ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on the concept of ‘agency’ to investigate the sacred places and material culture of two communities of high latitude hunter-gatherers, one located in the ethnohistorical present, the other in the prehistoric past (Fig. 7.1). Two contrasting constructions of agency are identified in the literature. In Socioecology a focus on agency generates insights into the diversity of forager behaviour in terms of the relative ‘efficiency’ of their adaptive strategies, in relation to a local resource environment. The second reading of agency emphasises cultural and symbolic dimensions to this kind of adaptation, that is, the negotiated and historically contingent nature of social interaction, which is viewed in terms of transactions in symbolic meanings rather than quantifiable exchanges of goods and services. It will be argued that while this second ‘practicebased’ reading of agency has come to enjoy considerable currency in the wider anthropological and archaeological literature, hunter-gatherer studies have tended to remain aloof to these developments, so that foragers continue to be
portrayed exclusively in ecologically adaptive terms. This chapter argues that the analytical concept of landscape represents an ideal framework within which these divergent readings of agency may be combined, thereby strengthening the insights generated by both.
