STONE’s foundations rest on the patterning of tombstones, cemeteries, settlements, and communication networks and on interconnections that reflect the social, political, and economic organisation. The project adopts the multiscale approach -from a single artefact to the landscape- incorporating concepts and principles of social archaeology.
The proposed research into the social lifeways of stećci will be implemented on three levels (figs. 1, 5):
will include the whole territory of medieval Herzegovina within modern BiH boundaries. Initially, data from the National Institute for the Protection of Historical, Cultural and Natural Heritage (NIPH) and published material will be consolidated, with information added in consecutive phases. Research at this level will generate GIS interactive maps to visualise the current distribution of stećci, map the patterning of tombstones/cemeteries with settlements and/or communications, and explore relationships between movement, visibility, proximity, and connectedness of places (settlements, cemeteries, and others), and social inter-relations. The macro-level GIS map will be created to map, assess, and study the stećci repository of medieval Herzegovina (~800 sites) with variable focus on the locations, typology, inscriptions, and decorative elements of the tombstones along with prehistoric and medieval settlements and roads. This phase will be completed with social network analysis (SNA).
The macro-level map will be superimposed with the historical GIS of medieval župas Popovo and Rudine and enhanced with detailed regional demographic and infrastructure records. Data for the historical GIS of župa Rudine will be obtained from the historical study of the medieval župa (Pekić 2019), offering detailed accounts of the geographic, political, and economic contexts, with communications, natural resources, and demographic information of the župa, all extracted from historical documents held in the DAD. Župa Popovo was historically appraised in 1959; thus, a historian will review the published work and modernise our knowledge with the archival data from DAD. The data obtained from textual sources will be converted into GIS interactive maps to answer questions about the interactions, connections, and relationships between lived areas versus cemeteries. Within this phase, GIS, SNA, and epigraphic analyses will be applied to the mezzo-scale sites and data. Assessed stećci cemeteries, overlaid with pre-medieval sites of human occupation, will highlight locations with continuous usage. The pilot study on transhumant connections between lowland and highland locations will begin. Old ethnographic records and oral histories convey the specific mountains and pastures allocated for centuries to certain regions and their villages. Theoretically, the retrograde mapping of the summer pasture camps and the associated cemeteries can link them to the lowland communities and offer an insight into the social and ecological aspects of transhumance.
One of the critical new interventions of STONE, in line with a thorough integration of archaeological approaches, is to connect the tombstones with details of the individuals and the environmental context within which they were buried. To monitor this, the team will generate micro-level GIS maps, where the meso-level data will be superimposed with the epigraphic appraisal of stećci from all four cemeteries and enhanced with the data from their excavations. Producing original new archaeological data, initially with airborne laser scanning (ALS) & UAV rendered maps and a geophysical survey, will offer the possibility to discover, investigate and document buried archaeology in a non-intrusive way. The informed GIS platform will assist in excavations, executed in collaboration with the NIPH Banjaluka and Mostar and the Universities of Sarajevo and Banjaluka.
