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medieval enclosure at Carrowkeel, Co. Galway.
Brendon Wilkins, Ireland.
Paper presented to TAG, Columbia University, 2008.
In later and post medieval Ireland, unbaptised children were rarely buried in
consecrated ground. Strangers, suicides, or unrepentant murderers were also treated
differently in death, interred in Cillin cemeteries liminal, clandestine places
associated with boundaries in the landscape, and often sited within early medieval
settlement enclosures that had long since fallen out of use. The origin of this practice is
often assumed to be associated with the adoption of Christianity, and the Limbus
Infantus of the medieval church. Baptism was the necessary threshold through which
all must pass before entering Christian society, and without which incorporation into
the society of the dead was impossible. This paper assesses the origins of this practice
drawing on a recently excavated early medieval settlement cemetery at Carrowkeel,
Co. Galway. The cemetery was in use for over 700 years, and the spatial segregation of
children can be recognised in the early phases of the site. Was this segregation a
precursor to the later medieval practice of Cillin burial? Did the adoption of
Christianity elaborate the preexisting boundaries of an early medieval society
obsessed with status in life and its continuity into death? To understand how these
nuanced conceptual and physical boundaries worked in the past, this paper begins by
addressing the boundaries that divide our discipline in the present.
1. THE SITE
Carrowkeel in County Galway resonates with the spatial and bodily boundaries
addressed by this morning’s session. Carrowkeel was a multi‐period enclosure
excavated on behalf of Galway County Council in advance of the N6 Galway to
Ballinasloe road scheme in the Republic of Ireland (Slide 1).
• The main phase was a substantial early medieval enclosure ditch
represented by a large V‐shaped ditch that measured 65 m east by 47 m
west.
• About a third of the enclosure remained beyond the limit of excavation, and
in this area the remnants of a substantial internal bank were preserved
beneath a 19th century dry stone field boundary.
• It contained a cemetery in the south‐east corner with 132 predominantly
supine east‐west burials.
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• And the population comprised a disproportionate percentage of non‐adults,
infant and foetal remains.
These infant and foetal remains were topsoil burials barely buried beneath the
surface, and looking back over my field notes, we were labouring under an illusion.
During the excavation we assumed, I think quite reasonably given the lack of clear
grave cuts, that there were three phases of cemetery use (Slide 2).
• A primary phase represented by a crouched inhumation found in the
terminus of a ditch.
• A secondary phase of supine west‐east orientated burials, probably
representing the use of the site as an early Christian enclosure;
• And a final phase of exclusively children that belonged to a Cillin Phase of the
site.
In later medieval Ireland right up into the mid 1960s, un‐baptised children were not
permitted to be buried in consecrated ground, but interred in Cillin cemeteries ‐
liminal, clandestine places often associated with physical and conceptual boundaries
in the landscape. To borrow a phrase I’ve heard once or twice myself, if you’re
names not down, you’re not getting in.
In fact we now think it was neither of those things. We took 40 radiocarbon dates
from the cemetery and they turned the original phasing on its head. The cemetery
was in use from the 7th to the 15th century, and far from being a later post medieval
phase of activity, the spatial segregation of children can actually be recognised in the
early phases of the site, much earlier than the mainstream opinion for the Cillin
burial.
This led us to question: Perhaps infant segregation in the early medieval period at
Carrowkeel was a precursor to the more general, historically documented later
medieval practice of Cillin burial? Perhaps the adoption of Christianity elaborated
the pre‐existing boundaries of an early medieval society obsessed with maintaining
status divisions in life and their continuity into death? Or perhaps this was neither a
Cillin nor an ecclesiastical enclosure, but something else that defied easy
classification.
I’ll address these issues shortly but now let’s have a look at the evidence, before
assessing how current thinking on boundaries connects with this particular site.
2. THE FIELD EVIDENCE
Carrowkeel was situated on the western brow of an east/west ridge of higher
ground overlooking a known area of early medieval settlement, consisting of
cashels, a souterrain, house sites and a field system approximately 150 metres away
2
(Slide 3 & 4). The enclosure had been identified on the first edition OS map dated to
1838, though not on subsequent map surveys, indicating that it had been ploughed
away or levelled during agricultural improvement in the 19th century. A geophysical
survey prior to test trenching identified a series of anomalies interpreted as
potential ditches, and this turned out to be multiperiod enclosure and cemetery site
with the main phase dating to the early medieval period.
There were three main sub‐phases recognised in the ditch and bank sections. These
included:
• A construction phase, when a substantial 1.5 m deep V‐shaped ditch was
cut, and up‐cast material deposited as an internal bank.
• Followed by a use phase, when bank material initially slumped back into
the ditch quite quickly, but then stabilised with a vegetation layer.
• And a final phase when the ditch was deliberately backfilled with large
stones and boulders, probably as a result of field clearance.
The cemetery contained 132 individuals, and it was located in the south‐east corner
of the enclosure, partly enclosed by an internal double‐ditch. As the incidence of
burials increased toward the edge of the site, the cemetery could have continued
beyond the limit of excavation towards the brow of the hill. In symmetry with the
changing phasing defined for the main enclosure ditch, four sub‐phases were
identified in the cemetery area.
