RT Conference Proceedings
T1 Cultural Memory in Protohistoric and Ancient Mediterranean Societies: An historiographical introduction
A1 Machuca Prieto, Francisco
A1 Gomes, Francisco
K1 Memoria colectiva
AB Memory and its uses are not neutral. As noted by authors such as M. Halbwachs and J.Assmann, memory, in collective terms, is a powerful tool for identity building, and hasbeen so since the dawn of Humanity. Within each particular society, the performativeconstruction of collective memory consolidates a shared interpretation of what happenedor what is worth remembering. This idea has made significant headway in archaeologicalresearch in the last three decades, as illustrated by a growing number of works dealingwith memory in Prehistory and the Ancient world.However, the different languages and vocabularies on this topic may confuse those whoapproach this field, so a necessary first step is to summarize the meanings ascribed toterms like “collective”, “social” and “cultural memory”. Of these three concepts, thelatter, put forward by J. Assmann, has undoubtedly had the greatest impact. In his view,“cultural memory” is nothing other than the remembrance of the past from shiftingperspectives in the present.This phenomenon of production, reproduction, and transformation of narratives about acollective past was already common during the European Iron Age and Antiquity. Studiessuch as those by E. Bickerman on the Greek world, and, more recently, R. Golosetti onPre-Roman Gaul, F. Marco Simón on Pre-Roman Iberia or K. Galinsky and K. Lapatin onthe Roman world have made this clear.From a combination of literary, iconographic, and archaeological sources, theapproaches of these authors to “cultural memory” confirm not only that remembering isan act of creation of meaning in the present through the past, but also that theexploration of the ways in which narratives about the past were built and deployed aspart of broader processes of identity construction is a field of study which still holds greatpotential.
YR 2022
FD 2022-09-02
LK https://hdl.handle.net/10630/24904
UL https://hdl.handle.net/10630/24904
LA spa
NO Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech.
DS RIUMA. Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Málaga
RD 20 ene 2026