels and about 90 centimetre of stogeography about 323 thousand litre of soil so it's a lot our evidence of imported material a material coming in is actually surprisingly and to be honest we found that ourselves slightly shockingly limited in the pottery and we have almost 150 000 shirts we have less than half a percent of that is imported and what is imported come from the vacu culture so the regional cultural group or neighboring groups it's not from far away we have some imported stone we have 89 pieces most of them are for informal tools and they come from various regional outcrops we have about 476 pieces of flint they come from the buddha area of buddha pest which is only about 30 kilometer north not more than one or two days walk and many of those are sickles we do have 12 pieces of amber and they must have come from the Baltic but it's very few considering the time span of those 323 litre of soil it's our own substantial evidence of contact outside the regional area the feryons we have 17 pieces they are very similar to types in the Capetian basis at the time no suggestions of any particular connections the bronzes we have 18 and by bronzes i mean so tiny little pieces of broken off pin and so on that there's nothing really spectacular at all the materials the bronze itself is from alpine sources but where we can identify the types they are Capetian so it's surprisingly i don't know shockingly but maybe far as initially almost that limited evidence of external contact on this very prominent tell so let me just zoom in on the ceramics for a minute that as i said we have very little import we have less than half a percent and it generally come from the encroached ware culture again shashken butter is here but we have some evidence of valuation of curiosity of some kind of awareness of that other ceramic and that express itself in local ceramic which adopt or adjust or imitate some element of the pottery from over here and that i think in terms of network or interaction actually bring up this wonderful sense of of an interaction which is of the mind which is culture which is about how people think and what they're curious about it's not a bad trait it's not a simple line a link on the landscape where something moved in one direction it is something more complex about human psychology about human social and cultural behavior so i think very challenging in terms of how we bring in to a systematic analysis of the types of interaction but one because it's difficult to fit in one we have to be careful about not ignoring so although we only have few of that it's less than half a percent it is a very important aspect of how this community interacted with the wider world so if you sort of try to very briefly think about the evidence of trade and I focus on trade because somewhat focus on network has been about opiate where you can identify that they are moving around so at an informal level we can say that shashken butter conformed through a way of life that was shared in the patient basis and more specifically to the region of the culture where it doesn't just share the settlement form but also the mortuary practices and ceramics tradition so they are sharing they're not isolated community they are sharing they're conforming and that implies very intensive cultural transmission but how is that taking place so it seems to take place through sharing and copying and talking and gossiping about how neighbors do things and how people a little bit further away do things it's about it's about a very human very very social aspect of the network it's one which is not mechanical and is at some level abstract to the sense that culture is abstract but is very very real in terms of affecting the way people lived and the kind of thing it's a strive towards and what inspired them in how they produced culture life so at that informal level we would have to say that shashken butter is very well incorporated and conforming with cultural values in a wider area but when it actually comes to objects of trade as I just told you there are far fewer objects imported into the material into the area into the site than we have expected and most of them just come from the their own region or just the neighbors within the compassion area so very lovely interesting challenge to have understanding I'll try to just take you one more level down in terms of how intimate this is so I'm looking at the beats and pendants from the same space and I focus on that because I find them very interesting because they're so personal objects so if they're prestige or identity or value special value it may be expressed here but actually most of the material is from natural their shells teeth and bone from just the local area my green area there's a few things which are from just on the side and then there are and I'm sorry this in the era should go up to amber then there are a few things which are cultured they're not they're made as beats and there we have amber fials and a few other bronches and the amber is the only one I'm not really sorry this area but the amber is the only one which really takes us out of the compassion basin the bronches does in terms of material but not in terms of the types of beats they are made actually still in the compassion basin so what I find the most interesting in this group partly because of idea of tell is a very cultured sophisticated and then when you look at what they carry what objects they have on them they're natural they are local or rather I call them local non-domestic they are from just outside the comfort zone of the side and its field it's just on the edge of that where you have materials that you're engaging with and I will try to just show that in more detail so on the background you see there's kind of those pendants made out of animal bones or teeth and then we have two examples which are you find very very interesting very revealing this is a bead made to look cut out of a cow's jaw made to look like a rodea canine so the significance of that association with the wild is so that you