ABSTRACT
Finlay has noted that there is now more of a phenomenological awareness of site location within British and Irish Mesolithic archaeology, with landscape features being considered as inhabited places (Finlay 2004:2). Jimmy Strassburg has also noted the effects of a “sociotheoretical awareness” within European Mesolithic archaeology (Strassburg 2003:543). Both of these writers are calling for a social archaeology that considers the symbolism and meaning of things in the past. But before we take accounts of Mesolithic hunter-gatherer lives to a larger scale, this may be a good time to review our social archaeologies critically. Arguably, Mesolithic archaeology is at a point where it is in danger of simply repeating the social archaeologies developed for the Neolithic in the 1990s, rather than moving on from these works and dealing with what is unique about the challenge of engaging with Mesolithic archaeological evidence. This paper offers a review of the concept of “place” to further debate and to allow for maturation of social landscape approaches at a larger scale. Environment to Place
Christopher Tilley and Vicki Cummings are two archaeologists who have worked at developing a social understanding of Mesolithic landscapes. Tilley’s research has shifted the focus from accounts of people’s responses to a physically formed or environmentally dened land mass, to
a consideration of the ways in which place comes into being through social practice (Tilley 1994). Rather than starting off with an environment and then attempting to explain how it was adapted to or utilised by people, Tilley (1994:35) has concentrated on the ways in which people interacted with, understood and related to their worlds through place. This relationship between people and their world operates dialectically. In the rst part of his book, Tilley has foregrounded the ways in which hunter-gatherer worlds can be known and the processes through which things are perceived. He understands place to be a conceptual space as much as a physical one. Tilley argued that knowledge and perceptions of worlds are created through time, memory and movement. It was in this way, he reasoned, that space was humanised and through which places came into being:
So relationships between people and place operate dialectically, as opposed to the one-way direction or constraint that environment previously was understood to have imposed over people. Similarly, places are constructed from the social meanings that things are perceived to have, rather than things such as natural features simply being taken as a pre-given constraint on or benecial feature to hunter-gatherer life. A dialectic relationship between people and place operates in Tilley’s anthropological accounts, and a conceptual space is given dimension through the stories that people tell of their worlds. However, before Tilley went on to deal with archaeological evidence in his book, he made a general theoretical statement about how place is dened as a centre for action. He wrote that “most signicant places are located or positioned in space” (Tilley 1994:18). And when Tilley dealt directly with Mesolithic landscapes, he wrote about the “…choice of locales and the exploitation and use of particular areas of the landscape” (Tilley 1994:145). This means that he literally visited Mesolithic sites as “ndspots,” that is, he treated them as a location. Mesolithic hunter-gatherer people are dead and cannot speak to us, but I would argue that the non-linear trajectories and complicated relationships between space, things, animals and people they created are conditions the archaeologist can deal with. Conversely, this kind of engagement will not occur if relationships between people and things are xed as locations. If Mesolithic int scatters are exclusively singled out for what they mark, or for where they are located, then you nd very little. There is a problem with the archaeologist only knowing place as a location because it xes material culture in a landscape and it stops the archaeologist from considering archaeological evidence as a medium for action. The int scatter, it seems, has to match to something else that is inherent in the land at that point. Rather than a scatter of int being evidence for various activities, activities that connected to other things and actions elsewhere, it has instead to match something that is visible as a natural point of interest within the physical geography of the area. So rather than engaging with how space is made through action, and tracing how it connects to other dynamic activities, the focus would seem to be on the kinds of natural feature that worked int objects point to or mark, for example, in Tilley’s work, a hill (e.g. Penbury Knoll/Pentridge Hill), or a signicant point along an old water course
or places close to spring heads. Or the int scatter is used as a marker to indicate a geological point of interest such as a int or stone source (on the clay with ints). There is a gap between material culture and landscape because Tilley’s account does not focus on the connective dynamic of people’s relationships with things (i.e. on how space is made through people’s relationships with things). Instead, place is already given as a centre for action, so the question becomes: Why was this particular place marked out by things in the past? Place as Location
