Abstracts
Gardening Time: Abstracts
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Mountains of the Mind: Place and Memory in the Iron Age of South-east Scotland
Ian Armit (University of Bradford)
The Iron Age landscapes of south-east Scotland are fast becoming among the most intensively studied
in Britain, following several major campaigns of excavation and the recent publication of sites
excavated in the 1970s and ‘80s. A central characteristic of these landscapes is the persistence of
certain places as foci for human activity throughout prehistory. A prime example is the dominant
volcanic plug of Traprain Law, which forms a prominent landmark for anyone inhabiting or moving
around the coastal plain of East Lothian. Here, signs of human activity extend back to at least the
Neolithic period, including a particularly significant episode during the Bronze Age when extensive
panels of rock art were inscribed into the hill. The subsequent history of Traprain Law from the Later
Bronze Age to the Roman Iron Age shows a series of quite different incarnations, each drawing on
memories and experiences accumulated over many centuries. While the importance of place and social
memory may be most obvious at sites like Traprain, it can be argued that similar processes underlie the
persistence of less dominant places, such as the fairly low-lying hillfort at Broxmouth which was
occupied for nearly a millennium from around 700 BC – AD 200. This paper considers the role of
place and memory within these densely occupied Iron Age landscapes.
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Memory in practice and the practice of memory in Caithness, NE Scotland, and in
Sardinia
John Barber, Graeme Cavers and Andy Heald (AOC, Edinburgh)
If John Ruskin was right and architecture really is all the parts of a structure that are not necessary for
its structural stability and also, the vehicle of cultural choice, then brochs and nuraghi are more
strongly influenced by their engineering than by their architecture. Having excavated 6 brochs and
forensically surveyed another 5 in the north of mainland Scotland we have evolved a set of theories
about their structural integrity. These we have tested in laboratory scale modelling and in half scale and
full scale reconstructions in the field. The work is hampered by the absence of modelling software
suitable for dry-stone built structures but progress is being made. This paper will report on this work
and compare our results with observations made on some 20 Nuraghi in Sardinia. The mutability of the
structures, the homogeneity of their design, their robustness, longevity of use and the strange processes
of their decay are all relevant to our cultural archaeological perceptions of them and their role in
formation and transmission of perceived cultural memory.
***
1
Inhabiting Broxmouth: the 'fabrication' of memory in a Scottish Iron Age
settlement
Lindsey Büster (University of Bradford)
Broxmouth hillfort in East Lothian was excavated in 1977-78 and has left a rich archive for
investigation. The Late Iron Age settlement comprises roundhouses of both stone and timber, and of
various morphologies. The pre-conquest date of the stone-walled roundhouses proved influential in
undermining traditional views of southern Scottish stone-walled architecture as the product of the
Roman advance north. Renewed analysis by The Broxmouth Project (University of Bradford, 20082012) has allowed other aspects of the Late Iron Age settlement to be studied in detail. In particular,
the successive modification of the roundhouses has allowed for a biographical approach to their
analysis, and consideration of the ways in which these biographies may have been intertwined with
those of the roundhouse inhabitants. One of the more unusual aspects of the stone-walled roundhouses
is the repeated retention of, apparently defunct, structural fabric in successive occupational episodes.
This, together with an abundance of structured deposition within these buildings, suggests the
deliberate construction of identity in reference to, and manipulation of, former structures and past
inhabitants.
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False memories?: the integration of prehistoric ritual monuments in early medieval
Scottish power centres
Ewan Campbell (University of Glasgow)
It is a striking feature of the late iron age/early medieval royal centres in Scotland that they seem to be
sited in relation to much earlier prehistoric ritual monuments. For example, Dunadd, the first centre of
the kings of Dal Riata in western Scotland sits in the centre of Kilmartin Glen, one of the densest
concentrations of early prehistoric stone circles, rock art, burial cairns, standing stones, henges, timber
circles and cursus monuments in Britain. In the east of the country at Forteviot, a later palace of the
Pictish and Scottish kings is sited beside a complex consisting of a timber palisaded mega-enclosure
and cremation cemetery, with numerous later henges, barrows, and timber circles, itself surrounded by
a Pictish barrow cemetery. Recent excavations at Forteviot by the Strathearn Environs and Royal
Forteviot (SERF) project have led to new insights into the later reuse of these early monuments with
extensive evidence for Pictish period excavations within the earlier monuments. The results can begin
to resolve the debate between these who see such coincidence as evidence of continuity of ritual
practice, or those who see it as appropriation of an imagined past.
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Memory, Materiality and Monumentality in Iron Age Scotland
Louisa Campbell (Glasgow)
The construction and application of explicit theoretical models has transformed archaeological
approaches to the study of landscapes over the past two decades. Ethnographic analogies have rendered
modern Westernised perceptions as inadequate for providing insights into ‘social landscapes’ as active
embodied entities which are understood, lived in and experienced through culturally embedded social
practices. Phenomenological approaches encouraged active engagement with landscapes as a sensuous
and somatic experience within the social dimension rather than an extra-somatic study of disconnected,
deterritorialised spaces that can be adequately captured through computer models or photographic
imagery. A long term holistic approach to the study of active embodied Iron Age landscapes,
2
monumental structures and material culture is proposed here as an effective means of identifying
patterns of continuity and change, taking account of similarities and difference on a macro and micro
scale at the inter and intra site level. These interconnected strands are considered as integral
components in negotiating the social interface within Iron Age communities, particularly those engaged
in variable degrees of contact with the incoming Roman army. This paper explores these connections
by investigating the continual reuse of monumental social spaces and the structured votive deposition
of foreign objects within those spaces, proposing these practices as the symbolic manipulation of
objects, memories and places as a means of utilising aspects of the past to legitimise the present.
