CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Each culture conceives the senses in different ways, establishing their own models and sensory hierarchies. From this standpoint, the sensory understanding of the world should not be limited to physiology, but should also include cultural aspects. Despite the importance of the senses in human experience, archeology has neglected the sensory dimension of the material world. Sensory research in the humanities is a reaction against the ocularcentrism that dominates the scientific practice. The ocularcentrism and the superiority of vision serve the interests of science, as vision is supposed to be associated with notions of distance, detachment and the ability to disaggregate entities.Truth, reality and objectivity are all built in visual terms. But if we accept the primacy of the visual in archaeological research, we have to accept that the people we study also had a vision-centered model of perception. The dominance of vision describes just one sensory modality among many others. ILimiting our understanding of perception to vision, limits our interpretation of the past. At the same time, accepting the preponderance of vision in archaeological practice reduces the possibility of engaging with the world in different ways, using different narratives. Remaining peripheral to methodological protocols, these stories refer to relations which could be constitutive of past experiences. In sensory studies, personal narratives, do not only imply to describe how the sensorium was used by different people in particular times and places, but also to reflect on the meanings of sensory experience to that people. Creative writing intends to incorporate all the senses in imaginative scenarios, stimulating new thinking and assumptions. In this book we talk about the senses, of different worlds, emotions, narratives. In this book we bring back the "self" to the archaeological science.