Giants in the Hand: Scale, Materiality and the Unique Social Lives of Seal Stones

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Very small things, especially ones worn on the body, have unique positions within persons’ lives and across them. They possess their own type of temporal and material persistence, arising not from being large and formidably unmovable, but from an ability to discreetly carry on from one moment and space to another. Given their substance, significations, or crafting, they can be rich in value even while also being easily overlooked; as undemanding travelers, their biographies can be complex and boundary-crossing. This paper focuses on seal stones and considers the unique character of tiny things, as anthropological and material subjects. I consider their coming-into-being in the hands of craftspersons as well as their distinctive and participatory circuits through human lives, as simultaneously rich in their material and iconographical dimensions.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• SAA 2021: General Sessions

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32921