George Nash and Andrew Townsend eds, Decoding Neolithic Atlantic & Mediterranean Island Ritual (original) (raw)
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Shima: The International Journal of Research into Island Cultures, 2010
This paper takes as its starting point a definition of islands that goes beyond geographical isolation to consider islands as social constructs insofar as they reflect feelings of isolation, separateness, distinctiveness and otherness. Nowhere is this truer than in the case of the ‘dry’ island, an island that although once surrounded by water has long since lost its physical isolation due to changes in sea level and drainage patterns. Taking the Isle of Ely in the fens of East Anglia in the United Kingdom between AD 1200-1600 as a case study, and utilising archaeological evidence for diet and for the local Ely ware pottery, it is possible to reconstruct a cognitive mappa, which describes the perception of islandness amongst the island’s medieval inhabitants.
ARCTIC
The focus of the paper is an engagement with the significance of the exploitation of stone sources to make objects, particularly stone axe heads on islands in northwest Europe during the Neolithic period (4000 – 2500 BC). Case studies of Lambay Island in the Irish Sea, Rathlin Island off the northeast coast of Ireland, and the Shetland Islands explore the use of these three stone sources through the archaeological record, examining the biographies of objects (from quarries, through use, to discard or deposition) and applying a range of approaches to understanding material culture. What emerges is an understanding of the central role these three lithic sources played in how people engaged with and created their island places and landscapes. Through their daily engagement with different stone sources (including the ones focused on here) at a range of scales, people created and sustained social relationships and conventions. Hence it is argued that stone artefacts from local sources pl...
Archaeology’s Contribution to Island Studies
Archaeology has, and will continue to make, some important contributions to the broad field of ‘island studies’. In this essay, I discuss four major topics in island archaeology that are helping to shape the way we think about islands. These include: (1) seafaring and the human maritime diaspora; (2) the effects of aquatic boundaries and isolation; (3) historical ecology and the impacts of humans on island ecosystems; and (4) climate change, sea level rise, and coastal degradation. As archaeologists continue to explore these and other issues with colleagues from both the social and natural sciences, we will come to better understand how islands have shaped humans, and humans have shaped islands.
1 Doing research on, with and about the island: Reflections on islandscape
Island Studies Journal
Even though the relational turn within Island Studies has long revoked the equation of islands with insularity, disconnectedness and backwardness, these ascriptions are still often deterministically attributed to islands, mainly by non-island scholars. Thereby these designations are not only reproduced, but connections, dynamics, different forms of embeddedness and entanglements remain overlooked. This paper has two main goals: (1) Adding to the relational turn in Island Studies by not only arguing for more inductive approaches to seriously engage with these situated and changing manifestations and meaningmakings of islands, and (2) by drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Malta, we introduce the concept of 'islandscape' (Broodbank 2000) to the Island Studies literature. Through the lens of islandscape, islands can be researched as nodal points of the local, national and global without reproducing 'islandism' while still acknowledging the importance of the island. The combination of-scape and assemblage-thinking which is already present within Island Studies makes it possible to address the tension between global and local and, rather, to look at which concrete, situated assemblages emerge within islandscape. In this sense, we propose to think of the island as islandscape from the very beginning of research, then to show how this islandscape is actually constituted and then to describe partial moments of stabilisation in terms of assemblages.
Preface: comparative island archaeologies
In J. Conolly and M. Campbell (eds.) Comparative Islands Archaeologies. Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, International Series. pp. iii-v, 2008
Islands hold a particular place in Western consciousness, and the long-term history of islands and their peoples continue to hold archaeologists' interest, despite recent attempts to deconstruct, or at least destabilize, notions of insularity (e.g.critics who justifiably condemn outdated concepts like the 'primitive isolate ' (Terrell et al. 1997), and perhaps even of the whole concept of 'island archaeology' as a distinctive enterprize , still maintain their own island-based research foci and-critically-continue to support students who wish to engage with island cultures. Actively decentralizing islandness whilst continuing to promote island archaeology is not as incompatible as it seems, and our sense is that the reason for the continued strength of islandcentered research agendas is that island archaeology continues to make, as it has in the past, a useful and, more importantly, distinctive, contribution to the study of long-term human ecology, culture and social change-the sum of which reinforces the value of island-based studies in the social sciences.
Doing research on, with and about the island: Reflections on islandscape
2020
Even though the relational turn within Island Studies has long revoked the equation of islands with insularity, disconnectedness and backwardness, these ascriptions are still often deterministically attributed to islands, mainly by non-island scholars. Thereby these designations are not only reproduced, but connections, dynamics, different forms of embeddedness and entanglements remain overlooked. This paper has two main goals: (1) Adding to the relational turn in Island Studies by not only arguing for more inductive approaches to seriously engage with these situated and changing manifestations and meaning-makings of islands, and (2) by drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Malta, we introduce the concept of 'islandscape' (Broodbank 2000) to the Island Studies literature. Through the lens of islandscape, islands can be researched as nodal points of the local, national and global without reproducing 'islandism' while still acknowledging the importance of the island. The combination of-scape and assemblage-thinking which is already present within Island Studies makes it possible to address the tension between global and local and, rather, to look at which concrete, situated assemblages emerge within islandscape. In this sense, we propose to think of the island as islandscape from the very beginning of research, then to show how this islandscape is actually constituted and then to describe partial moments of stabilisation in terms of assemblages.
Island landscapes and European culture: An ‘island studies’ perspective
Journal of Marine and Island Cultures, 2013
The active imagining of a European identity needs to engage with the geographical possibilities, visualisations and performativities of place. It is all too easy but superficial and naive to consider geophysical parameters as the silent backdrop or empty canvas on which cultural initiatives unfold. European islands, amongst other features-mountains, coasts, forests-are imbued with powerful (and often Western) myths and tropes of place: they combine materiality and metaphor, presenting spaces that at once appear open and closed, fixed yet fluid, complete and peripheral, vulnerable yet resilient. The geo-social constitution of their culture is also subject to the vantage point of the observer, him/herself caught in the liminality between being a visitor, being an islander, and various other uneasily defined categories in between. Acknowledging the insights of the likes of Clifford Geertz, Ulf Hannerz, Anna-Maria Greverus and Owe Ronstro¨m, this paper proposes that a critical analysis and appreciation of European culture in island landscapes must be one that engages with the nature of islandness; the locus of study should also be the focus of study. This paper also suggests epistemologies to flesh out this approach, its merits, but also the dangers associated with essentialising island spaces and peoples.