The phase I assemblage comprised 37 individuals, and coincides with the dating for
the construction of the enclosure, and during this phase this part of the burial area
was used for organised disposal of predominantly women and children. Breaking
down as such, 70% of these individuals were non‐adults.
The second Phase of the cemetery dates from the mid 9th to the 11th century, and
contained 75 individuals, and 93% of these were non‐adult. This relates to what we
called the ‘use’ phase of the enclosure, when erosion of the main ditch stabilised,
and the cemetery contained the largest proportion of very young children.
Beyond this point, the organisation within this part of the cemetery breaks down,
and this mirrors the final sub‐phase of the enclosure and gradual backfilling of the
ditch with field clearance debris.
In cemetery Phase III there are 18 individuals, and a much more even spread of age
categories than was recognised in earlier phases, although non‐adults accounted for
78% of this phase.
And only two individuals were attributed to cemetery Phase IV, dated to the 15th
century, indicating that the cemetery was in the process of abandonment.
3
3. PREUNDERSTSANDINGS
OK, so how do we make sense of this? We took a number of pre‐understandings into
the field, all of which seemed like a perfectly valid fit with what was coming out of
the ground. Prior to dating we assumed that the site was an early medieval
ecclesiastical enclosure reused in the later and post medieval period as a Cillin (Slide
9).
• We knew that the twelfth century Church reformations had led to the
abandonment of many ecclesiastical sites throughout the country.
• We knew that this had coincided with the final concession on behalf of
the church on the denial of baptism rites and the establishment of the
doctrine of limbo infantus.
• We knew that the word Cillin was thought to derive from the Latin Cella,
meaning little church or oratory, probably because these sites had been
chosen because of their earlier religious association.
• We could support this with cartographic and place name evidence from
the surrounding environs, and cite Emmer Dennehy’s analysis in County
Kerry that 51% of Cillins were sited within the confines of a pre‐existing
archaeological monument, and more often than not they were early
medieval enclosures that had long since fallen out of use.
• And after Nyree Finley’s study of secondary burials at Fournocks, we
could relate this generally to an Irish tradition of differential treatment of
the young that potentially stretched far back into the prehistoric.
Jobs a good un… or maybe not, because although these pre‐understandings made
perfect sense in themselves, Carrowkeel wasn’t easily defined as either an
‘ecclesiastical enclosure’ or a ‘Cillin’, and when we actually started to research these
two categories, we found that the field evidence in general for both these site types
is actually quite vague.
4. CILLIN
To turn firstly to Cillin, and current thinking on these places is complicated (Slide
10). Cillin are sensitive subjects; some were in use into living memory and are
strictly off limits, others have been forgotten, neglected and bulldozed to make way
for modern development. That very few of these sites have been comprehensively
dated and therefore may be much older than we think, are just one of the problems.
Perhaps more limiting than lack of data has been the way these boundaries have
been conceived by the modern archaeological imagination, not in the least our
conception of childhood.
4
In many respects our methodology, finely tuned to producing an objective record,
and may be blinding us to what was most important about these sites. Western
biological definitions of foetus, perinate, infant and younger child, implicitly focus
the development of the ‘person’ into embryonic stages. The archaeological subject
becomes bounded within a known universe defined by medical technologies and
new attitudes towards parent hood. But ‘humanity’ is a flexible construction; in the
words of the session abstract, it is policed, challenged and deliberately broken
down.
The use of Cillin cemeteries may actually be less about physical death as social
death, and it is precisely this lack of definition of children as full social beings that
marks them out as troublesome. How can children join the society of the dead if they
haven’t been officially admitted to the society of the living? And this can’t just be a
response to the Christian doctrine of Limbo Infantus. Suicides, shipwrecked sailors,
strangers, unrepentant murderers and their unfortunate victims were also interred
in Cillin cemeteries. To die a bad death comported to the restlessness of the soul,
and these sites are saturated with superstition and folklore, the home of fairy
changelings, or the night washerwoman – a child murderess destined to wash the
bloodied bodies of unbaptised infants.
With this in mind, the origins of Cillin burial can’t be taken for granted; funerary
practices are linked to the institutional and social structures of society, and the
performance of such rituals are of crucial importance in the maintenance and
expression of those cultural and social formations. Early medieval enclosures were
not an inert stage for human actions, or simply ‘host’ sites on which children’s burial
grounds piggyback to the afterlife. Nuances of significance and meaning
differentiated these places in the past, and they had complex histories of practice
played out through them. To understand the origins of the practice of Cillin burial,
we need to rethink not just the boundaries around personal identities, but adopt a
critical conception of spatiality.
5. EARLY MEDIEVAL ENCLOSURE
In this respect, current thinking on early medieval enclosures can’t easily cope. The
prolonged duration of sites and their changing status over time makes typologies
problematic. Carrowkeel only just fits with Leo Swan’s definition of ecclesiastical
enclosures based on 11‐shared attributes, where at least 5 required for group
inclusion (Slide 11). The site was in use for approximately 700 years, and
substantial changes took place at the time, including the reorganisation of the
church and the consolidation of power into tribal dynasties. Early medieval
settlement was exclusively rural and the field evidence for this period is highly
visible in Ireland ‐ characterised by enclosed farmsteads (known as ring forts) in
addition to a smaller number of monastic settlements (or ecclesiastical enclosures).
5
As far back as 1821 (Slide 12), this was being used to interpret the field evidence at
a regional level, prefiguring later work by Mathew Stout in the 1990s, to model the
relationship between ringforts, ecclesiastical sites, territorial boundaries and
topography (Slide 13). The division between settlement and ecclesiastical
enclosures was presumed to reflect social practice in the early medieval period, with
the larger part of the population residing in ring‐forts during their life and then
taken for churchyard burial in death.
But Carrowkeel doesn’t really fit in either camp – it was too large to be
characterised as a ring‐fort, and the lack of structural remains together with the
presence of a large animal bone assemblage, usually indicative of long‐term
settlement waste, argues against it being the site of an early church. Carrowkeel isn’t
alone in this, and there are a number of other sites that also don’t quite fit into
either category.
The Processualist turn towards explanation attempted to accommodate this pattern
(Slide 14). Enclosures with evidence for cemeteries have been subdivided into
‘developed’ enclosures, or those with evidence for associated church buildings, and
‘undeveloped’ enclosures, or those with no associated structural evidence. The
implicit assumption is that some enclosures developed into full monastic
settlements with associated religious structures and others fell out of use.
But looking again at Carrowkeel, how well is this theory really serving us? Early
church structures would have been constructed from wood and ephemeral evidence
is difficult to find on undeveloped enclosures, and may still lie beneath upstanding
stone structures on developed enclosures. As an argument it’s a neat trick, based on
absence of evidence not evidence of absence, and it extends the culture historical
vision of bounded distributions of enclosure that correlate directly with the lifespan
of discrete communities.
6. SETTLEMENT ENCLOSURE
To understand how these enclosures changed over time we need to ensure that our
archaeologically derived categories accommodate the significance and meaning that
was attributed to them in the past. In this we are assisted by working in a text‐aided
period, and a recent examination of documentary sources by Elizabeth O’Brien has
revealed a concern by Church authorities that as late as the early eighth century,
some communities were deliberately choosing not to bring their dead for
churchyard burial, but were preferring to bury them in ancient family burial
grounds. Irish missionaries would all have been familiar with these texts, and using
the example of Jacob and Joseph carried back from Egypt, the canon justifies burial
among ancestors.
Dr O’Brien has begun calling sites like Carrowkeel ancestral or settlement
cemeteries, to acknowledge their pagan rather than Christian origins, and in fact this
6
still fits with Swan’s original typology. Although Swan calls these sites ‘enclosed
ecclesiastical’, he clearly states that these were not necessarily Christian places, but
this seems to have been forgotten in theoretical shifts towards explanation.
But while the founding of sites like Carrowkeel may well have been tolerated, their
continuing use was a point of contention. Monks and ecclesiastical tenants were
clearly encouraged to have their affiliation recognised in death. In the ‘appropriation
of death’, or access to salvation, the historical sources reveal a conflict between
popular belief and the Catholic Church.
7. BURIAL PRACTICE
This can also be seen in the funerary practices at Carrowkeel, which on the face of it
were ostensibly Christian (roughly east‐west orientation and lacking grave goods).
But there were startling departures from this general pattern (Slide 15).
River‐rolled quartz and some animal bone were found in a number of burials.
A flexed adolescent found at the terminus of the cemetery ditch.
A tightly crouched adolescent.
And the highly unorthodox female burial with legs akimbo.
The positioning of the body as a supine west‐east inhumation is usually regarded as
a Christian practice responding to the belief that the soul rises, and an alignment
with the orientation of the rising sun during Eastertide.
Barry Raftery’s analysis of the Irish field evidence indicates that Roman burial
customs were adopted independently of Christianity, and that bodily orientation
with the Easter sunrise is not necessarily due to beliefs in the rising soul.
Christianity can be seen to adapt to existing burial practices, incorporating earlier
indigenous elements, and through their continued performance at sites like
Carrowkeel, these rituals were the place of contested meaning.
8. CONCLUSIONS
In conclusion, Carrowkeel was founded in a predominantly pastoral economy based
on a transhumance model of summer grazing. In this period, burial within the
settlement cemetery would have secured tenure to the land. The continuing
placement of the dead in the landscape was a deliberate strategy by a group,
probably bound by familial and kinship ties, to re‐establish their relationship with
their ancestors and guarantee connection with the land.
The segregation of children in one part of the cemetery is in keeping with evidence
from other sites for the segregation of distinct groups during the medieval and post‐
medieval period.
