[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review.]
This volume represents the proceedings of a conference of the same name held at Pisa, and online, in March 2021. The conference led to the creation of the International ReseArch group on Quarries and Rock‐cut sites (IRAAR), and can retrospectively be considered its first iteration (though the name does not appear in this volume). This conference (and now publication) series is the second on an international scale to deal specifically with stonecutting in greater Mediterranean Afro-Eurasia, after the now-venerable, more-or-less triennial conferences of the Association for the Study of Marble and Other Stones in Antiquity (ASMOSIA). The nomenclature is clarificatory: while ASMOSIA has dealt with stone(s) since 1988, IRAAR deals with rock and the cutting thereof. For the nonspecialist, in this context, rock (bedrock, the living rock, etc.) is the lithic material still in and of the ground; rock becomes stone once it has been purposefully cut away from that ground. While contributors to ASMOSIA have certainly not neglected quarries—the sites where rock becomes stone—their focus has traditionally been on the products themselves. IRAAR, and hence the contents of this volume, by contrast, are interested in places where the cutting happens. Nor are the contributions limited to cutting rock for the sake of making stone (positive products); they also consider spaces and structures created by cutting rock (negative products):eight of the thirteen contributions deal with quarrying, five with rupestral sites (and the lines between the two categories are rarely clearly defined, as several authors note).[1]
The volume in question includes chapters on topics from the Neolithic (Porqueddu, Robin); Egyptian New Kingdom (Galazzo); 1st millennium BCE (Grégor et al.); Roman period (Šprem, Galazzo); Early (Morleghem, Lamesa), Mid (Routhiau), and Late (Stevens, Gély and Viré) Middle Ages through to the Modern period down to the 20th century (Sciuto, Germanò, Lamesa), along with a theoretical and historiographic reflection that touches on the Classical, especially Roman, period (Lyes). The geographical range is similarly wide, from Ethiopia, Egypt and the Arabian peninsula through the entirety of France (four chapters alone), by way of Puglia, Istria, Carrara and Sardinia. While many of these might seem to lie beyond the threshold of interest for readers of BMCR, the scholar of rock-cut sites (like the practitioner of archaeological field survey) must confront a multi-period landscape, and the difficulty of dating such palimpsestic rupestral interventions is a disciplinary truism. Moreover, given the relative dearth of similar studies, methodological approaches from diverse geologies and cultural contexts are to be welcomed.
The cultural and chronological framing of the contributions to this volume mostly reflects academic archaeologists whose research questions have brought them to confront particular (rocky) kinds of evidence. These contrast with a different tradition of investigation, that of speleologists (often technically amateurs but no less competent and often highly skilled for that), whose approach is at base the exploration of the subsoil and documentation of the evidence encountered, of whatever type or period. Only one of the authors in the volume (Stevens) belongs to this tradition, as far as I can tell, but the openness of the conference to bridging such disciplinary divides is promising.
The organization of the book into three thematic divisions is not entirely convincing, though this is a common problem confronting edited volumes, and scarcely detracts from its overall quality. There is insufficient space in this review to comment in detail on all of the contributions.
Some chapters are dedicated to case-studies of particular rock-cut sites or quarries, while others proceed at regional or supraregional scale. What unites almost all, even the wider-scale studies, is an attention to fine details, namely toolmarks, a fundamental unit of analysis for the rupestral archaeologist. Building on this attention, most of the contributors either explicitly or tacitly employ a chaîne opératoire approach,[2] a natural fit considering the method’s extensive development in the context of study of the production of prehistoric stone tools, another lithic-reductive process. (Indeed, Morleghem’s contribution, with its attention to the scatter of waste produced by stonecutters extracting individual blocks, calls to mind refit studies that similarly rely on a detailed recording of waste scatters to reconstruct the steps of reducing a core to a stone tool.) If it were not already clear, this volume confirms the chaîne opératoire as a, perhaps the, principal instrument in the methodological toolkit of the contemporary rupestral researcher.
