Emanuele Prezioso

This paper introduces a new perspective on the constitutive role of material culture for memory using the Knossian Kamares pottery style as a case study. It challenges prevalent approaches in mainstream memory studies, which confine memory to individuals' brains or minds, suggesting a deeper relationship between material culture and memory. Presenting a novel methodology rooted in cognitive archaeology to study the long-term making of Knossian Kamares decorations, I suggest that the Knossian Kamares pottery style is a transgenerational memory that enabled generations of artisans to remember, learn, and update technological skills and knowledge. I also claim that, in assuming this distributed, enactive, and non-representational stance on style as memory, it becomes evident that remembering is something we do: an active engagement that emerges with and through material culture in specific sociomaterial settings.

In presenting the study of Bronze Age Knossian Kamares (ca. 1900-1700 BCE) making of polychrome decorative motifs, this paper investigates the degree to which the aesthetic material forms of things (i.e., the combination of materials, shapes, and decorations) constitute memories of sociocultural practices: patterns of skilled actions, thoughts, and the beliefs attached to them. Specifically, I propose that Knossian Kamares decorations are memories because they are material signs of past sociocultural practices that occurred with and through them over time. Ultimately, this essay aims to call attention to the role of the aesthetic qualities of material forms and their associated sociocultural practices in constituting memory from the perspective of material engagement theory and the enactive-ecological approach to cognition.

For mainstream theories, memory is a skull-bound activity consisting of encoding, storing and retrieving representations. Conversely, unorthodox perspectives proposed that memory is an extended process that includes material resources. This article explains why neither representationalist nor classical extended stances do justice to the active and constitutive role of material culture for cognition. From Material Engagement Theory, we propose an alternative enactive, ecological, extended and semiotic viewpoint for which remembering is a way of materially engaging with and through things. Specifically, we suggest that one remembers when one updates their interactions with the world, a form of engagement previously acquired through sociomaterial practices. Moreover, we argue that things are full-fledged memories, since they accumulate and bring forth how we have materially engaged with them over different timescales. Last, we highlight the need for studies considering the cognitive ecologies where remembering takes place in its full complexity.

This essay offers a critical review of Thinging Beauty: Anthropological Reflections on the Making of Beauty and the Beauty of Making (Malafouris, Koukouti 2020). In their article, the authors take an insightful step forward in the anthropology of aesthetics by grounding their theory in embodied material praxis and Material Engagement Theory (MET; Malafouris, 2013) which argues for a radical continuity between mind and material culture. They suggest that aesthetic consciousness (experience and judg- ment) is a process encompassing «the creation, perception, as well as our emotional response and affective attunement with materials, forms, or evocative performances» (p. 213) by which selected aspects of the world come to acquire the ability to move us via aesthetic agency. In their initial outline of the concept, Malafouris and Koukouti focus on a novel perspective of this experience: the performative aesthetic associated with making, a mode of immersive attention they call creative thinging or «attentive material engagement». Their ethnography of master potters situated in the midst of creative thinging suggests that the artisans’ expertise is revealed in their feeling of and for clay. The concept of thinging beauty is also introduced as both a performative and appreciative form of aesthetic consciousness. By introducing a novel approach to aesthetic experience, Malafouris and Koukouti offer a unified path toward an anthropology of aesthetics encompassing the aesthetic consciousness of both those creating and appreciating an object or performance.

The styles of Celtic art are populated by monstrous artefacts whose forms and decorations are an admixture of animal, human, and vegetal motifs. Because of these material qualities, monstrous artefacts flee from our categorisations, capture our attention, and entrap our senses. They evade from the notion of style that archaeology has created to make sense of the cultures and people who created them. In this paper, I present an analysis of style and argue that it is necessary to take monstrous artefacts seriously. An enterprise that requires to analyse what they do for us, rather than what they represent. That is, observing the requirements that these monstrous artefacts place on artisans in the context of reproducing them. By adopting the Material Engagement Theory (MET), I present a novel definition of style as a continuous creative process: an accumulation of ways of thinking and acting recreated every time an artisan engages with them through required creative gestures and skills. The aim is to explore how artefact are not passive entities but actively constitute our modes of engaging with the world.