7
A targeted programme of radiocarbon dating at Carrowkeel has helped clarify that
conceptual divisions were being drawn out between infants and other individuals in
the early medieval period, and that these relate to longer term patterns of Irish
death practices. It is entirely plausible to see the continuity of this practice into the
later and post‐medieval Cillin tradition, with the original meaning of that practice
co‐opted by Christian ideology. The use of sites as burial grounds for infants and
other ambiguous categories of individual lead to a reworking of both the meaning
and the memory of the original monument.
And as these sites fell out of use, as ditches silted and became over run with
vegetation, their abandoned nature enhanced the liminal status of infants as betwixt
and between this world and the next.
With that I’d like to thank you all for listening.
Acknowledgements
The author is indebted to all staff at Headland Archaeology Ltd, particularly Susan
Lalonde who supervised the excavation of the cemetery area and undertook all
osteological analysis. Many of the ideas expressed in this paper were first mooted in
our joint publication of the site and my understanding has benefited significantly
from her input. Thanks to Stuart Callow, Kevin Murphy and Deborah Riches who
supervised the excavations, and to Emmer O’Donovan and Bryan McDomhnail for
survey work. Special and final thanks are reserved for a formidable team of
excavators, who braved the storms through three cold months on what has to be the
windiest hill in Co. Galway.
References
Becker, M. J. 1995. Children’s cemeteries: early Christianity, not disease.
Paleopathology Newsletter. 80:10‐11
Edwards, N. 1990. The Archaeology of Early Medieval Ireland. London: Routledge.
Finlay, N. 2000. Outside of life: traditions of infant burial in Ireland from cíllín to cist.
World Archaeology. 31 (3): 407‐422
Hamlin, A. and Foley C. 1983. A women’s graveyard at Carrickmore, Co Tyrone and
the separate burial of women. Ulster Journal of Archaeology 46: 41‐46
Holbrook, N. 2005. An Early‐medieval Monastic Cemetery at Llandough, Glamorgan:
Excavations in 1994. Medieval Archaeology. 49:1 ‐92
Lalonde, S. 2006. Preliminary Report on the Human Skeletal Remains from a Cemetery
and Settlement at Carrowkeel, County Galway, on the Route of the N6 Galway to
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Ballinasloe National Road Scheme. Unpublished technical report by Headland
Archaeology Ltd for Galway County Council.
Lalonde, S. 2008. Suffer Little Children: Child Burial and Abuse in Early Medieval
Ireland. Proceedings of the Ninth Annual Conference of the British Association for
Biological Anthropology and Osteoarchaeology. Archaeopress: Oxford (in press)
Metcalf, P and R. Huntington. 1991. Celebrations of Death: The Anthropology of
Mortuary Ritual (second edition). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mytum, H. 1992. The Origins of Early Christian Ireland. Routledge: London and New
York.
Ó Donnchadha, B. 2007. The oldest church in Ireland’s ‘oldest town’. Archaeology
Ireland Spring 2007:8‐10
O’Brien, E. 1984. Late PrehistoricEarly Historic Ireland: the burial evidence reviewed.
Unpublished M.Phil. Thesis, National University of Ireland, University College
Dublin.
O’Brien, E. 1999. PostRoman Britain to Anglo Saxon England: burial Practices
Reviewed. BAR British Series 289. Oxford: Archeopress.
Parker Pearson, M. 1999. The Archaeology Of Death And Burial. Stroud: Sutton.
Raftery, B. 1981. Iron Age Burials in Ireland. In O’Corrain, D. (ed.) Irish Antiquity.
Cork. 173‐204.
Swan, L. 1983. Enclosed ecclesiastical sites and their relevance to settlement
patterns of the first millennium A.D. In Reeves‐Smyth, T. and Hamond, F. (ed.)
Landscape Archaeology in Ireland. BAR British Series 116. 269‐280. Oxford:
Archaeopress.
Thomas, T. 1971. The early Christian archaeology of north Britain. London and New
York.
Tourunen, A 2007 The Faunal Remains from Carrowkeel, Co Galway Unpublished
Technical Report by Headland Archaeology Ltd. for Galway County Council.
Wilkins, B. 2007. N6 Galway to Ballinasloe Scheme, Contract 2. Final Report on
archaeological investigations at Site A024/1, an enclosure ditch and cemetery in the
townland of Carrowkeel, Co. Galway. Unpublished technical report by Headland
Archaeology Ltd. for Galway County Council.
Wilkins, B and Lalonde, S. 2008. An early medieval cemetery settlement enclosure at
Carrowkeel, Co. Galway. Journal of Irish Archaeology. XVII, 57‐83.
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Slide 1 – Location of Carrowkeel, Co. Galway.
Slide 2 – Crouched inhumation within terminus of ditch, supine east-west burial and
foetal burial close to the surface.
Slide 3 – Site plan and cemetery
Slide 11 - Swan, L. 1983. Enclosed ecclesiastical sites and their relevance to settlement
patterns of the first millennium A.D.In Reeves-Smyth, T. and Hamond, F. (eds.)
Landscape Archaeology in Ireland. BAR British Series 116.