***
The gardens lie sleeping underneath: Social remembrance and the subterranean
worlds of Iron Age Orkney.
Martin Carruthers (Orkney)
The volume of literature written specifically about Orkney’s Iron Age souterrains, or ‘earthhouses’, is
very small and the majority of works are conventionally concerned with offering interpretations of
these enigmatic subterranean structures that posit a single, functional purpose. Usually the polarised
options that have been proffered have ranged between ‘storage’ on the one hand, and ‘ritual’ on the
other. These options have been given within a fairly unsophisticated discourse that makes little realistic
allowance for either the complexity of human social life/histories generally, or that of the remarkable
subterranean structures and their fascinating contexts. A very useful exception to this otherwise largely
functionalist discourse is Richard Hingley’s description of the phenomenon of the intentional reuse of
much earlier (Neolithic) monuments as the context for the construction of Iron Age built places in parts
of Scotland, including the souterrains of Orkney (1996). In this paper I would like to explore further
this reuse of older features, monuments and landscapes as it concerns souterrains, and I would like to
do that by drawing out the detailed biographical features of the lives of several souterrain sites that I
have recently excavated on the Orcadian island of South Ronaldsay. I will tell a tale of two souterrains
that lay beneath a working prehistoric landscape of houses, fields and paddocks closely tended by a
large and energetic Iron Age farming community. I hope to tease out a narrative of the acts,
performances and interventions that were involved in the construction, use and dissolution of specific
souterrains and also what that entailed in terms of practical, embodied engagement with contemporary
and ancient features in the landscape. These actions were undertaken in such a manner as to be
mediatory of community relationships and histories, producing and maintaining social memory and, at
times also, social amnesia and dis-remembrance. The resultant ‘deep histories’ were undoubtedly
enmeshed in cosmology, mythology and social histories of the landscape. Additionally, however, the
findings from the fieldwork also show that the phenomenon of reuse extended to the use of past
material remains that had been much more recently created, abandoned and then re-encountered,
curated and remembered by Orcadian Iron Age groups. At one of the sites excavated, it was found that
a later Iron Age community had constructed a souterrain in such a way as to reuse the entrance passage
of a disused Iron Age broch dating from just a few generations earlier, in the so-called Middle Iron
Age. From this it would seem that the legitimate and meaningful resources potentially available to Iron
Age Orcadians, for such manipulation and memory-making, therefore incorporated the entire material
world that they had inherited. These resources included the more recent, probably genealogically
accounted past of only several generations before. However, regardless of the nature of the pasts being
encountered by Iron Age Orcadians, whether distantly ancient Neolithic monuments and landscapes, or
the more recent remains of their immediate predecessors, it nevertheless appears that the physical
construction of underground architectures was their preferred means of exploring those pasts. I would
therefore contend that the souterrain was, amongst other things, a social-material apparatus for
accessing and attempting to control the interpretation of the past. By extension, this subterranean
technology allowed those individuals, or groups, within communities who managed to exercise such
control to fare very well in maintaining their version of the present and to shape the future according to
their own desires.
***
3
Ideological archaeologies: do the nuraghi constitute a part of the identity of
modern Sardinian?
Elena Casares (University of Edinburgh)
The standard position of the Sardinian archaeologists is that the Nuragic civilization still constitutes
even today a strong element of identity for all Sardinian small towns, in particular those communities
that populate the internal regions, where a fierce character has been noted and an unbreakable bond
with the land itself, the marks of which include the modern isolated society. The thesis of “constant
Sardinian resistance” in opposition to their overseas oppressors, formulated by Giovanni Lilliu, justly
found major consensus in this place, a clear expression of pride that brings the memory of ancient local
origins. In fact, it seems that the Nuragic epoch, more so than any other cultural phase of the Sardinian
age, has played a fundamental role in the conscience of the common identity, today strengthened by
centuries of colonization that have produced a plurality of ethnicities on the basis of the regional
culture. For this purpose, however, we agree to consider that after the armed conquest of the
Carthaginians and - successively - of the Romans, the lack of external influences and the presence of
essential values, happened in such a way that the old “ethnic nation” developed into the “ethic nation”,
allowing in this way to recuperate some sort of unity of the collective consciousness in the island. But,
are these claims to historical memory a fantasy encouraged by clichés promoted by the local tourist
authorities? Do they tell us more about the present than about the past?
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Layers of materialised memory in Malta: reutilisation of Late Neolithic
monumental centres during the Bronze Age
Alberto Cazzella (Rome), Anthony Pace (Malta) and Giulia Recchia (University of
Foggia).
A number of Maltese place names of Arabic origin show that various Maltese Late Neolithic
megalithic structures remained conspicuous in the archipelago’s landscape throughout antiquity and
Medieval times. Several of these structures were in fact reutilised during the Bronze Age, as we know
from sites such as Borg in-Nadur, tas-Silg or the Xaghra stone circle. Bronze Age ceramic residue
indicators have been noted at all major megalithic sites. In all likelihood the significance of the
megalithic structures - their structural presence and materiality, their former socio-economic function,
their ideological attraction – may not have been totally lost on the later generations of the Bronze Age.
