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Alessandra Gilibert (Ca' Foscari University of Venice): “The social life of prehistoric art. The case of the Armenian vishaps from the age of their manufacture to modern times” Vishaps (Armenian “dragon stones”) are large-scale prehistoric stelae decorated with animal reliefs, erected around 4100 BCE at secluded mountain locations of the South Caucasus. In this presentation, I sketch what we currently know about the first erection of vishaps in modern Armenia and then focus on their history of re-use and manipulation. From the age of their manufacture to the present day, vishaps actively elicited social actions beyond their original scope. Through the millennia, they were torn down, buried, reworked, re-erected, transformed and used as a surface for graffiti. These and other interventions reveal that vishaps, despite their remote settings, have been continuously entangled in local discourse, with shifting meanings and several points of intersections with broad