Slide 12 – Early medieval Settlement and society (Wood 1821: 269).
10
Part I: disciplinary boundaries:
Discussant: Brian Boyd, Columbia University
A cyborgian archaeology
Anne Tiballi, Binghamton University
Contemporary archaeological debates on materiality, agency, and the possibility of
identifying 'individuals' in the past all hinge in some part on the quality of 'Selfness',
a unitary identity bound within the confines of the body. Bodies are evidence of past
selves, and provide a vehicle through which to enact agency, the means by which to
experience the world, or a blank page upon which can be marked the cultural
signifiers of rank, affiliation, and other expressions of identity. Interactions between
bodies/selves and other objects, human, animal or material, always presuppose this
unified 'Self'.
The concept of the cyborg was introduced by feminist philosopher Donna Haraway
in an effort to deconstruct the social relations of science and technology in advanced
industrial societies of the late 20th century. Though her application of the cyborg
was limited to this context, her work does offer key insights for archaeologists.
Cyborgs call into question the fundamental, ontological distinction between Self and
Other, a dualism that generates the further distinctions of mind and body, culture
and nature, whole and part, natural and artificial, maker and made, agent and acted
upon. They confuse boundaries that we take as self‐evident, and have carried with
us in our investigations of the past, recreating boundaries where they might not
have existed.
Drawing from philosophy and feminist theory, this paper will examine the utility of
Donna Caraway's cyborg as a metaphor and model for the ways in which
archaeology could break away from the idea of the unitary identity and formulate a
new subject as partial, conditional, in some instances collective, and at all times
permanently unclosed.
Life, death and identity: bodies as boundaries
Karina Croucher (University of Liverpool)
What does a boundary do? It divides space, time, concepts, material, matter, and so
on...
In this paper the body as a boundary is considered; in what ways does the physical
body define who we are? What role does the boundary between ourselves and
others play in identity construction? And significantly, how are these differences
11
respected or transcended through the mortuary arena? This paper will discuss these
themes and questions in relation to mortuary practices from the Neolithic Near East,
where secondary burials, fragmented bodies, the re‐use and circulation of bodily
parts, and the body's relationship with animals and material culture are evident,
asking if and how the body as a boundary is a relevant concept in the mortuary
domain.
Exploring the relational boundaries of body and site
Oliver Harris (University of Cambridge)
One aspect of modernity is that both bodies and places have largely been conceived
of as bounded entities, secured, through analogy with nation states, by the regular
policing of their borders. The schemes of knowledge that have produced the
security of one area have in turn helped define the boundary of the other. These
discourses have permeated into the past too, until recently in archaeological
accounts bodies were bounded, as were the places that they inhabited: individuals
moving from node to node in a pre‐generated network of inhabited sites. These
notions are now rightly under critique. Yet one area that has not been considered in
detail is how concepts of bodily and spatial boundaries might still have interwoven
in the past. Did the ways in which bodies experienced places effect how the
boundaries of both person and locale were constituted? Do permeable sites mean
permeable people, for example? Perhaps the reverse, do bodies that were exposed,
parted and fragmented suggest a conception of locales that were also separable and
transferable? Or, unlike the present, might these discourses have little to do with
one another, independent variables within the cosmologies and socialities of the
past? This paper will explore these ideas in relation to one particular class of
monuments of the British Neolithic, causewayed enclosures, and the bodies that
inhabited them.
If it weren't for those pesky kids: the spatial segregation of children in an early
medieval cemetery enclosure.
Brendon Wilkins, Headland Archaeology Ltd.
Death confronts us with the ultimate boundary through which we all inexorably
pass. According to Derrida, awareness of our own mortality calls forth other
intangible boundaries, such as ethical constraints to our freedom and the moral
indelibility of our actions. Death is the decisive end point from which the legacy of
our behaviour is irrevocably judged. It compels us to take personal responsibility,
and this is perhaps what Benjamin Franklin was alluding when he wrote "In this
world nothing could be said to be certain except death and taxes". What then of the
troublesome dead ‐ those who lay beyond normal social categories or through their
own deeds offend the very social order. In later Medieval Ireland, strangers,
suicides, or unrepentant murderers were rarely buried in consecrated ground.
Unbaptised children were also treated differently in death, interred in Killeen
12
cemeteries ‐ liminal, clandestine places often reusing the early Medieval settlement
enclosures that had long since fallen out of use. The origin of this practice is often
assumed to be associated with the adoption of Christianity, the Limbus Infantus of
the Medieval church that decreed baptism to be the threshold through which all
must pass before entering Christian society, and without which incorporation into
the society of the dead was impossible.
