Abstract
This contribution highlights several figures of thought underlying the term “petrification”, aiming at developing it into a research approach. For this, I draw on its components petra and facere, which allow the prevalent reading of petrification processes as ‘turned into stone/fossilised’, but also as ‘made of stone’, ‘made from stone’, ‘made like stone’ and ‘rendered in stone’. These connotations are developed into lines of investigation that focus on preservation, materiality, technology, appearance, and display applicable to all kinds of regional and temporal case studies. I exemplify these by evidence from Pharaonic Egypt but indicate also how they can be transferred to other material culture studies, which key challenges are to be faced for each line of investigation, and which research focus they unclose.
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Wasmuth, M. (2021). Petrification as a Research Approach: Its Terminological Potential for Material Culture Studies. In: Hüglin, S., Gramsch, A., Seppänen, L. (eds) Petrification Processes in Matter and Society. Themes in Contemporary Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69388-6_4
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