In other words, while certain cultural values and meaning may have changed or even forgotten through
the centuries, certain elements of continuity survived even if in modified form and were embodied in a
sense of place. Recent excavations at tas-Silg and Xaghra have provided us with useful new data about
two important aspects of embodied memory which we shall discuss here: (i) the chronology of the
reutilization of these megalithic sites and (ii) the specific ways in which they were reused. It is now
clear that patterns of reutilisation of Maltese Late Neolithic megaliths were manifold, with individual
sites being used differently and for purposes that cannot be explained in a uniformitarian model. The
transformation of the Tarxien South into a cremation cemetery seems to be unique. In fact, the use of
Borg in-Nadur followed another trajectory, as happened in the case of the Xaghra Circle and at TasSilg. In this contribution, we will explore a number of case studies to highlight how Malta’s Late
Neolithic megalithic centres were re-used during the Bronze. In particular, we will discuss new Bronze
Age material from tas-Silg, where the re-use of a megalithic complex continued well into the Middle
Ages. We will examine the extent to which continuity and change were the product of changing
ideologies and values, as well as the sense of place encouraged by a well-defined materiality.
***
4
Memory as a social force: transformation, innovation and refoundation in the
protohistorical Sardinia
Anna DePalmas (Sassari)
In protohistoric Sardinia, characterized by the presence of nuragic towers, in a not better definable
time, presumably between the Recent and the Final Bronze Age, a very significant change took place.
Many evidences show that the features and the spatial planning structured since the Middle Bronze Age
with the building of the nuraghe, suffer a substantial change that cause the end of the phenomenon of
construction of such monuments. The progressive weakening of the concept of nuraghe as a reference
point of society, reflects a real transformation expressed in the contemporary emergence of the renewed
and consolidated forms, of the villages system. Besides the previous circular huts, the settlements of
this period consist of rooms of various shapes accessible through a central courtyard that connects them
in an insulae pattern. The village grows around the nuraghe, sometimes overlapping the ruined walls or
invading the yard and reusing the stone buildings collapsed from the tops of the towers, creating living
spaces above the ruins of the collapse. In the new territorial organization linked to the emergence of the
village, the presence of communitary religious buildings such as wells, fountains, square temples
(megaron) and buildings with rectilinear-circular and curvilinear plant seems to acquire a particular
importance, even if sacred spaces are also created inside the civic structures as nuraghe and villages.
Villages around the temples seem to be temporary, perhaps in a close relation with community
meetings. At the sphere of sanctuaries is related the deposition of bronze objects ("bronzetti") that
reproduce, in miniature, men and women, animals and daily life objects. Of great interest are miniature
representations of bronze or stone nuraghe that illustrate the building wholeness. The meaning of these
representations, object of cult in the space of community meetings, may be connected to the celebration
practices and rituals and is an attestation to the fact that at the end of the nuragic period the tower, is a
defunctionalized building raised as a totem for the identity, as a witness of the great works produced by
the ancestors. In this sense the nuraghe and the landscape characterized by this buildings, takes the role
of the medium of cultural memory, in a sort of landscape of memory; a place of commemoration that is
celebrated through reproductions both realistic and schematic as logoi and semata.
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Nuraghe and Sardinian memory from Sassari to Biella via the Great War: some
anthropological reflections on monuments and memory
Paola Filippucci (Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge)
This paper considers the relationship between monuments and memory from an anthropological point
of view. In starts from the commonly made assumption that monuments help forgetting as much as
memory by containing, reifying and reducing the past in the process of framing it ideologically. As
such monuments can be treated as evidence and means of how the past is constructed and contained
within the present. Reflecting on a modern Sardinian monument of remembrance, this paper will argue
that monuments’ materiality however can also be a vehicle for accumulating and holding the past and
so for making present and giving body to its otherness. In this optic, monuments can also show and
mediate the power of the past, ‘as that in which we are embedded’ (Wittman 2011: 278), to touch
people in later times.
Reference cited: L. Wittman The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier University of Toronto Press 2011
***
5
Beyond the Brochs: the non-monumental in the Western Isles
Simon Gilmour (Edinburgh):
Recent excavations in the Western Isles have highlighted the presence of non-monumental sites, i.e.
those that are not brochs/complex Atlantic roundhouses or wheelhouses, in the Iron Age. This
presentation will explore the contemporaneity of monumental and non-monumental sites and their
relative place in an Iron Age landscape. Drawing on previous and recent work, the argument is made
that the evidence offers glimpses of a living Iron Age landscape, creating a more holistic understanding
of life on the archipelago over two thousand years ago.
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Monuments and Memory in the Iron Age of Caithness
Andy Heald, Graeme Cavers and John Barber (Edinburgh):
The definition of the 'Long Iron Age' in Atlantic Scotland was intended to allow a more sensitive view
of the development of monumental drystone settlements from their early Iron Age origins, through
their peak in the middle Iron Age and into the Pictish period in the mid to late first millennium AD.
Long-lived 'broch village' settlements like Nybster in Caithness illustrated the durability of certain
locations through time, though it is clear from the complexity and variability of structures at such sites
that their form and meaning were not static over centuries. Similarly, excavations at Thrumster broch
have shown that that roundhouse was repeatedly remodelled and rebuilt, in part perhaps through
structural necessity but perhaps also in response to the changing requirements of the house as a symbol
in the later prehistoric landscape of northern Scotland. This paper will present the results of recent
survey and excavation at Iron Age settlements in Caithness and explore the implications for our
understanding of changes in Iron Age society in the north.