The study of the "ancient mind", with its implications to the material culture and the actions of humans in the past, is currently ongoing. However, only a few segments of the archaeological research are advancing applications of cognitive studies in the field and producing insights inferred from their application. Transformations and variations in the archaeological data, as are figurative representations on objects, could benefit from a non-representational investigation and shed light on areas of the research still under debate. This paper, drawing upon the theory of material engagement, notions of extended and embodied cognition, material symbols, and material agency stemmed from anthropology, aims to introduce a brief outline of how iconographic motifs and styles have the capacity of guiding and influencing human becomingness. From this perspective, novel ways of examining the past may help to trace processes of becoming and to shed light on the interaction between Near East and Egypt at the end of the fourth millennium. Notably, the contribution focuses on how the presence of Mesopotamian motifs on specific Egyptian objects actively shaped and produced the basis for the creation of an elite in Egypt. Mostly due to lack in sources of data, the logic behind the processes of simplification and the birth of the Egyptian elites is still partially obscure. However, those periods of change are able to illuminate the importance between people and their cognitive environments and to give us more insights into the processes behind change and stability in the material and social worlds. Through an analysis of objects as partaking to a certain style, it is here advocated that a cognitive approach to figurative motifs has the potential to produce novel insights about social and cultural transformations among people, materials, and their environments.

In Predynastic Egypt, nature was perceived as a struggle between chaos and order; a figurative way to define society and the role of the king as keeper of the cosmos. Carvings and paintings on vases, rocks in the deserts, and objects found in the tombs of the elites signify the first attempts of representing the natural and cultic religion of Egypt. The animals living at the boundaries of the cosmos, the deserts, and the riverine regions, were associated with natural forces and considered to be spirits. Pictorial depictions of rows of animals, conflicts between different animals, and crocodiles or hippopotami thus represent the powers of chaos. Alternatively, dogs, birds, and fantastical creatures, early manifestations of local spirits who preserved the cosmic and social order. Developments in kingship and social stratification indicate the birth of a collective identity, built on the menace of external threats. The enemies weren't only defined by name and form but gained a cosmic, animalistic dimension. From this perspective, the king rises in the late Predynastic period as a unique being able to keep the order. He was represented both as an animal-god and as a human, whose power dominated nature, as well as the cosmos. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the perception of nature and cosmos during the Predynastic period and the position it held for defining the cosmos as well as the role of the first kings in society.

Since Aristotle, philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, and archaeologists have proposed and debated novel ways of considering the relationship between material culture and memory. Some focus on memory as an intercranial, brain-bound phenomenon for which the material world is only the background on which remembering unfolds. Others have attempted to study it from a collective perspective that encompasses both the social and material worlds.
With its interest in studying the remains of past humans’ actions, archaeology has always had a close connection with material culture and memory. It is undeniable that memory and material culture are the bread and butter of every archaeological endeavour. However, most studies in archaeology and beyond have taken this assumption for granted or produced explanations based on already-existing frameworks in psychology.

In this talk, I sketch a different picture of the relationship between material culture and memory from the vantage point of Material Engagement Theory and Ecological-Enactive cognition. Specifically, I will present my enactive, ecological, extended, and distributed proposal for memory, remembering, and the role that material culture plays using selected examples from some of the case studies I encountered during my doctorate. Ultimately, this talk will be a defence for an integrated, multi-disciplinary approach to the joint study of brains, bodies, and material culture; one that considers the role that sociomaterial contexts and practices play in constituting memory.

This lecture aimed at introducing Material Engagement Theory and its scopes. It was structured so to present Lambros Malafouris' ontological stance, followed by a thorough examination of MET's three main postulates: Extended Mind, Enactive Sign, and Material Agency. Ultimately, I presented examples from the literature on MET to show what each of these postulates refers to.