imitate it even if you don't have the bead you use another material to still create that association and that I think brings in an interaction which is very intriguing for us what is it that that area outside the domestic outside the utilized routine area provide and that's where one might think a little bit about some of the ontological challenge about how in their worldview there is a world there which matter with the drawn with the use in their way and very interesting it's not the river that provide that it is forest at the edge or presumably at the edge of the fields so again I find it is so intriguing when the data tells us give us that little glimpse in a complex world which is not need it's not a simple network their interaction which are quite abstract in their in their ontology and how they're formed okay let me take us to the third level and I'm sorry I could talk about this forever realize I have limited time this is within the site we have different kinds of spaces and therefore also interaction within the site and this give a glimpse of the household spaces and the open communal spaces and they are very important in terms of introducing an insight into different behavior which is dictated and resulting different kinds of spaces and this is where the site become much much more informative than it becomes about network or interaction at the other at the level of external import or even the tel phenomena this shows you have a wonderful house on of our wonderful houses but also this streaking sense of what happens in that interface between one kind of space one kind of social entity and other kind of spaces and different kind of social entities and we have tried to use the concept of the ontological challenge of social living that basically it is a challenge to live in that density it's a challenge about how you interact and we do see that in different way in the material in terms of what it kept clean what is dirty what is regulated how regulation breakdowns etc very very interesting aspects which I can't go into now but I think that it's clear that there is a level a low level of continuous interaction between different kind of spaces which also produces different kind of spaces and which involve movement so it is unclear whether network is a useful methods for that but awareness of interaction is indeed very very helpful so let me just introduce the another aspect of that inside interaction because you need to you need to tell you have horizontal as a justice place but you also have vertical interaction so you have neighbors and ancestors at the same time so in this slide you see the half but this is a half on many phases every time the house is pulled down to level out the half is maintained and rebuilt as part of the next house so within the half which are interior to the houses you get that continuous link back through time through generation before you to houses before you or potentially to ancestors I don't quite like the word ancestor but it is something similar to that and it brings in time I think in interesting way that we have times as a continuous linear phenomena all the time of accumulation and change etc but we also have time as a non-linear dynamic as a recall means of being conscious of times of bringing up memory in the making of the next state of the oven you are consciously recalling and remaking something which has been and that is a dynamic or we can see on this side and I think we could think it through on different kinds of side that sense of the non-linear dynamic of time and how we bring that to networks so they're there briefly in terms of concluding reflections the cartographic tradition that of weekly so vaguely referred to is a practice of visualising and representing past social relation in 2d that has been a totally dominant and familiar way of viewing archaeology but also therefore of understanding they do give they are the basis of interpretations that tradition representation common problematic assumptions and tendency and their particular had the tension tendency towards understanding social relations in terms of hierarchy when we look at those maps of differences they have their often assumptions of hierarchy of relations between those points of value and rational behavior that this is placed there because of this and so on so they are not just representations without any agendas and I think what we are experiencing and this get back to my first point in terms of challenge is that the ideas and worldviews which have been embedded in that way of thinking is something we have been challenged to question we should not just take it for granted that hierarchy exists or express itself in that way that people are rational in certain ways at the same time it is clear and it's something we must keep links to that people are social so I think therefore that the challenge we may be facing is how we move between top down approaches and bottom up approaches with the top down approaches they are often resulting in lack of sensitivity they cannot be sensitive to the socially unique of the specific sites the lack of details and black boxing particularly around indigenous understanding if someone is talking indigenous in terms of past about cultural values and about abstract motivations where the same bottom up approaches makes comparison very difficult and very difficult to reach generalizations so you might question what's the point of knowledge if we cannot generalize from it and they can also lead to fragmentations so either of these approaches are not totally fulfilling the aims of producing good knowledge and my suggestions and this is very good to do a suggestion where you so end of your lecture so you don't have to be committed to anything I put question mark after suggestion because I don't know what one would suggest but I was slightly curious about whether we could explore the idea of fossil logic and fossil methods a bit better to understand diversity and complex past communities in such a way that they remain complex and diverse rather than