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The ‘bubbling cauldron’: examining the association between Scottish cauldrons
and wet places, with a contrasting example from south of the border at Chiseldon,
Wiltshire
Jody Joy (British Museum)
In the later Iron Age and early Roman period a significant number of cauldrons were deposited in wet
places in Scotland as part of hoards or as single deposits. The discovery of many of these objects was
poorly recorded so it is sometimes difficult to establish if they were originally placed in bogs, pools or
lochs but the association between cauldrons and water is a strong one. South of the border cauldrons
are found in a wider variety of contexts, including rivers, graves and dry land hoards. In this
presentation I will examine the association between object and place. Why is it appropriate to deposit
cauldrons in watery places? What is significant about these places? Cauldrons are an iconic if
sometimes poorly understood class of object. They are substantial vessels capable of containing large
quantities of food or liquid and it is thought that they were probably used for boiling meat or serving
drink for use in communal feasting ceremonies. Many cauldrons show extensive evidence of repair and
likely had long use-lives before they were deposited. They were clearly valued objects and the choice
of location for deposition was a significant one. As a contrast to the association between cauldrons and
watery places in Scotland, I will also examine the cauldrons from Chiseldon, Wiltshire, where 13
cauldrons were discovered in 2004 in a large pit. This is the largest concentration of complete
cauldrons so far recovered from Iron Age Europe. The site itself was probably a small settlement. It is
located on the ridgeway and is in site of two hillforts: Barbury Castle and Liddington Castle. At the
time of their deposition, Liddington had been long since abandoned but Barbury may have been in use.
6
Here we can see the deposition of cauldrons within a monumental landscape, in stark contrast to the
‘natural’ location for the deposition of the Scottish cauldrons. Both were equally important in the
construction of social memory.
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Burial locations, memory and power in Bronze Age Sardinia
Luca Lai (University of South Florida/ Univ. of Cagliari)
Evidence for the use of caves for burial in the Middle through Final Bronze Age has accumulated in the
past two decades. Contrary to the persistent view that chambered, collective tombs were the canonical
burial place for Nuragic communities, the widespread finding of Nuragic human remains in natural
caves leads to the suggestion that a large portion of the Sardinian population in the Bronze Age was not
actually laid to rest in such tombs. This increasingly documented phenomenon poses problems that
involve the perceived meaning and function of burial places and types, their charge of memory and
identity, and their potential utilization in power dynamics and in the replication of units of organization
and production. Long term trends in variation in Bronze Age burial practices are identified, their
implications discussed, and future key research directions are outlined.
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Dacia without Burebista
Kris Lockyear (London)
Burebista, the "first and greatest" of the Kings of the Getae casts a long shadow over the history and
archaeology of the late Iron Age in Romania and Bulgaria. Credited with almost everything from the
creation of the "first centralised and free state of the Dacians", the destruction of the Greek cities on the
Black Sea coast, the creation of a coinage system based on the Roman denarius and the banning of
wine, what do we actually know about this historical figure? Mentioned in only three sources: Strabo,
Jordanes and the Akornion inscription, can we really credit him with so much? How many "factoids"
exist in the literature, reiterated uncritically? How useful are chronological schemes derived from this
pseudo-historical framework? Despite the revolution currently occurring in our understanding of this
region and period, Burebista still appears centre stage on many occasions. This paper will agree with
Babeş (1974) in arguing that we must interpret the archaeology of the region uninfluenced by historical
models, and looks forward to an understanding of Dacia without Burebista.
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When stone becomes wood. Transformations and remembrance in Neolithic
Sardinian rock cut tombs
Simonetta Losi (London)
Rock cut tombs are conventionally considered as hollowed out spaces obtained by extracting mass
from a block of stone or a rocky layer. Despite being defined by the very absence of mass, excavated
spaces are discussed and represented in archaeological narratives as self-contained material objects, or
artefacts, enveloped by sculpted rock surfaces. Typically, architectural analyses draw attention to the
geometrical qualities of the tombs, effectively reifying their empty volumes into smooth, inert and
finished ‘buildings’. The material properties of stone and the role of rock - both extant and absent - in
the continuous constitution of the tombs are rarely discussed beyond the economics of labour
investment and the ergonomics of excavation technologies. In this paper I explore the connections
between subtractive spatial thinking and the generative valences of stone. Interpreting Sardinian rock
cut tombs as physical and symbolic interfaces, I trace the interplay between human and material
7
agencies in the creation and transformation of communities and places on the island during the fourth
millennium BC. I analyse selected tombs displaying stone-carved skeuomorphic representations of
timber buildings’ interiors, arguing that mnemonic practices embedded in the sensual qualities of
materials and in their unending capacity for transformation were central in local understandings of
place, memory and time.
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Broch communities through the generations: Examples of long-occupied sites and
their probable significance.
Euan W MacKie (Glasgow)
Brochs are such massive structures – huge investments of authority and labour – that many were
inhabited for scores, if not hundreds of years, while being gradually modified as time passed. Some
were probably built on sites which were themselves already significant for some reason. All this surely
means that the great drystone keeps – towering over the landscape – became in a sense repositories of
family and tribal traditions, elements of which we can occasionally glimpse through careful
excavation. Several examples will be discussed, including one in which the broch ‘estate’ seems to
have been divided between two sons, another in which the ruling family accrued great prestige –
lasting at least five centuries – through contact with Governor Agricola’s exploring fleet in c. AD 79
and a third site which seems to have been founded in the Early Iron Age by colonists from Brittany.