Cummings has also considered the signicance of place during the Mesolithic (Cummings 2000, 2003). She effectively demonstrates how subtle differences in the landscape played a signicant role in the location of a Mesolithic site. For example, she describes the impact of the colour of an exposed rocky outcrop and also gives dimension to the sound of the sea within Mesolithic life. But both Tilley and Cummings x place through a particular location. For example, Cummings takes from Tilley’s work that “There is considerable evidence to show that Mesolithic sites were not randomly positioned in the landscape, but meaningfully situated” (Cummings 2000:90). However, she also draws a distinction by stating that:
Although Cummings’s work on the Mesolithic is of great interest, and very important as a social account, she explicitly emphasizes the issue of place as a location in her research without questioning whether this was the only way in which space was made in the past. She wants to know why one site location was chosen over another in the past, without rst questioning whether the concept of “locatedness” was even an issue within Mesolithic hunter-gatherer life. Along with Tilley, Cummings has highlighted the use of natural places as meaningfully situated locations (i.e. water, rocky outcrops and trees). Although it is important to consider all of these elements within our social accounts of past lives, the problem is with how we do this. Water, rocky outcrops and trees were part of a meaningful medium, but they did not necessarily x place. In her consideration of water, Cummings writes that “…sites may have been carefully positioned in the landscape, in order to reference water and all its associations” (Cummings 2003:77, emphasis added). What we have in this work are meaningfully situated places, but these are xed locations around which everything else must spin. My concern is that by searching for meaning in the past, we do not consider how evidence worked in the Mesolithic. Our social concerns seem to be with the location of int scatters, and what else worked int physically related to at that point. The archaeologist, and his or her rendering of huntergatherer life, becomes xated with staying put, rather than attempting to depart into a consideration of how a particular collection of worked int operated as an assemblage of different tasks and activities that extended elsewhere into other things. Cummings mentions that Mesolithic people were building their worlds (2003:74), but this is construction only in the form of place becoming sedimented within landscape. Both Tilley and Cummings really consider histories to have marked place rather than to have made space in the Mesolithic. Cummings writes of persistent places that: “Many sites may have been
important and symbolic simply because they had a history of use” (Cummings 2003:79). But how did meaning circulate within this medium? In considering issues of past mobility at the site of Nab Head in Pembrokeshire, Cummings (2000:93) argues that repeated use of this area was due to the location of the site as a place that tted in with how people moved along the coast. Place is dened as a centre for action and then mobility is indicated by the fact that different groups of people either went to or returned to this area. So mobility is indicated by the existence of different sets of material culture at the same point in the landscape. Different sites are picked out through time and this supposedly points to mobility, rather than tracing how different practices of making extended elsewhere through further tasks. In her critique of traditional research tenets, Finlay argued that issues of mobility were constantly being grounded in sites by archaeologists. She wrote:
But social accounts of meaningfully situated places are just as grounded in sites. Tilley and Cummings do not move through the spaces that were created from different practices of making in the past. They do not consider how space was articulated through people’s relationships with things, or how such dynamics connected to other things and other activities elsewhere. As Finlay has rightly pointed out, there remains a problem within traditional research tenets where assemblages of worked int have been studied exclusively in order to characterise the nature of a site. To be fair to Tilley and Cummings this may have been what they were reacting against in their work; however, there are other ways in which to consider technical practice. Mobile Space that Does Not Stay Put in Place
Mesolithic int scatters should not be considered simply as “ndspots”; they were lived spaces where space was made and given dimension through different practices of making. Flint scatters are assemblages of material culture that are evidence for much more than a location. Flint scatters are direct evidence for past practice (e.g. working int, hunting animals, the butchery of animals, the processing of plants, cutting wood, the preparation of food). Assemblages of worked int are therefore about process; they are a mesh of connective dynamics created by people, and are not a series of unconnected or isolated acts. Therefore, assemblages of worked int connect to other things: animals (microliths [as arrows and knives], scrapers, burins, awls, akes), trees (axes, scrapers), plants (microliths, serrated blades, akes). Assemblages of worked int are evidence for tasks and the ways in which these actions connected to or interlocked with other activities to create an extended network of structured action. This is how a landscape scale is achieved within studies of technical practice, often referred to as “taskscapes,” following Ingold (1993) and Edmonds (1997). However, what is really important about concentrations of worked int is that they are assemblages of effects. It is not the objects in themselves but the implications for what they do that is exciting, and what else they would have connected to that is inspiring.