becoming simplified so have an understanding so thank you very much for your attention thank you very much Marie Louise it was it was fantastic lecture as always and and so so take with meaning and and and good food for thoughts that I I'm sure that more than 450 of our listeners will have many questions to follow but since I'm here I will abuse my position as as an answer to to ask a few myself uh of course you touched here many different things and in in these troubled times of course we need to reconsider the whole concept of networking and everything and the whole all of that jumps to our minds all of things that we probably traveled years ago and now we see how inefficient some of our tools are first of all terminology I think you pointed very well that network is becoming as vague and powerful term as culture everybody uses it nobody knows what it actually means or actually we all mean different things by that but we continue to use it all over the place sort of assuming that other people will understand what we mean by it but what's your opinion because some people say we shouldn't use it we should use something else but in terms of for example uh uh ethical names and and terms like culture or terms like health or something if we abandon tool it could be dangerous because people may pick it up and use it as a weapon in terms of fill it in with a different content and then it becomes even more difficult to to go through it what's what's your opinion what we should do with our terminology when we describe uh uh human relationships in the past yeah I think uh yeah I kind of like to dimension to it we need language to to both to analyze and to communicate for language very very quickly get saturated with particular meaning so sometime one have to renew language to develop new words uh but I think sometime you instead of developing new language you could also go back to your concept and understand the roots and some of the meaning which has which is slipping into your use of it because you're not thinking about it and I think culture is interesting because that had almost got out of fashion because it became almost polluted with a whole range of intentions and political meaning and and implications so maybe sometime if you if you need to use a word and you need to make this central you do need to clean it up a little bit it's like you have to think about the implication the word has unless you make it clear that that is not what you you that is not what you want to use it for so in some way just now I find maybe culture is becoming a little bit more opening again than the word network or the network is very interesting and have a lot of potential to uh in terms of analysis it also comes from sphere of sociological analysis which are very very modern so I I think I think in that way the the colonization of the mind is an interesting challenge because it really asks us to think really really deeply about our language uh that and it's very uncomfortable in a way it's a lot of things you're taking for granted it's the prestige and privilege you are taking for granted that you certainly have to be self critical about but I think it could also be freeing up uh that critical stance can help you to be more thoughtful in your engagement with language thank you it's it's um I think it's it's it also opens completely another box I've been thinking about your words now and of course we have to this this could be a subject of on its own uh I have thousands more questions but I've seen that some of the questions are now appearing in our uh chat and John Chapman asked the first one and the question is a tell with no evidence of metalworking not a nodal point you seem to imply this surely networks connect different kinds of sites yes and I think that that is what one have to embrace because the traditional model with presenting the site is actually all essentially the same that they were tell and they conform to a certain role in terms in particular the metal trade and what we are learning through Alexander's work is yes there are tells but they're not tells in the same way and I think that is uh what I also tried to say that one can critique the idea of the network of tells but in the end they also have things in common so maybe it's worth thinking what it is that is important what is the important thing to have in common and what is the important types of relationship there might have had with this other and it's not just about trade it's also about sharing in in other ways so it was more my concern about how often the discussion of tells as network it have been focused on on the trade rather than other ways other kind you trading with your mind as well as with objects but thank you to john for the comment yes and I also think that I fully understand what john means in terms of we often see these these maps connected with the similar dots so there is a net of tells but we know that there are so many different ways that people lived in in in the same landscape at the same time and somehow we ignore all these differences in in in terms of networking but there is another question from Eric Ruhm who says I found your observations or networks of similarity as replicating normative notions of culture and plea for fuzzy logic fascinating however networks can incorporate intensities of connections and can although it is hard to be used to capture flows and developments in connections and intensities over time do you think such additional tools can bring new life in the more cartographic traditions you mentioned so that's the comment from Eric I think that is and I know he do this kind of work and do it very well and very interesting I think that is it's very exciting if from within archaeology we can see that we need networks to do more to do things which are more subtle and more dynamic and I think in particular that sense of that it's the where the dynamic sits and if they can make if they can work with ways of understanding the intensity of connections in way which show them or open up for the possibility