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'... morentur in Domino libere et in pace...': cultural identity and the remembered
past in the mediaeval Outer Hebrides
Mary MacLeod Rivett (University of the Highlands and Islands (Lews Castle College)
The title of this paper is taken from the text of the Treaty of Perth, in AD 1266, outlining the terms of
the settlement between the Crowns of Norway and Scotland in the aftermath of the Battle of Largs. It
allowed for former subjects of the Norwegian Crown to stay (or leave) the Hebrides ‘freely and in
peace’ following the transfer of the subkingdom of Man and the Hebrides to Scotland. After nearly 450
years of Norwegian cultural and political dominion, there can be little doubt that the inhabitants of the
islands were of mixed Gaelic and Norse genetic, linguistic and cultural background, but increasingly
evidence suggests that the 13th and 14th centuries saw significant shifts of settlement and architecture
throughout the Hebrides. Amongst these shifts would appear to have been a reoccupation of some Iron
Age duns and brochs, abandoned during the 9th – 12th centuries, where these fitted into the new
landscape of settlement. The reuse of the monumental remains of the pre-Scandinavian past, so
emphatically abandoned at the Scandinavian advent, would seem to reflect an emphasis on the local
and potentially Gaelic roots of the most powerful island families, mirroring the contemporary political
changes.
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Cultivated and constructed memory at the nineteenth-century cemetery of Cagliari
Hannah Malone (Cambridge)
A cemetery may embody, not only the memories of the recent dead, but also the memory of an ancient
place. This is true of Bonaria graveyard at Cagliari, which was built in the nineteenth century on a
burial site already used by the ancient Romans and early Christians. The cemetery was established in
1829 as a civic monument of great significance to the local community. It harnessed the importance of
8
a site layered with history. Bonaria developed gradually through a combination of public and private
investment. The city authority erected monumental architecture that hinted at the graveyard’s earlier
function as an ancient burial place. Within this architectural framework the citizens created private
tombs and monuments. Thus, the cemetery rose from its foundations on the graves of local ancestors,
and came to act as a repository for both private and public memories. Through its art and architecture,
Bonaria expressed the power of the city, its position within the emergent Italian nation-state, and the
wealth and status of a local bourgeoisie. It is representative of the role played by civic graveyards in the
gradual and collective perpetuation of memory in an environment analogous to the city. Cagliari’s
cemetery was part of a spate of cemetery building in nineteenth-century Italy prompted by the
introduction, from 1806, of Napoleonic legislation that prohibited burial within urban areas. With the
end of the tradition of church interment, which had persisted since the middle ages, it became
necessary to build new cemeteries on the outskirts of Italian cities. Bonaria exemplifies the new
graveyards, which were public and secular and constituted an unprecedented architectural type. The
cemetery’s large and monumental architecture, which surpassed its practical purpose, may be attributed
to its importance as a monument that embodied the memories and identity of the local community.
***
Council chamber or repository? A possible new interpretation of the Capanne delle
Riunione in Bronze Age Sardinia
Clifford Marshall (UCL)
These Late Bronze Age/Early Iron Age buildings had traditionally been interpreted as meeting places
for the elders of the tribes. This is now challenged by the growing data base of evidence from recent
excavations and re-examination of the buildings, objects found in them and their spatial relationship
with the landscape and other buildings. In this paper I intend to demonstrate that social memory
influenced their development, giving us a new interpretation of their purpose and of their role in the
negotiation of a social identity in Sardinia at that time.
***
Memory and movement in the Bronze Age and Iron Age landscape of Central and
South-eastern Slovenia
Phil Mason (Institute for the Protection of Cultural Heritage of Slovenia)
The late 2nd millennium BC and the 1st millennium BC in central and south-eastern Slovenia saw the
formation of dynamic landscapes, in which place, memory of place and movement were combined. The
paper seeks to explore the ways in which these were expressed in the Late Bronze Age and how this
expression changed in the Early Iron Age. The LBA landscape was characterised by large extensive
open settlements in the river valleys and small defended upland settlements, whilst mortuary sites were
located in less visible marginal areas close to watercourses in the lowlands, as well as on isolated hills
and hill slopes in the uplands. There is some evidence for the connection between settlements with
mortuary areas being marked by formal paths, connecting the places of the living with the places of the
dead, places that were liminal, but repeatedly visited. The memory of these places in the LBA
landscape was transformed in the EIA landscape. Some places, settlements, cemeteries and prominent
features in the landscape were incorporated into or embellished with new structures, hillforts and
barrow cemeteries, which enshrined and reinterpreted their memory and function in the landscape,
whilst others were apparently abandoned, to later re-emerge in the LIA. Movement through this
landscape was enshrined in memory through the marking of paths and the elaboration of approaches to
hillforts with funerary monuments. It is suggested that this marks a change in the nature of liminality
and the role of memory in the landscape from the Late Bronze Age to the Early Iron Age in the region.
