From Quarries to Rock-cut Sites: Echoes of Stone Crafting

The archaeological study of quarries focuses mainly on the reconstruction of the extraction process, while rock-hewn spaces have often been approached from the point of view of architectural styles or art-history. Nevertheless, a holistic structural approach to the study of these spaces could allow a better understanding of the agency of those who carved the stone.

Stone quarries and rock-cut sites have rarely been included in global studies of historical landscapes and few are the forums dedicated to the theoretical and methodological debate over the importance that these sites have for the understanding of past societies. To fill the gap, the proceedings volume aims at providing new data on sites located in Africa (Ethiopia, and Egypt), Europe (France, Croatia, Italy, Spain) and Asia (Turkey, Saudi Arabia) studied with a diachronic approach, as well as new theoretical reflections for the international debate on the archaeological investigation of rock-cut spaces and stone quarries.

Two directions structure this volume: the analysis of the individual rock walls, considering the study of tool traces as a proxy for understanding the carving phases, as well as the analysis of the structure (site/quarry) as a whole, by contextualizing the results of the study of the single walls.

The volume mainly targets researchers who are willing to discover quarries and rock-cut sites as aspects of the same mining phenomenon: places in which specific empirical and handcrafting knowledge related to stone working is expressed and conveyed, but also a wider audience that is interested in these peculiar and impressive sites.

Anais Lamesa studied Art history and Archaeology at Panthéon-Sorbonne University and Paris-Sorbonne University. She was also a teaching fellow at Paris-Nanterre University, then a high school teacher. Subsequently, as a PI, she managed the Troglopie project (Troglodytisme en Ethiopie), funded by DIM-matériaux anciens et patrimoniaux/ Île-de-France fellowship at the CNRS, involving four research institutions (three French ones and an Ethiopian one) and a commercial company. In 2022, she obtained the French diploma of Senior GIS technician. The same year, she was appointed as the director of the archaeology department at the French Institute for Anatolian Studies in Istanbul, where she is responsible for the establishment of archaeological research programmes and their dissemination in Turkey.

She is currently focusing on the region of Cappadocia and working on the sacred landscape of the region, the techniques used in its rock-cut monuments and the social aspects relying on the crafting of rock-cutting action.

Katy Whitaker is a landscape archaeologist working in heritage research, management and protection with Historic England, the UK government's advisory body on archaeology and the built environment. Her research into quarrying and stone-working focusses on sarsen stone, a silcrete used since the Neolithic in southern Britain. She uses traditional archaeological survey methods together with remotely sensed data and a range of archives in an innovative approach to landscape-scale analysis of extractive industries. Recent publications include collaborative analyses focussed on quarry sources of stone used to build the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Stonehenge, whilst two major studies of prehistoric and post-medieval sarsen stone exploitation will be published in 2022.

Affiliation: University of Reading and Historic England, UK

Claudia Sciuto is a research fellow in environmental archaeology at the University of Pisa, Italy. She works on the transformations of quarrying landscapes, looking at different environmental proxies. Her focus is on the relationships between geologies and human communities as manifested through the development of technical and social characters. Her work is transdisciplinary since it entails a methodological and theoretical reflection as well as morphological/archaeometric analysis of materials, and ethnographic fieldwork. She currently leads a research team for the project "Forsaken ecologies" which aims at investigating the metamorphoses of cultural landscapes in the Apuan Alps.

Current affiliation: Researcher at Pisa University.

Marie-Elise Porqueddu is a PhD in Prehistory and a post-doctoral researcher at the École des hautes études hispaniques et ibériques, Casa de Velázquez (Spain). Her research focuses on carving savoir-faire and Neolithic underground architectures (mining sites and rock-cut tombs) in the Western Mediterranean.

Current affiliation 2022-2023: Scientific member (post-doctoral) at the École des hautes études hispaniques et ibériques, Casa de Velázquez (Spain) / Researcher affiliated to Aix Marseille Univ, CNRS, Minist Culture, LAMPEA, Aix-en-Provence (France)

Past affiliation 2020-2022: Experimental Laboratory LAEX of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain), Fyssen Foundation post-doctoral grant.

Gabriele Gattiglia is an Associate Professor of Archaeological Methods and Theory at the University of Pisa. His fields of interest regarding Digital Archaeology (mainly Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and Open Data), Archaeological Theory, and Medieval, Postmedieval and Contemporary Archaeology. He coordinates the Winter School R for ARchaeologists, dedicated to quantitative methods in Archaeology and works at MAPPA Lab. He has coordinated the H2020 ArchAIDE Project (2016-19), aimed at the automatic recognition of archaeological potsherds through Artificial Intelligence. Currently, he participates in the FAIR (Future Artificial Intelligence Research, 2023-26) project funded by the Next Generation EU programme. He is a member of the Scientific Committee of the Computer Application in Archaeology (CAA) Association.