Preface

In his illuminating article, Christophersen rethinks concepts in and approaches to the archaeological study of urban living, focusing especially on medieval urban towns in Scandinavia. He recruits various concepts – interaction, event, leakage and creativity – from a materially imbued social-practice theory to explore the urban landscapes as a complex of dynamic social spaces. Christophersen draws from scholars (Hodder 2012; Reckwitz 2002; Schatzki 1996; Shove, Pantzar and Watson 2012) who emphasize that practice is routinized behaviour through which actions and events are performed, that practices are tied to a place and timescape, that social actors live with and interact with materials, and that materials may be the media of interaction with others. Following Hodder (2012), he emphasizes that the nature and quality of social and material relationships lead to the formation and stabilization of practices. In turn, this practice constitutes the town or city.

Section: Urban Centres In Anatolia and Roman Asiamentioning

confidence: 99%

On complementarity of practice, scale and structure. Scalar aspects of social/material space in Anatolian peri-urban contexts in antiquity

Wandsnider¹

2015

“…This challenge has been the subject of discussion in Scandinavian and international urban archaeological research since the start of the new millennium (e.g. Andersson 1997; Andrén 1995; Carelli 2001; Christophersen 1997; 2000a; 2000b; Griffith 2013; Hadley and ten Harkel 2013; Hansen 2000; 2004; Larsson 2006; Thomasson 2011). Mathias Bäck (2009) has summarized the trends and tendencies in Swedish urban archaeology from the 1970s to date, and he presents a far more nuanced and complicated discursive structure than the one I have presented above.…”

Section: Introducing a Challengementioning

confidence: 99%

Performing towns. Steps towards an understanding of medieval urban communities as social practice

Christophersen¹

2015

Urban archaeology in Scandinavia has long been dominated by a processual understanding of medieval urban development. The author proposes that the concept of urbanity in the sense of ‘urban living’ should replace the processual and functionalist-oriented concept of ‘urbanization’, and that instead focus should be directed towards social processes, practices and materiality. He perceives the emergence of urbanity in the Middle Ages in the light of the formation of specific urban patterns of practice that can be analysed with the aid of theoretical tools from recent social-practice theory. Against this background, the potential of recent social-practice theory is examined as a possible analytical tool in an urban archaeological approach to medieval urban communities. Through concepts such as interaction, event, leakage and creativity, the medieval urban landscape can be reformulated as a dynamic social space in which diverse everyday routines were intertwined in patterns, bundles and complexes.

“…Since even artefacts and structures can obtain a certain social role, everyday social practice/performance thus would, next to meaning (intention/mood) and knowledge, to some extent also be reflected in the respective material culture. With this entry Christophersen joins a current general trend in the archaeological discussion tending to focus on both social approaches of everyday life (Hadley and ten Harkel 2013) and personal and communal identities (e.g. Hem Eriksen et al 2014, viii) – in prolongation one might even add isotope analysis of particular individuals here (cf.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Urbanity by its ‘smallest units’. Comments on ‘performing towns’

Kalmring¹

2015

Any reader expecting yet another contribution on the urbanization of Scandinavia will be misguided reading Axel Christophersen's contribution on ‘performing towns’. As the author makes very clear, he focuses onurbanityin the sense ofurban social practicerather than onurbanizationitself. The latter concept is straightforwardly dismissed as belonging to processual archaeology, and was trying to understand the town as abeingstructure and neglecting the dynamic role of its individual inhabitants as a ‘crucial historical driving force’ (p. 110). Christophersen also omits the classic discussion – actually besides Christianization one of the two most prominent topics in early medieval archaeology – on the designation and character of the earliest towns in the north, where early towns are merely defined as population centres ‘larger than a village and smaller than a city’ (p. 112). Instead, with the adoption ofpractice theory, Christophersen picks one heuristic approach from modern social theory (mentalism (subjectivistic/objectivistic), intersubjectivism, textualism and practice theory itself) for the analysis of social phenomena as routinized body/knowledge/things complexes (Reckwitz 2002, 257–58).