***
9
Early Christian Landscapes as Theatres of Memory: a study from Argyll
Megan Meredith-Lobay (Oxford)
Raphael Samuel describes History as the ‘work of a thousand hands’ and ‘an organic form of
knowledge and one whose sources are promiscuous, drawing not only on real-life experiences but also
memory and myth, fantasy and desire’ (Samuel 1994: 8, x). Bill Gale defines the Theatre of Memory,
Saumel’s type of social history as a place where ‘the dramatic staging and presentation of memory’
takes place (Gale 1996). The landscape context of the early Christian archaeology of Argyll suggests a
dialogue between past and present, mediated by a landscape that actively sought to translate the
language of Christianity into a conceptual framework that sat squarely on the shoulders of the pagan
past. The church played the largest role in this dialogue between past and present by engaging with past
conceptions of power, ritual, and authority in the landscape in a meaningful way that was itself
‘unintentionally couched in the language and understanding of existing structures, so that in many ways
a concept of continuity was at the heart of change,’ (Harvey and Jones 1999: 223). This paper will
examine the landscape context of the early Christian churches of Argyll as ‘Theatres of Memory’,
drawing upon Samuel’s concept of the dramatic staging of memory to explain relationships between
the church and the landscape as one where no boundaries existed between what came before and after
the advent of Columba, but instead a whole where both the land and the church structured how they
were perceived though imitating the language of the past. Ultimately, this means that the relationships
we can glean will not be a church organised for the benefit and ambitions of a small handful of
powerful monastic centres.
***
Time regained and revisited. Picts and Prehistory
Gordon Noble (Aberdeen)
One major difference between the monuments erected in prehistory and those in the first millennium
AD is the use of writing. The earliest monuments erected in eastern Scotland in the early medieval
period may include those with latin scripts such as the Cat Stane carved as a memorial to ‘Vetta,
daughter of Victricus’ and the Pictish symbol stones which originated in the fifth or sixth centuries AD
also appear to have been a form of writing that can be connected to particular individuals living or dead
(Samson 1992; Forsyth 1997; Lee et al 2010). These monuments can be set alongside the first evidence
for writing and the recording of events according to historical time across the north and west of Britain
and Ireland. The Pictish symbol stones of north and east Scotland were in this respect very much of
their time – the use of writing made new forms of history possible. The setting up of these monuments
in the landscape also meant that these new histories were grounded in the land and undoubtedly in new
ways of conceptualizing and owning land. In this respect, a new system of encoding present and past
promulgated by a new elite was naturalized as part of the landscape who rewrote history and the land
using new concepts of land tenure and ownership. This paper will examine time, monumentality and
history at the juncture of prehistory and history amongst the kingdoms of the Picts.
***
Remembering Nuraghi: Memory and Domestication of the Past in FBA/EIA
Nuragic Sardinia
Mauro Perra (Civico Museo Archeologico, Genna Maria – Villanovaforru, Sardinia)
The latest archaeological investigations carried out inside nuraghi indicate that out of 10 of them about
6 were abandoned between the LBA and FBA, that is between the 13th and 12th centuries BC. There
are scarce findings dating to the advanced phases of the FBA and to the early EIA, thus suggesting only
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occasional frequentation of the sites, whereas few of the nuraghi which were still in use in the EIA
show signs of deep transformation from structures for the control of territories and resources into
worship places. This latter phase is the one in which votive swords and bronze or stone nuraghe models
were exhibited. In a period in which nuragic towers were no longer built nor were they a catalyst for
new settlements, memory of a mythical past of the nuraghe-builders was exploited so as to found a new
society where hegemonic groups attempted to legitimize their dominant position within the various
nuragic communities.
***
Revisiting Glenelg: Reconstructing Brochs in treeless landscapes, 90 years after
Alexander Curle
Tanja Romankiewicz and Ian Ralston (Edinburgh)
The brochs of Scotland, these enigmatic drystone towers, are fascinating. Why did the Iron Age
communities expend so much material, labour and time to create such dominant features within the
landscape. Their tall walls, possibly up to 10m or more in height, consumed a large amount of quarried
stone and, it can be assumed, large quantities of structural timbers for roofs and upper floors – the latter
the conspicuous consumption of a scarce resource in the wet and windswept terrain of Scotland’s north
and west. Or so at least present scholarship has argued. But how far does this assumption actually relate
to the archaeological and environmental evidence? How many structures actually have convincing
evidence for an internal postring, the key piece of evidence for timber-built upper floors and roofs? The
answer, after a thorough investigation of archaeological evidence has to be: “very few”. This
observation has led us to question existing reconstructions of brochs. What if far fewer substantial
timber elements were in fact included in these structures? We will discuss the evidence for the use of
timber within broch architecture – or the lack thereof – and question the evidence from key sites such
as the brochs at Glenelg where Curle’s discovery of a postring in excavations after World War I
represented a significant step forward. – Our aim is to arrive at new interpretations of architectural
features within these sites and to propose alternative reconstructions. The results admittedly raise more
questions than answers about the meaning of this complex architecture, in particular with regards to
current inferences concerning social relations and status connections, as well as the physical supply of
timbers in treeless landscapes.
***
The reuse of monuments in Atlantic Scotland; variation between practices in the
Hebrides and Orkney
Niall Sharples (University of Cardiff)
It has been known for some time that the roundhouses of Atlantic Scotland are often built on Neolithic
chambered tombs and famous examples include Pierowall Quarry and the Howe in Orkney and
Clettraval and Unival in the Hebrides. This relationship is often taken to indicate similar concerns to
establish a relationship with the ancestors in both areas. However, I will argue that there are important
differences between the two regions which relate to the architecture of both the houses and the tombs
and also the landscape context of the monuments location. This lecture will analyse these differences to
identify the common strands of social memory that characterise Atlantic Scotland.
