No Man or Woman is an Island Revisited: The Social Construction of Small Island Space

Summary

The construction of space usually begins with the georeferencing of physical boundaries. As such, space becomes an external container that affects the structure of it contents. This paper explores the construction of space from the perspective of the individual. It begins by recognizing the minimal distance of face-to-face interactions and expands outward from there. The first step is to reject three-dimensional space and to situate the individual in an n-dimensional space. Production, consumption, procreation, mobility, exchange, and ritual are some of the common categories used to express dimensionality, but they tend to be investigated as cause-effect relationships. Yet these dimensions share more in common with clouds than they do terra firma. In practice, space is expressed in the creation of covalent and ionic bonds that define the social being, which is materialized through diverse expressions. Expressions of an infinite volume in a finite space. