On Thursday 7th December, the PCMA Seminar will host a workshop entitled ‘The Ocean Below: Human Experiences and Material Culture of Freediving across Time and Space’ organized by Mari Yamasaki from the PCMA UW and Emilio Rodríguez-Álvarez from Universidade de Vigo. The event brings together experts who share their interest in the sea and the complex ways humans have engaged and continue to engage with its depths.
Abstract: “Humans have been diving with and without technological aid since prehistory; some recent evidence seems to push the limits even beyond our species, suggesting that also Neanderthals would not see the surface of the sea as a limit to their action. Freediving for pearls, corals and sponges is well attested in the Persian Gulf as early as the third millennium BCE, and the practice was also known in the Mediterranean, the Americas, and Asia. Engaging with the underwater realm was not exclusive to pearl divers. Fishermen and coastal inhabitants may have experienced diving more often than we think, harbour builders may have required underwater expertise, and painters and poets borrowed underwater imagery for their art. But what evidence do we have for these ancient activities? How, as archaeologists, can we approach the subject of underwater engagement?
A long and tiresome argument for not approaching the issue has been the lack of evidence – especially the material evidence – and that the marine engagement was probably limited to its surface. We disagree. We believe the evidence is there and needs to be put into the right context, reframed, or simply looked at from an aquatic perspective. This workshop brings together experts from a wide range of disciplines and diverse competences that share one very distinctive element: their interest in the sea and the complex ways humans have engaged and continue to engage with its depths. By addressing the evidence from an interdisciplinary perspective – ranging from human physiology to ethnography and zooarchaeology – we hope to establish a baseline for current and future research on the underwater space as a place of past human action.”
Workshop program: PDF
The workshop will take place at the PCMA UW at Prosta st. on 7th December 2023 from 9:00 am to 5:30 pm. The event can be attended remotely – on the Zoom platform. For those interested, please email: pcma@uw.edu.pl to obtain a link.
The workshop has been organized within the framework of Dr. Mari Yamasaki’s Polonez BIS grant 2021/43/P/HS3/01355, co-funded by the National Science Centre and the European Union Framework Programme for Research and Innovation Horizon 2020 under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement no. 945339.
Read more about the project “Underwater realms. Concepts of underwater spatiality in the ancient Eastern Mediterranean”: Link