SW 3.103: People and Mountains: Stories from an Archaeological Perspective

The mountains of the world have meant many things to the people who have used them for the past 50,000 + years. For some they were home, for others, occasional sources of food and other economic resources. For still others, the mountains were sacred spaces to be used in special ways. Archaeological assessments of mountain environments and sites have long lagged those of many other environments and are typically based on case-studies (compare recent volumes such as Archaeology of Mountain Landscapes or the Oxford Handbook of Mountain Archaeology). It remains for mountain archaeologists and researchers from the related historic and geo(archaeological) sciences to begin the work of crafting narratives—stories—from their data; to bring to life the sites and the people who created them.

The focus sessions at #IMC25 strive to do just this by

• de-emphasizing site reports and purely descriptive papers and instead,
• highlighting contributions that paint data-based pictures of the lives people lived in world’s mountain ranges, and
• featuring contributions that report on methodological developments with the potential to further the current state of research or even provide a step-change in the field.

In this Synthesis Workshop we will discuss what the various stories reveal about the human use of mountain environments on various timescales and how novel methodologies can contribute to these holistic descriptions of mountains and their past inhabitants.