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Neolithic stamps: cultural patterns, processes and potencies

Skeates, R.

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Abstract

Decorated clay stamps carrying a culturally filtered range of abstract designs are one of the most visually striking but problematic categories of portable art found at Neolithic and Copper Age sites in western Asia and southern Europe. This article proposes a revised account of their production, consumption and changing values across space and time, by emphasizing their biographies, human relations and cultural embeddedness. They were sometimes worn as amulets, but primarily designed to be hand-held printing and impressing tools, used to reproduce copies of powerful graphic images on the surface of other cultural materials. It is argued that their potent signatures repeatedly attached, revealed and reproduced significant cultural concepts and relations across different people and practices and across the material and supernatural worlds.

Citation

Skeates, R. (2007). Neolithic stamps: cultural patterns, processes and potencies. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 17(2), 183-198. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0959774307000248

Journal Article Type Article
Publication Date Jun 1, 2007
Deposit Date Dec 1, 2008
Publicly Available Date Mar 29, 2024
Journal Cambridge Archaeological Journal
Print ISSN 0959-7743
Electronic ISSN 1474-0540
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 17
Issue 2
Pages 183-198
DOI https://doi.org/10.1017/s0959774307000248
Keywords Stamps, Pintaderas, Neolithic.

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