In psychology, trauma is generally considered an emotional response to a past adverse event that affects a person's behaviours (e.g., memory recollection issues, anxiety, depression). Trauma shows a strong connection with the phenomenon of memory, and multiple studies have attempted to understand their relationship. Specifically, these studies suggest that the connection lies at the level of information processing (i.e., encoding).
The root of such a view is well established in mainstream cognitivist perspectives on memory: a brain-centred enterprise involving encoding, storing, and retrieving information. These studies on trauma and PTSD recognise that memory is more than just the recollection of previously stored information. They suggest that trauma memories are not simply recalled but re-experienced in relation to external cues. This resonates with recent accounts of 4E cognition and Material Engagement Theory (MET), which suggest a different way of thinking about cognition by incorporating ecological factors (e.g., social and cultural elements). Memory, specifically, is considered as an active enterprise that is continually readjusted and recreated every time a person interacts with people or things through specific practices.
In this talk, we advance an alternative approach to understanding memory trauma by adopting 4E and MET paradigms. We illustrate our assumptions by grounding them in a very specific case study: the experience of father absence in a Brazilian favela. In this context, the two figures of the drug trafficker and the martial arts master are often recognised as paternal by children lacking their biological father. In doing so, the traumatic process takes on different developmental trajectories: boosted if the child enters the criminal world, and dampened if they enter the gym. Ultimately, by analysing the notion of trauma memory through a specific anthropological case study, we suggest an alternative interpretation on trauma, memory, and novel pathways towards recovery.

Kamares Ware is one of the most famous pottery styles in archaeology. Its shapes and creative decorations have been differentially studied in the past, mainly from a stylistic perspective. However, its complexity and the fragmented state of the Middle Minoan Cretan contexts have at times hindered our attempts to make sense of its horizontal and vertical dynamics of transmission. Publications accumulated in decades have produced descriptions of Kamares Ware pottery styles from various centres around Crete. These genealogies of pots illustrate continuity in both material forms and correlated practices that lasted for several generations. By looking at style from the perspective of Material Engagement Theory and radical enactive theories of cognition, I illustrate that the long-term development of the Knossian Kamares style describes something more than a succession of forms and decorations: a novel form of memory. Specifically, I argue that the Knossian Kamares style is a form of transgenerational memory continually re-created every time potters made new vessels in this style. Furthermore, by rethinking the notion of autobiographical memory from psychology and the cognitive sciences, I present for the first time the idea that transgenerational memory might also be productive of identity.

What does it mean to say that things are ‘alive’ when referring to the archaeology of mind? This question seems to be of primary significance in cognitive archaeology (Malafouris and Renfrew 2010).
The emergence of ‘new materialism(s)’, along with post-humanist and non- representationalist perspectives, has given social scientists new ways to conceive of objects and things as living entities. ‘Symmetry’ (Olsen et al. 2012), ‘interaction’ (Gamble 2007), ‘entanglement’ (Hodder 2012), ‘assemblage’ (Fowler 2017), and ‘indexicality’ (Preucel 2006) are only some of the concepts used by archaeologists seeking to highlight the active participation of things in the worlds inhabited by humans. In cognitive archaeology, this ‘material turn’ has been mainly driven by a theoretical framework known as Material Engagement Theory (in short, MET; Malafouris 2013). For MET, things are not the result of a priori thoughts imposed on matter. They are, instead, constitutive elements of thinking as it emerges in situated contexts of material engagement. Of course, the situated processes that give rise to the human ‘mindscape’, so to speak (Malafouris 2012), extend beyond the micro- scale of the situated individual. Appreciating how things shape the mind requires attending to the communities of practice occupying the meso-scale, as well as the interregional networks linking them at the macro-scale (Knappett 2011).
The aim of this session thus rests at tracing the multi-scalar dynamics of cognition, whether be it through ‘material engagement’, ‘archaeological semiotics’ or any other non- anthropocentric approach. All contexts of analysis are welcome.