This paper assesses the origins of this practice drawing on a recently excavated
early Medieval settlement cemetery from Carrowkeel, Co. Galway. The cemetery
was in use for over 700 years, and the spatial segregation of children can be
recognised in the early phases of the site. Was this segregation a precursor to the
later Medieval practice of Killeen burial? Did the adoption of Christianity elaborate
the pre‐existing boundaries of an early Medieval society obsessed with status in life
and its continuity into death? To understand how these nuanced conceptual and
physical boundaries worked in the past, this paper begins by addressing the
boundaries that divide our discipline in the present. Using Carrowkeel as a case
study, this project illustrates how a multi‐disciplinary team of specialists can work
together to bridge the perceived gap between humanities and science‐based
research, and how this can be delivered within a time‐bound development schedule.
Working at the water's edge: being in the world beyond land, water and liminality
Hannah Cobb, University of Manchester
Jesse Ransley, University of Southampton
Waterways, lakes and seas hold a unique position in the archaeological imagination.
Their ability to divide and connect, to be both the centre and the edge of people's
worlds means that the material responses they have elicited in the past and the
present are understandably diverse. Yet we still tend to approach the interface
between land and water as a boundary, to be crossed, in order to move from one
state to another. Thus, one recurring theme in the literature is that of waterways
and shorelines as liminal and therefore either peripheral/marginal or
transformational. In this paper it is to this notion that we would like to turn. We
argue that the liminal nature of watery places is something which has always been
assumed yet rarely theorised. As such, drawing upon two very diverse,
archaeological and anthropological examples, from the backwaters of present day
Kerala, southern India, and from the island archipelagos of Mesolithic western
Scotland, we will consider what liminality may really mean in these contexts.
How is this transformative understanding of the boundaries between land and
water and of waterways constructed and is it liminal at all? Or is the propensity to
see waterways and watery places as liminal, as divisive, transformative boundaries,
simply a product of our modern, western and inherently land‐based understanding
of the world? Does it simply reflect our conception of land and water as opposing
binary forces rather other understandings of the everyday permeability of these
categories? By exploring these dynamic, often fluid and intimately connecting
13
examples of waterways and watery landscapes, we will suggest that in these cases at
least, the largest boundaries exist not in the realities of such waterways but in our
own conceptions of them.
Bounded islands / connecting sea? : different perspectives on Scottish islands
Joanna Wright, University of Manchester
This paper will begin by briefly addressing the issue of how the physical and
conceptual boundaries of islands may have been understood in the past and how
this has affected our interpretation of these places in the present. A number of
factors, from an inherited notion through Western literature and media of islands as
'the other', to the birds‐eye view given by modern maps, have shaped the way we
perceive of islands, a notion strongly challenged today. Our perception of islands as
bounded units is in part due to our perceptions and experiences of the sea itself as a
barrier or isolator of islands from mainland. Using examples from the ethnographic
and archaeological record of evidence for both ancient and modern seafaring and
island/mainland contact, it will be demonstrated that people's relationship with the
sea was, and still is, very different to that of the majority of the Western world
today. The sea, far from dividing islands, often connects them, allowing the
dissemination of ideas, objects and people. Such connections are traceable
throughout both small island groups and over greater distances, and demonstrate
varying degrees of contact or boundedness between different parts of islands and
over the sea. Indeed, connections and boundaries often exist that are not
immediately discernible to the outsider. This paper will therefore explore these
aspects of water‐bounded islands and surrounding sea before applying them to a
case study from the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age of the Western Isles of Scotland
and beyond.
Sharing space for art: a crosscommunity collaborative project in Donegal Pass and
Lower Ormeau, South Belfast.
Katie Keenan, Columbia
What is "Shared Space" in a city that is segregated by sectarian boundaries? In
Belfast, Northern Ireland, working class communities of different religious
backgrounds continue to be divided by both physical and conceptual borders, even
as the government pumps funding into various "cross‐community" initiatives. This
paper will discuss how the participants of one such initiative attempt to adhere to
these nebulous concepts in order to procure funding, while they continue to
negotiate the actual boundaries that restrict movement and communication in their
daily lives.
14
Beating the bounds: time, space and the plurality of enclosure in Prehistoric Scotland
Phil Richardson (Newcastle University)
This paper aims to address the sessions concern that current thinking about
boundaries prejudices our understanding of how past space was negotiated.
Boundaries in this sense are seen in solitarist terms, concerning the division and
enclosure of space for different, singular, purposes. The starting point for the
majority of current archaeological understandings of boundaries is a very Modern
one. Namely the universalisation of a way of imagining space; an image of space as
already divided, separate and bounded. This representation of space produces
narratives that construct a particular form of ordering and organising space which
fails to acknowledge the multiplicties, fractures and dynamism of experienced
boundaries. The aim of this paper is not to suggest that spatial order is unworthy of
study or, more importantly, was of no concern in the past, but to suggest that the
disciplinary, performative and aestheticised single purpose spaces dominant in the
discourse fail to account for the mulitple understandings such ordering of space
created and contested. The illusion of divided or bounded spaces having a single or
unique purpose is therefore divisive, creating 'boundaries' between an
'archaeological' past and the plural, multiple ways in which spaces and boundaries
were and are actually experienced. Case studies from prehistoric Scotland will
explore and foreground alternative and contradictory classifications of boundaries
that attempt to transcend these issues by exploring the relational qualities of space,
time and materials as experienced through the physicality of lived landscapes that
were never impermeable.
