Social groups, technical traditions and pottery handicraft

Ethnographic examples from Ethiopia

A public lecture by Jessie Cauliez

as part of the Public Lecture Series Rock Art & Symbolic Expression. A Southern Africa – France Dialogue

Thursday 26 July 2018

13:15 | Origins Building, Wits University

Origins Bldg, Origins lecture theatre, room 105 | Wits University

Jessie Cauliez is a prehistorian archaeologist. She is a Fellow Researcher at the French National Centre of Scientific Research (CNRS), at the TRACES UMR 5608 Laboratory in Toulouse (Travaux et Recherches Archéologiques sur les Cultures, les Espaces et les Sociétés). Here, she is co-director of the “PRBM” research team “Later Prehistory of the Mediterranean basin”. She is also member of the Africa Unit “African History and Archaeology“. Jessie Cauliez analyses the historic trajectories of Holocene societies through research firmly anchored in the production of new data. She participates in the reconstruction of models charting the economic, technological and social mutations that characterize the arrhythmic evolution of the first agro-pastoral societies, at the dawn of metallurgical developments. Her work focuses on the northwestern Mediterranean and the Horn of Africa, where she currently directs several archaeological and ethnoarchaeological research programmes (funded by the French Ministry of Foreign affairs, the French National Research Agency, the French CNRS Institute of Ecology and Environment, The Fyssen Foundation…). In light of the necessity to build up interpretative referentials in social anthropology, she has also developed ethnographic work in Ethiopia, with several ethno-linguistic groups. In this way, she aims to enhance our understanding of the links between technical traditions and socio-cultural groups on one hand, and the mechanisms at work in the diffusion processes of material culture on the other hand: how do individuals build up their identity, and maintain and develop social boundaries?