Taken together, the chapters by Šprem, Morleghem, Galazzo, Grégor et al. and Germanò offer a panorama of current methodologies for investigating premodern (i.e., pre-mechanized) quarries, supplementing and integrating chaîne opératoire/traceology, including ethnography of local populations, archival research, field survey, satellite and lidar remote sensing, photogrammetric documentation, geological micromorphology, and excavation. The results of careful excavation and documentation (combined with fortuitous archaeological preservation) are particularly evident in Morleghem’s study of a Merovingian sarcophagus quarry. Ceramic and radiocarbon evidence offer an absolute chronology between the mid-6th and late 7th centuries CE, while a relative chronology results from studying the patterns of exploitation of the quarry, block by block and dump by dump, suggesting extraction took place continuously over one or two generations (ca. 25-50 years). This internal relative chronology is particularly innovative, and could help to refine the absolute range given by the materials. The evidence allows Morleghem to call attention to the challenges posed by the management of large volumes of quarry waste as a byproduct of extraction, consonant with recent archaeological attention to ancient waste.[3] For Morleghem, excavation of debris is not merely a means of accessing and documenting the quarry-face; the debris itself is half the story.
The permeability between extractive and other uses of rock is considered by Porqueddu, who suggests that the technology for excavating tombs in Neolithic southern France might have been know-how transferred from local flint mine(r)s, offering a counter to diffusionist explanations. Porqueddu’s sophisticated analysis of toolmarks draws in part on her experimental archaeology work, especially crucial for a period predating the introduction of metal tools. Nearby and slightly later, Robin’s promising study of the location and alignment of prehistoric Sardinian tombs (domus de janas) could profitably be read by scholars investigating rupestral necropoleis in other cultural and chronological contexts.
Lamesa considers the question of left-handedness or ambidexterity of stoneworkers, in the context of a study of rupestral churches in northern Ethiopia. Here, in conjunction with ethnography, tool-marks are of principal importance, since their orientation attests the posture of the worker; in the absence of environmental constraints that would condition a left-handed stroke, the presence of left-dominant stonecutters can be inferred. This is a promising line of research that will require, however, a larger sample size than that presented (for which the author can scarcely be blamed, having been interrupted by both pandemic and war) in order to draw out more significant patterns.
Two contributors (Sciuto, Lyes) consider the theoretical frameworks and approaches with which stone-studies practitioners have engaged or could engage with the material. Both contributions raise more questions than they answer with regard to how such approaches might shape archaeological research design, fieldwork, and study, though they offer useful springboards for pursuing future such answers.
Sciuto approaches the embodied know-how of stoneworking with a new-materialist lens acknowledging non-human agency to consider “how craftsmanship is developed in collaboration with the rock itself” (103), proceeding from Leroi-Gourhan’s study of technology and Tim Ingold’s theorization of the art of making.[4] Nor is the relationship simply between the worker, the tool, and the rock; the worker exists in a community (of practice and otherwise), and so then too do the worker, tool, and rock exist in community between them. To conclude, Sciuto considers the relatively well-documented community context of workers in the marble quarries at Carrara over recent centuries, usefully highlighting the relationship between “the hand, the stone, and the mind,” though I was left wanting more specificity as to how such ethnographic accounts might help us to people ancient quarryscapes. On the whole, Sciuto’s chapter offers an elegant account of certain key theoretical trajectories within the subdiscipline.
Simplifying somewhat, if Sciuto’s contribution is about what larger theoretical approaches can offer quarry studies, that of Lyes is about what quarry studies can offer to larger theoretical approaches. Taking as evidence the output of the ASMOSIA conferences, Lyes argues that researchers in the field have been insufficiently attuned to overarching questions within contemporary archaeology more broadly, such as those elaborated by Kintigh et al. as “Grand Challenges.”[5] Though one can quibble with some characterizations and internal inconsistencies , nevertheless the call to step back from our individual rock-faces and consider the wider archaeological landscape is well founded.
On the related question of the integration of archaeometric approaches within the discipline, Lyes warns against the accumulation of mere “numbers” in stone studies without an adequate archaeological contextualization, or else “continue to run the risk of being empirical, directionless and silo-ed [sic]” (71). Here too, the prescription is a greater attention to the “why” of the study and a closer collaboration between archaeologists and scientists in designing research questions. Surely some of the blame here must also be assigned to the overwhelming pressure to publish in ever-greater quantity endemic to academia: and so much the better if, as a scientist, one can demonstrate multidisciplinary collaboration with archaeologists or vice versa.
Drawing on a question raised by Pollard and Bray for archaeological science more broadly,[6] Lyes concludes by asking “what really are the big questions for the study of stone in antiquity?” If no answers are forthcoming, the chapter has at least laid groundwork (albeit not always finely pointed) for future considerations.
In order to build robust datasets capable of responding to big questions or “grand challenges,” we need ever more fine-grained studies of quarries and rock-cut sites, like those presented elsewhere in the book, though ideally at a greater level of detail than is possible in an edited volume. If such studies can be guided by a more well-defined set of higher-level research questions, so much the better. Future iterations of the IRAAR conference seem a likely venue for the discussion and elaboration of such definitions.
