Finding Needles in Bone-Stacks: Using HEURIST Databases to Study Funerary Remains
Yangos Chalazonitis École française d’Athènes
The project “Mort et Pouvoir au Pays Bien-Aimé,” carried out by Ioannis (Yangos) Chalazonitis in the École française d’Athènes, advanced in parallel with the adoption of the HEURIST database system by the institution from early 2023 onwards. A new database, treating the material associated with the project was created using the new infrastructure; it evolved organically over the following years, and currently hosts almost 700 object entries associated with more than 180 graves from various sites of the Lower Strymon Valley. This presentation will cover the experiences of the author throughout the development of the project database, with particular emphasis on challenges and common pitfalls particular to the use of databases for the study of funerary contexts —and on how the HEURIST platform can serve to resolve these issues. The presentation will also touch upon parallel databases that were created by the author in collaboration with partners in the EFA and other institutions for use in similar projects, and how experience altered or reinforced our ways of approaching our datasets.
Ioannis (Yangos) Chalazonitis
A graduate of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Ioannis (Yangos) Chalazonitis received his DPhil in Classical Archaeology from the University of Oxford in 2017, with a thesis titled “The North-Eastern Aegean, 1050-600 BC”. His work has focused on the regions of eastern Macedonia, Thasos and Aegean Thrace, with a particular emphasis on the materialisation of local identities, on interactions between different population groups and on the expression of social hierarchisation in funerary contexts. He has held a Wiener-Anspach postdoctoral fellowship in the Université Libre de Bruxelles from 2017 to 2019, and the post of FNRS Chargé de Recherches in the same institution from 2019 to 2022. Since late 2022 he is a Scientific Member of the École française d’Athènes, where he carries out a project focusing on the materialisation of different aspects of power in funerary contexts of the Lower Strymon Valley.
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