that they are not just directional and in terms of density but they have other dynamics I think then they could help us to thinking I don't think there will ever be the only way of thinking about interaction but I think it could be a powerful tool but it has to develop it has to embrace some of the differences between modern life and a prehistoric life thank you and I was myself personally impressed with two metaphors which are which are very powerful in your in your lecture the first is constellation it's beautiful thing of course when we think about the stars content is actually in the eye of beholder it's actually 2d image creating all kinds of different 3d ideas which are more related to individual mindsets than than to this initial 2d starter and I think it's it's a very much like what we do when we see all these cartographic representations of our nodes networks and everything we see different things and sometimes it's even when even when you made such a map and all of us at one point did you think that you are actually sending a particular message because you know what it means people will see this kind of thing will see something else so sometimes we do these things in in terms of putting things on the map thinking that we are actually sending very clear message not trying to to elaborate in in text or speech and then suddenly you realize that people are getting something completely different from the same picture that you have done and another thing I have seen that a lot of people are actually addressing gossip it's a wonderful thing we all forget about it but I come from a small from a small town so we all know that strict social strategies are in in power all the time to prevent or even to induce gossip because gossip actually has much more influence on actual life than official code of conduct which is in power in in these places and I think it's it's very intriguing to think about these communities as as such I see many people are actually referring on that and and our editor actually is sort of referring to El Jajar and anthropologist studied the way gossips and women shouldn't drive local economies and create some ideas so I think that your lecture will have so many consequences but I'm looking for other questions not yet can I just comment on the thing you said about maps because I think you it's very interesting to appreciate our own self the sense that knowledge is obvious that you produce map and you think it's obvious what you produce and I remember now when I work in Hungary I can recognize a European map without coastal lines but when I was younger and hadn't worked in Hungary I despaired whenever I went to a lecture and just showed a part of Europe and there was a code there were not a coast if there were not a code I didn't have no idea which part of Europe they were showing I didn't understand now I can always recognize the line of the Danube and that sense of just on level of maps that for each of us it's so self-evident what landscape we have flattened out as a 2d thing but it is not so evident there's a lot of there's a lot of embodied knowledge of this landscape we present as archaeologists so I love maps but I thought it was interesting to think about the problems as well oh yeah definitely and of course when you're talking about this you don't have imported things and in the tell but you have seen that there is an important interaction with the neighboring groups and and conformity or means collective ideology of this whole area they are well conformed obviously so it seems that individual experience of people who are contacting with these groups is somehow transforming the community knowledge and practice without actually importing objects it's really I think it's wonderfully fascinating in terms of us understanding the archaeological record that of course they are interacting clearly they've you know tells are giving up roughly the same time as a dynamic there which really very widely shared but it's not one which is primarily expressed through meteorology it's expressed through ways of living and that's much more difficult to capture you cannot sort of count it up there easily oh yeah yeah that's it's really fuzzy Catherine actually sent a question and she says the sort of multi-colour research you are advocating is complex but necessary this is maybe a simple question but do you think there can be a shared method for these sort of sliding between scales or we will have to reinvent it for every site or region or research question yeah Catherine I think that is I think I just hinted at that challenge at the end and I know I was sort of checking out and not trying to commit myself I think that is exactly the challenge because if every site become unique it is not useful in some way we have to find ways of advancing our research methodologies so those kind of appreciation of scales can be applied widely rather than having to be reinvented I think you're putting your finger on an important point which I think comes also from the bottom up approach it has a danger of everything becoming so unique and self-defined that it actually doesn't matter for others and if our purpose of doing archaeology is also to learn about the past not just about your own site then we have to find a way of developing methods or shared methods which I hope could be appreciating those different kind of scales which social life is expressed and experienced but I'm not quite so I can see how to do it from my side I don't know how one takes not necessarily my methods but my concern and bring it to a more comparative perspective but I think it would be possible and I think it would be helpful because otherwise we end up in an archaeology of extremes with people who work very generalized of people who work extremely localized and they don't speak together I think it's it's actually very important this is why we have meetings like this and lectures like this and of course I fully agree with what we perceived in in later period in iron edges that models that we are actually trying to