Papers: Part II: disciplinary boundaries:
Discussant: John Barrett, University of Sheffield
Undercutting the Roots of the Great Divides
Ian Russell, University College Dublin & University of Notre Dame
Andrew Cochrane, Cardiff University
Modern social sciences seem to desire division. Even the reductive conception of self
as individual carries the meaning of that which is not divisible. A pluralistic modern
understanding of individualism would depict us ascribing empowerment and
agency to a fundamental truth of an individual. Diverse models, however, cause a
multiplicity of power structures rather than an egalitarian undercutting of authority.
Within a competition between different models and structures relying on the
politics of projection (e.g. separation, exclusion and inclusion), perhaps it is time to
explore more subtle nuances of lived experience through understandings of contrast
and differentiation.
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This paper questions the notion of a fundamental dividuality in the world. It will
critique the arborescent models of modern and contemporary social scientific
theory, elaborate on Deleuze and Guattari's rhizomatic models and develop a
mycelial metaphor for phenomena. Through a consideration of mycelial theory, we
seek to undercut the roots of arborescent epistemic structures and the resulting
divisions between socialized objects. Specific anthropological and archaeological
case studies will be used to apply mycelial theory in a revision of knowledge as a
capricious phenomenon which is eternally negotiable, remediated and whose
creativity and energy grows from the decay of its own subject material.
The Locus of 'The Past'? Multitemporality, Quasiabsence, Percolation
Christopher Whitmore, Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World
Brown University
Breaks, ruptures, revolutions; all limn the past in order to transcend it and, thereby,
locate it elsewhere. How else are we to know it as a 'foreign country'? These
bounded lands, made up of successively delimited epochs, replete with beginnings,
middles and ends, form the topographies of the *past‐as‐it‐was*; as 'societies once
lived it.' However, this topographical image of the past *as lived elsewhere*‐an
image that runs to the heart of archaeology and notions of heritage‐is not an
ontological reality. Here, archaeologists begin with (old) things and mnemonic
traces but we often regard the past as absent.
A symmetrical archaeology holds humans to be more than living beings solely. If we
are to understand relations between humans/things/our fellow creatures without
presupposing the nature of those entities (imposing boundaries), then we can no
longer relegate previous achievements to an outmoded, outdated, obsolete past *a
priori*. The achievements of past societies (groups composed of humans, things and
companion species) are folded into the fabric of the contemporary world. These
*quasi‐absent pasts* are bewilderingly complex in their multi‐temporal
composition. Understood in terms of nonlinear movements and turbulences, rather
than boundaries and unidirectional progressions, the non‐absent past requires a
different image of time as a percolating multiplicity. Several multi‐sited case studies
from Greece and elsewhere will be deployed to illustrate these points.
Archaeology: Understanding the Present Past
Gonzalo J. Rodriguez Carpio, Binghamton University
This paper is an attempt to understand archaeology as a discipline located at the
intersection between the past and the present, the present past, and related to
historical understanding of material culture. It is based on some hermeneutical and
phenomenological notions.
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The main idea is that the enduring presence of monuments is shaped by the
reception of them along their history and simultaneously they have effects in
history. With that premise in mind, the aim of an archaeological research would be
to understand historically those receptions and effects. It would also include a self
questioning of the archaeologists understanding because they are both receptors of
the monuments and their action would originate some effects in monuments
history.
An immediate consequence of placing the reception‐effect relation as an aim of
archaeology is the inclusion of different time scales and multiple sources of data
from several disciplines. This situation raises the issue about the boundaries of
archaeology. If archaeological inquiry expands to other fields, like anthropology, like
history, is it still archaeology? Why? Having "unbounded" archaeology, in some
sense, how is it defined? Does it rely on its relation to material culture?, Is it related
to archaeologists' practice? Both of them?
In order to sketch some answers, the ideas exposed would be illustrated with
examples from Peruvian archaeology and other relevant references from elsewhere.
The role of boundaries in Prehistory's studies: the case of University of Porto' team
Sérgio Alexandre Gomes, University of Porto (Portugal)
During 1970's, prehistoric studies at the University of Porto has started an
establishment process that would led it into a consolidate status, becoming an
obligatory subject inside History and forming an independent field of research
capable to manage the study of local and national prehistory. In these almost 40
years, the researchers of this institution had developed several research lines in
which is possible to recognize different bounded categories: geographical,
chronological, architectural and so on. The analysis of the way these archaeologist
had delimitated their action as researchers and the possibilities which they had
considered in their studies allows us to establish an enquiry concerning the
representation they had made on the boundaries they had used to fix and control
their actions. The analysis that I aim to do on the paths and interrogations of this
research group has two kinds of inquiry: I'll try to problematize in a historiography
sense the circumstances in which these archaeologists had taken their options and I
also intend to focus the way they had represented archaeology as science and
themselves as translators or performers concerning a specific kind or group of
materials. In this way, this approach constitutes a possibility to ask about the
boundaries which these archaeologists had used and its consequences to
archaeology as a practice. By doing this, I'll argue that archaeology, as any other
knowledge, should take its boundaries not as walls which surrounds an essence that
provides archaeology an identity, but as a source of interrogation which offers ways
of turning thinkable something that in previous moment was understood as a
transgression to archaeologist's practice.