***
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Remembering the underworld: memory, monuments and landscape in Bronze Age
central Sardinia
Robin Skeates (University of Durham)
This paper explores the processes that might have been involved in remembering the dead in nuraghic
Bronze Age Central Sardinia: not just at the well-known above-ground tombe di giganti monuments
and related nuraghi, but also in underground caves, which were extensively and repeatedly used as
burial places throughout the second millennium BC. Although for the most part overlooked by
archaeologists, on-going archaeological fieldwork in the Seulo territory suggests that these caves were
an important structural element of the nuraghic social and cultural landscape, where deceased members
of non-elite society and memories associated with them were laid down and reworked by the living,
especially through the repeated performance of primary and secondary burial rites.
***
Beyond the nuraghi. Perception and reuse in Punic and Roman Sardinia
Alfonso Stiglitz (Cagliari)
The widespread and looming presence of the Nuragic towers, which for more than three millennia
characterizes the Sardinian landscape, leads us to investigate the forms of their perception back in the
time. In the presentation we will focus on the Punic and Roman “ages”, during which many of the
Nuragic buildings were attended; a particular attention will go to the votive areas. This choice
generated by the greater volume of documentation available and by the highly ideological role this type
of attendance play, allowing us to develop observations regarding the quality and the modality of the
ancient structures perception. There will be two major routes of analysis: the first path will address the
type of attendance, with particular emphasis on the questioning of the misunderstandings arising from
the use of the term "reuse". The second path will address the problem of social groups which attended
the nuragic buildings during the Punic-Roman era.
***
Gardening Time: Memory and material representation in the Lismore Landscape
Simon Stoddart (University of Cambridge) and Caroline Malone (Queen’s University,
Belfast).
One purpose of the Cambridge conference is to bring together key figures of the Lismore Landscape
project team (Euan Campbell, Gilmour, Malone, Meredith-Lobay and Stoddart) as the project is
brought to publication submission in the autumn of 2012. This particular presentation will focus on the
broch of Tirefour in the wider context of the landscape project. The monument has now been phased
through a radiocarbon dating programme kindly financed by Historic Scotland that essentially shows a
foundation in c. 300 BC and a long period of subsequent use of the monument, including
refortification, culminating in roosting owls once human occupation had ended. The broader landscape
setting will bring together the memories of landscape recorded in early maps and the impressions of the
current inhabitants of the island.
***
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The nuraghi's life in the Iron Age
Carlo Tronchetti (Cagliari)
The excavations and fieldwork so far undertaken shows that the nuraghi surviving on the Iron age lose
their former function. In the main, the nuraghi are refunctionalised as cultural buildings. In some cases
the large perimeter fences in big stones are raze to the ground and the ruins covered with new small
dwelling places. The true and proper nuraghe becomes a place where the worship of god(s) is practised.
The shape of the nuraghe is now represented in stone and bronze models. The bigger stone models are
used in shrines as altars; the smaller ones are usually placed in the so-called “meeting huts”, round
buildings with a high political and social value in the nuragic villages. We have found many stone
models of nuraghe of various shapes (single tower, nuragic fortress with many towers) in the
orientalizing necropolis of Monte Prama (Cabras-OR), as part of an elaborate set displaying the values
of the aristocratic buried people. The nuraghe in the iron age is the place where the worship is
practised, providing an altar, and the symbol of the political and cultural value of the late nuragic
communities.
***
The nuragic adventure. Aspects of land occupation
Alessandro Usai (Cagliari)
During the Bronze Age a people rooted in Sardinia since several millennia built thousands of cyclopean
stone monuments, called nuraghi. Roughly four hundred years (1600-1200 a. C.) of building frenzy,
population increase, land colonization and economic development created a highly deforested and
exploited landscape, dotted with small and large nuraghi. These multi-purpose buildings functioned as
co-ordinating centres, mainly for concentration and redistribution of products, and formed a thick
network structured in several districts with different hierarchical levels. At the end of the period, this
proliferation system was no longer bearable. This is the most likely explanation for the great
transformation which nuragic Sardinia underwent during the Final Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age
(roughly 1200-700 a. C.). The construction of nuraghi stopped seemingly in a sudden way, leaving
many nuraghi unfinished. Overcoming the initial disorientation, under the leadership of emerging
élites, the nuragic civilization resumed its way with a new economic efficiency, technological
development and artistic flourishing. Large and small settlements continued growing up everywhere
and exploiting the resources of the land. At the same time, local shrines and regional sanctuaries began
to develop. At the end of the Early Iron Age, after a long-lasting crisis, this system too fell and Sardinia
entered a new historic cycle. Nevertheless the nuraghi kept an important role in rural territory
management till roman and medieval times.
***
Nuragic memories: a deep seated pervasive attitude
Alessandro Vanzetti (Rome)
The popular attitude towards prehistoric monuments in Sardinia has been to consider them as testimony
of a great past, as represented by the names attached to them, e.g. domus de janas (witches' homes),
tombe di giganti (giants' tombs), nuraghe Sa domu 'e s'orku (home of the ogre) etc. This attitude is the
consequence of removal, and of break in continuity, while persisting memory inside Nuragic evolving
society can be traced through use and reuse of monuments, and iconography. This implies changes in
use and in attitudes, but ideas of discontinuity can have been enhanced by the modern perception of the
disappeared society. The paper will discuss the persistence of memory attached to different monuments
in the Nuragic context, spanning from the Bronze to the Iron Age. Is it possible to apply a sort of
"memory index" to monuments?
