Session title: PLUS ÇA CHANGE? CHANGING DEPOSITIONAL PRACTICES OF THE EARLY IRON AGE

The archaeological community is invited to submit abstracts concerning changing depositional practices of European societies in the Early Iron Age. The specific aim of this session is to identify the formative processes, including the redevelopment of social relationships and systems of power, the cultivation of new symbols of identity and status, and the incorporation of innovative technologies, by which Early Iron Age groups developed and defined their social structures in light of and perhaps in opposition to the previously established constructs which defined the Bronze Age. The Early Iron Age is traditionally associated with the reformulation of many societal customs based on the transformation of ideological and hierarchical arrangements made manifest through objects and materials. These transformations in practice are based in a shifting system of artefacts that are associated with one context in the Bronze Age and then with another in the EIA. The aim of this session is to focus attention to these changes on a pan-European scale and to promote the study of social frameworks through the analysis of the variations in depositional practice of objects. These changes in the pattern of material deposition are found across a wide spectrum of types of contexts, including burials, new settlement developments and foundation deposits, middens and household disposal, and sacred and profane contexts. We welcome submissions that incorporate a strong contextual approach to this analysis of the formative practices in the Early Iron Age. Suggested topics include, but are not limited to: • Changing practices of the deposition of material culture and its role in the establishment or • definition of identity • Continuity or disarticulation of specific objects and ideological frameworks from the Bronze Age to the EIA • Changes in cultural memory and transformation in EIA conceptualisation and practice • The role of agency in EIA contexts • Formative processes that define community and cultural identity, as well as the “Other”, in light of broad cross-cultural contact during the EIA • Fresh contributions to earlier trends in research including cultural reawakening after the Dark Ages, settlement development, cultural dispersion and cross-cultural influences