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Border Crossings: Archaeology and Border Theory
David Mullin, University of Reading
Recent debates in archaeology and anthropology have brought into focus the role of
material culture in forming, maintaining and negotiating identity. Cultural
expression is no longer seen as reflecting the presence of monolithic, homogenous
social groups, but is rather a means of "buying into" social relationships and beliefs
or expressing and negotiating ethnic identities. Studies of the relationships between
ethnicity and material culture have suggested that culture does not passively reflect
social relationships and organisation, but that there is a recursive relationship
between the two: shared beliefs and commitments, shared memories and engaging
in joint action have a role in forming identity and community as much as shared
traditions of material production and architecture.
Social groupings may be viewed as communities which are held together by a
constructed identity based on inclusion and exclusion: choosing to accept or reject
certain aspects of material culture, the way in which this was produced, or how it
was integrated within existing frameworks, may have had key roles in the
construction of these communities. The decision about which sets of practices were
adopted or rejected may have not only have established identity based on
difference, but may also have been used to produce consensus and community,
establishing boundaries and borders around and between different social groups.
The field of border studies is relatively new, and has, until recently, focussed on
nation states and international political boundaries (particularly that between the
United States and Mexico). Of late, the study of borders as physical entities has given
way to the examination of concepts concerning symbolic borders; visible and
invisible lines; regional and local lived experience; landscape and identity. The idea
of the border as a discursive practise which creates and negotiates meanings, norms
and values has emerged, and the ways in which people and institutions construct,
police and cross borders, both imaginary and real, has formed a focus of research
across the arts and social sciences. Archaeology has much to contribute to these
debates and is in a unique position to both add breadth to the study of (physical and
mental) borders and boundaries, as well as adding historical depth. However,
although anthropologists have identified the relevance of border studies to their
field, archaeologists have been rather slower to exploit the opportunities the
approach offers. Rather, the focus has been on the construction of ethnic and
gendered identities and, although there is overlap between the study of borders and
bordering practices and approaches to ethnicity and gender, these have been under‐
explored.
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Who's afraid of the big bad wolf? Relativism; objectivity and the possibilities of plural
archaeologies
Phil Richardson, Newcastle University
This paper aims to confront the perceptual boundary of relativism in order to
undermine and challenge a perceived conservatism in archaeological practice.
Relativism is sometimes identified (usually by its critics) as the thesis that all points
of view are equally valid. This position is often taken by opponents of
interpretations and practices that either diverge widely from established
orthodoxies or offer multiple conclusions. As such relativism is held up as a straw
man whereby jejune generalisations can be made of plural and reflective
archaeologies; denying them their validity without having to interrogate their
epistemological potential. The contention here is that we need not fear the label
relativist and that the conceptions of objectivity, relativism and reason inhibit the
production of a truly reflexive archaeology where pluralism and multivocality allow
us to revel in disjuncture and the indeterminacy of the archaeological record. This is
not a position whereby everything goes and that all arguments are equal, rather it is
a position that acknowledges the situated contextual nature of the production of
archaeological knowledge. Through not recognising and exploring our own position,
our engagements with each other, the material remains of the past and the 'public', a
boundary is created between the archaeologist and the past and the archaeologist
and the present; a boundary which denies new forms of knowledge and new
theoretical positions. These issues will be explored through an examination of a
particular 'public' archaeology project and the challenges to archaeological method
and theory that the 'public' volunteers made, enriching the whole project.
Unbounded boundaries as symbolic constructs: revisiting "culture contact" in
archaeology
Sevil Baltali (Yeditepe University, Istanbul)
The concept of "cultural boundaries" has been criticized because they create
bounded, naturalized and essential entities. The criticisms stem from the views that
cultural boundaries are ever‐changing, plural and constructed actively by people
within societies. I revisit and discuss the problem of cultural boundaries within the
archaeological studies of "culture contact". The very name "culture contact"
presupposes that there are indeed different cultures interacting despite the recent
critiques of the concepts of "culture" and "boundary". How can we think about
"culture contact"without the concepts of "culture" and "boundary"? Do we have to
altogether abandon these concepts or can we constructively re‐theorize them? How
can we theorize "cultural contact" with plural and fluid boundaries?
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In this paper I will discuss these questions with reference to the well‐known
archaeological culture contact case from fourth millennium B.C.E ancient northern
Mesopotamia. I focus on the ways northern Mesopotamian societies constructed
symbolic divisions of 'cultural difference' through an analysis of the meanings of
southern‐style elements within northern contexts. I argue that an investigation of
culturally particular ways of envisioning and representing the "own" and the
"foreign" should involve a relationship between analytic and indigenous categories
of boundaries that can be discontinuous and incomplete.
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