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Memory beyond the monumental (Or: tending a garden involves more than just big
trees)
Isabelle Vella Gregory (Cambridge)
Monuments are highly visible features of the archaeological records. Their status as important
buildings is by no means a modern phenomenon. While monuments remain a highly valuable
archaeological resource, it is essential that our thinking goes beyond the monumental. This paper looks
at monuments in Sardinia, with a focus on smaller scales of materiality.
***
Monuments and Cultural Landscapes: Memory, Agency and Practice in Prehistoric
Europe
Peter Wells (University of Minnesota)
In some periods of prehistory in continental Europe, notably the Middle Bronze Age and the Early Iron
Age, burial mounds became important and abundant monuments in the cultural landscape, ever-present
visual reminders for the living of departed individuals. In other periods, common practice was flat
grave burial, with only temporary markers, if any, above them. What can we learn about connections
between monuments and memory from these different approaches to burial? The larger question is,
how is memory constructed and practiced? I argue that the participation in the performance of burial
ritual was a more powerful agent in the creation of memories of the deceased and of the deceased's role
in the community than was the building of burial mounds. Close analysis of the arrangement of objects
in graves in relation to one another and to bodies (or cremated remains) enables us to reconstruct the
process of funerary ritual. This performance created powerful visual experiences which culminated in
the closing of the grave and the disappearance of the body and the entire burial assemblage from the
world of the living. The memory of such experiences acted as an agent in subsequent performances of
funerary ritual. In well documented Early Iron Age landscapes, we note how memory of one funerary
event helped to direct the course of subsequent burial rituals. As burial mounds became parts of the
landscape, seen every day, their power to evoke memories of the funerary performance may have been
considerably weaker than that of graves that were closed in the course of the performance and left no
significant visible markers. From this examination, I offer general conclusions about how memories are
constructed and about what roles they play in subsequent social and ritual practices.
***
Neolithic monumentality and commemoration at henges in Scotland
Rebecca Younger (University Glasgow)
Monuments are often assumed to be memorials, permanent reminders of the past in the landscape
which are reused and returned to throughout the monument’s ‘life’. Henges are circular bank-and-ditch
earthwork monuments of the late Neolithic to mid-Bronze Age, and ostensibly confirm such a concept
of monuments as memorials. Henge sites were foci for activities over centuries, places where pitdigging, deposition, and the construction of timber- or stone-settings occurred before the henge
earthworks were built; and continued in use as burial sites long after the earthworks had begun to
erode. Yet if these were places of memory, they did not enshrine the past in an unchanging
monumental form. Each new phase of monumental construction transformed or destroyed the previous
one, and the repeated reworking of the site would mean that not every part of the monument would
endure to be a permanent reminder of the past. Can this picture of on-going change and rebuilding be
reconciled with our concept of monuments as permanent memorials? This paper discusses
commemoration at henge sites as a way of thinking about this paradoxical continuity and change,
14
transience and permanence, at prehistoric monuments. Commemoration is understood as an active
engagement with the past, but also with the future. Monuments are not autonomously memorial: people
are needed to remember. Here, the idea of henges as places where people engaged with concepts of
time and memory during the Neolithic, Chalcolithic and Bronze Age is explored. The discussion draws
on case studies in central and north-eastern Scotland, including the recently-excavated henge site at
Forteviot, Perth and Kinross. Are monuments commemorative because they are permanent, or because
they change?
***
Poster
Walking across the land of the nuraghi: politics of memory and movement in
central western Sardinia during the Bronze Age
Giandaniele Castangia (Cambridge)
The nuraghi of Sardinia, megalithic towers built between XVI and XIV centuries BC all around the
Mediterranean island - where circa 7000 of them still stand - have represented a long-term landscape
marker and a symbolic referring point for Memory across prehistoric Sardinian communities. So far,
studies on nuraghi have hugely suffered for the stagnation of archaeological research in a culturalhistorical perspective, that privileged matters of relative chronology based on pottery seriation and
monument typological classifications. The research presented in this poster aims to overcome these
limits, focusing on the region of Sinis (central-western Sardinia) and its towers from a different
perspective, which is landscape-oriented instead of monument-oriented, contextual and historical. GIS
technology was employed to reconstruct the prehistoric taskscape of the region. Daily relations
between those elements that constitute it are expressed in movement and vision, and thus can be
partially archaeologically detected. The identification of relations in Space (synchronic) and Time
(diachronic) between monuments and other elements of the landscape, throughout the study of
perception and movement, has the potential to reveal what was the role played by monuments as agents
in the politics of Memory. Throughout the use of geographical (topological), visual perception-focused
(viewshed analysis), movement focused (cost-path analysis) and economic-related (site catchment
analysis) analyses, the study shows that in the Sinis area Nuragic towers were related more to
movement across the landscape rather than visibility and inter-visibility needs. In particular the
calculation of least-cost paths between those sites that yielded proof of earlier occupation (Middle and
Recent Bronze Age) shows clearly that the nuraghi were built upon a specific pattern of movement that
was already established in the region during the Middle Bronze Age and was likely more ancient than
that. The towers seems to occupy and ‘highlight’ places that were part of an ancient solid social
network in which at some point a new ideology create the need for monumentality and ostentation.
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… and for those who have enjoyed this conference you are cordially invited to
participate in the next:
FRONTIERS
20th – 22nd September, 2013.
Magdalene College
and the McDonald Institute, Cambridge
This conference will focus on the role of frontiers during the Iron Age of Europe
For further details please contact Simon Stoddart ([email protected]) or Letizia
Ceccarelli ([email protected]) or Bela Dimova ([email protected])