apply to not work how to how to modify them well I think it's your approach is actually key is go to the bottom up go back to the individual communities and then from our experience from different communities form actual model which will be based on individual communities not on some sort of general idea how things should work and then you go to the individual communities and stretch them to to conform to our idea how they should work because you know science is always right reality is sometimes wrong this is what we tend to do a lot of a lot of times and another thing imitation which we this example of yours is it's fantastic I mean dear to the cows do so people city these people do not really understand what it's all about I think it's contrary actually that people do understand much better what it's all about because if you would find a dear tooth you would not you cannot be sure that people who are actually wearing a beard dear to and in Suskal about are aware what it means in another community here by imitating stuff you actually show that you are aware of the meaning you are aware of the message you want to produce so imitating actually means that you are much closer this is what what you are telling us all the time it doesn't mean that you have to import stuff if you imitate stuff it means that you are much more aware what it means or this general ideology then then actually bringing in the actual object yep yeah we have two examples I find them fascinating it's it's really fascinating and also this ancestry as a way of formalizing system of inheriting the actually inheriting role within the community it doesn't have to be genetic but your rebuilding of hearts means that we are here we are here to stay we are inheriting what whoever lived here we are taking over and it means sort of stability as opposed to relation with neighbors which brings social dynamics development of social structure I mean even now we have this thing that we have private room even if you're good friends with someone you probably never saw their bedroom but in many languages for example in mine you have living room and reception room as as it's the same thing so you would you would have your friends or neighbors or somebody coming to your living room and you would display whatever you want to display whatever message you want to send out but your private things are going to be hidden regardless of the depth of of the experience and there is another question by Caroline Brie I wonder about the raw material import versus fully made product import what are your thoughts on how these types of outside interactions compare with each other do they have different implications and impacts and how would they differ yes I think that again is it's a very powerful question because that could means that one also have to differentiate between what optics do and the motivation so I think for example with the flint it is quite likely that you have a group of workers who they get the work raw material and they make the flint tools on site we have a lot of little debris so there one can see one kind of interaction where it's about bringing the raw material into site and use it for making objects where if you get the amber I think you get them in as beads it is as objects so I think one could draw a distinction between objects and the kind of association they have and raw materials and I think that distinction would even apply to some of the import from of ceramic for the other groups it's very interesting they're not that many but they are so distinctly different just very interesting how they've thought about this and they so that's not so there's the difference between imitation and an actual foreign objects so I think the difference between raw material and finished object is one which bring in potential very different scenarios so that one should not just group it together I grouped it together in that slides to give you a sense of the volume but I think one could then again differentiate it in terms of what kind of interaction and what kind of impact and the ability to appropriate it I think when you get flint raw material in you can appropriate it as your own objects if you have if you get amber in it's much more open question to me at least what actually happened in the incorporation of that into your local world views so I think you're pointing to important distinction yes I think that's that's what we are missing in many publications when you say oh we have this and this many amber objects or gold objects or whatever it depends it's sometimes in a certain grace for example we find both things we find very very delicate and sophisticated products of amber workshops which are imported as such and then you find a necklace of big chunks of amber the first one says look who do I know and the other one says look how much amber I can get and it's completely different story but if you would just see the table with with the numbers you'll be so and so many amber beats it doesn't say these three are probably equally important that's 330 of of of different kind or are at least they are telling different different story okay I think we should finish now because sessions are starting now so we have to we have to probably chase our viewers and thank you again Marie-Louise for this very very inspiring lecture and I think we'll talk about it more everyone should know that these keynote lectures will be available later in terms of as as take lectures so you can go through it again and yeah I wish you luck to all the sessions and Marie-Louise I hope to see you very soon uh in in circumstances where we could go for a beer after you've done that isn't that wouldn't that I see all the names of so wonderful people who I would have loved to talk with so you feel really sense of regret or losing not having this opportunity but thank you so much and thank you very much for your questions it's been really rewarding to get a sense of responses that's that is why we talk and write and think is to engage with each other so thank you so much bye bye