The notion of style has been used in archaeology for typological and chronological sequences, pictorial attribution, as an indicator of economic movements, and as a tool to establish identities between groups. Also, a good deal of literature presented style as a choice to explain the relations among materials and people. New emerging approaches to material culture, above all Material Engagement Theory (MET), are casting a new light on the mutual interactions between people, things, and their environments. Rooted in MET and A. Gell’s anthropology of art and time, this paper presents style as a memory process able to guide a potter’s stylistic choices. Using Middle Minoan decorative polychrome pottery, style is explored as a process where each creation in the present (intentions) results from accumulated sequences of memories of past actions (retentions) that project actions in the future (protentions). Decorative styles result as memories of actions distributed in space and time in the material culture. Looking at the constant engagement between people and things allow seeing how memories pass through generations guiding actions and intentions. Style helps to bridge past and present and to understand how it acts in the social, cultural, and material worlds. This approach, although still under investigation, aims to question the transmission of stylistic traditions over long periods.

Paper presented at the invitation of the Keble at the Reunion weekend for the celebration of 40 years of co-education at the college (150th anniversary of the college). This paper present my research project.

My study examines how decorative pottery styles guide potters’ choices (use of tools, materials, and skills) when producing surface decorations. It explores the hypothesis that decorative pottery styles are memories of past actions developed over the long-term. Those memories are distributed in material culture and united in styles according to their perceived physical qualities. To verify this theory, I re-examine the long-term development of Kamares Ware from unpublished and published deposits of Knossos (Crete). Clarity on styles of Kamares Ware and their role in the social changes of the period still lacks; mainly, due to the broad typologies produced in the past.
The anthropological approach proposed with the research focuses on the sensual qualities Kamares Ware decorative pottery styles produce when engaged in the context of making.  This approach is grounded in Malafouris's Material Engagement Theory, Gell's anthropology of art, and is informed by an ethnographic campaign in workshops near Rethymnon (Crete). The latter may shed light on how the sensual qualities of pottery decoration engage with memory and influence the decision-making process.

A Matter of Style. Human-Object Interactions and the Long Term Processes of Transformations.

Despite debates on the concept of style flourished in the second part of the past century producing frameworks and conceptions about the nature of changes and of human interaction with the world, this paradigm is now completely lost. Style, however, is part of the way we engage with the world and, through the objects that surround us, partake in our ways of making sense of it.
Interactions between people and objects manifest in many different ways, but the relation we have with them is mediated through a common logic manifested through the perception of similarities; something that archeology has expressed with the concept of typology. It is in the semiotic interaction between forms, decorations, and other objects sharing stylistic similarities that style acquires the potential to guide us in the ways of making sense of the world. From an archaeological perspective, this notion can frame in time persons constraining actions and thoughts through perception.
The relations that style creates among diverse objects and the connection it builds in time make it a useful paradigm to grasp the interaction between people and material worlds. It is in this coupling between objects and humans, both the making and thinking with specific stylistic features, that we can demonstrate changes in the human past.
Style, deconstructed and shaped through the lens of anthropological philosophy, philosophy of physics, and Material Engagement Theory is presented in this paper as a way to probe into the recursive exchanges between humans and objects across space and different temporalities.

The aim of this short presentation was to introduce part of my current DPhil research project to the members of Keble College at the University of Oxford.

Focus of the project is producing a notion of style useful for archaeology from the perspective of anthropological archaeology on ceramics, Material Engagement Theory, A. Gell's notion of Œuvre, and Hegelian conceptions of time.
The idea is to develop a theory of style that defines it as a property of objects that can be seen in the archaeological datum as a cognitive process partaking in composing our minds and, hence, able to influence the human ontogenic development. I aim to explore style as an ongoing process of change, that is a temporally arranged sets of cognitions along axes of dureé.