Stone technologies and landscapes around the Irish Sea during the Mesolithic
Emmett O'Keeffe
Supervisor: Dr Graeme Warren
Funded by: UCD Ad Astra Research Scholarship
Abstract
This doctoral project investigates the Irish Sea region during the Mesolithic period comparing and contrasting the relationships between stone technologies and their landscape contexts. The broad aim of the research is to investigate how people’s knowledge of the world was embedded in and bounded by the interplay of stone technologies and landscapes.
Archaeologists have long accepted that technology is a social concept, bound up within the routines and rhythms of the world: technology is embedded within everyday experience and forms part of the fabric of social (re)production. Therefore, the investigation of technology must be quite central to social archaeologies of the Mesolithic. Stone technologies, due to issues of preservation, form the bulk of material that archaeologists can use to investigate the Mesolithic thus offering a very useful dataset to investigate the social worlds of Mesolithic people.Likewise, landscape archaeology has long informed social understandings of places and how they may have been understood in the past. Akin to technology, landscapes are thought of as part of a dynamic choreography: structuring and being structured by the routines and rhythms bound up in everyday social activities. Landscapes are a medium through which people negotiated their understandings of the world through multiple, layered series of meaning, some of which may manifest in the archaeological record.Previous attempts to investigate Mesolithic landscapes have often failed to rigorously do so, landscape is often seen as something which cannot be quantified. Mesolithic stone technology on the other hand has traditionally been studied from a very rigid, typological point of view. The results of such approaches have been generalised, large scale understandings of the Mesolithic period. The central argument of this thesis is that technology and landscape, and especially the interplay between them, are our best avenues for understanding Mesolithic lives. Recently archaeologists have begun to realise this and acknowledge the need to look at the details of technologies and landscape contexts. The most successful of these investigations have investigated Mesolithic worlds by examining the taskscapes and châine opératoires that linked people with each other and different places in the Mesolithic.
This research project will investigate the landscapes of the study area in a series of targeted case studies around the Irish Sea. This will be achieved through the development of a methodology for the quantification and assessment of landscape characteristics. The lithic assemblages associated with these landscapes will undergo analysis to assess modes of sourcing, production and discard and how these change in different contexts. These analytical methods will facilitate the building of social landscape and technological datasets allowing comparison of areas under study around the Irish Sea. One such confirmed area of study will be the Llyn Peninsula and Ynys Enlli (Bardsey Island) in north-west Wales. This case study area which has been the focus of recent field work (e.g. Bardsey Island Lithic Scatters Project) will contribute to the PhD project as one of a number of areas under investigation.
The significance of this project is twofold: firstly, it will examine Mesolithic social lives from an integrated, rigorous lithic-landscape viewpoint attempting to move beyond traditionalist approaches which have built static, generalised models of human action. Secondly, it will develop a methodological approach for the integration of landscape and technological data that is potentially applicable outside the current study.
Contact
Contact Information:Phone: +35317167624