The volume is available Open Access to read online, though should one want a PDF, it comes with a (low) price tag; the physical volume is a well-produced, convenient softcover, the price of which is not exorbitant for those who prefer to read offscreen. The quality and utility of illustrations, where present, is generally high. Outright errors are few,[7] though infelicitous English occasionally surfaces. Such issues do not detract from the overall value of the book, which will principally be of interest to those already working within the field of stone studies, though it might also serve as a vademecum to those who are looking to become initiated into the rupestral mysteries.
Authors and Titles
Gabriele Gattigilia, Foreword
I. Theoretical and Methodological Challenges in the Archaeology of Quarries and Rock-Cut Sites
Marie-Elise Porqueddu, “Savoir-faire and Technical Environment: Rethinking the Emergence of Rock-cut Tombs in the Neolithic Mediterranean”
Katarina Šprem, “What to Expect When You’re Documenting and Excavating a Roman Quarry – Monte del Vescovo, Istria, Croatia”
Christopher J. Lyes, “Theorising Ancient Quarries: How Far Have We Come?”
Daniel Morleghem, “When Quarry Waste Explains Tool Marks”
Claudia Sciuto, “The Hand, the Stone and the Mind: Exploring the Agency of Rocks in Quarrying Techniques”
II. Carved Sites and Carved Landscapes
Guillaume Robin, “How do Rock-cut Architectures Interact with the Landscape? The Example of Prehistoric Rock-cut Tombs in Ossi, Sardinia (Italy)”
Daniela Galazzo, “A Study of Quartzite (Silicified Sandstone) Quarries in Egypt”
Manon Routhiau, “First Reflections on the Structural Analysis of Rock-hewn Caves in Lalibela’s Landscape, Ethiopia”
Thierry Grégor, Jérôme Rohmer, Abdulrahman Alsuhaibani, “Quarrying, Carving and Shaping the Landscape. Stone Working at Dadan, Northwest Arabia, in the First Millennium BCE and Beyond”
III. Rock-Cut Sites and Quarries: Crafts and Societies
Germano Germanò, “Underground and Open-pit Quarries in Polignano a Mare (Italy): a Preliminary Investigation”
Anaïs Lamesa, “The Left-handed and the Ambidextrous: Methodological Considerations by Way of the Excavation of Rock-cut Churches Over the Long Term”
Luc Stevens, “Qualifications of Craftsmen Who Dug Souterrains in France (10th-15th centuries): Preliminary Results”
Jean-Pierre Gély, Marc Viré, “The Technique of Extracting Building Stone by ‘Stone-walling and Back-filling’ in Paris: an Innovation of the Late Middle Ages”
Notes
[1] There is as yet, so far as I can tell, no convenient cover term for the subfield or its practitioners, and a hypothetical lithotomiology, for example, is not very elegant.
[2] The chaîne opératoire (“operational sequence”) as developed and employed in archaeology, particularly in analysis of the manufacture of stone tools, is a concept that aims to reconstruct the entire sequence of operations necessary that shape the lifecycle of an artifact, from procurement of raw materials through to reuse or discard, locating these steps chronologically and spatially. While this already provides a useful framework for theorizing artifact creation, the chaîne opératoire is also a cognitive model; technical gestures employed in artifact creation are necessarily socio-culturally conditioned gestures.
[3] E.g., Newman, S. 2023. Unmaking Waste: New Histories of Old Things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Dicus, K. 2022. “Refuse and the Roman City: Determining the Formation Processes of Refuse Assemblages Using Statistical Measures of Heterogeneity.” AJA 126(4): 543–66; Sosna, D. & Brunclíková, L. (eds.). 2017. Archaeologies of waste: encounters with the unwanted. Oxford: Oxbow Books.
[4] Leroi-Gourhan, A. 1964. L’homme et la matière. Paris: Albin Michel Science; Ingold, T. 2013. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. London: Routledge.
[5] Kintigh et al. “Grand challenges for archaeology.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences – PNAS 111(3), pp. 879-880.
[6] Pollard, A.M. and Bray, P. 2007. “A bicycle made for two? The integration of scientific techniques into archaeological interpretation.” Annual Review of Anthropology 36(1), pp. 245-259.
[7] E.g., “scares” for “scars” 89 ff.; “setting” for “rising” 123; “biggest” for “bigger” 214; “sky” for “ceiling” 264.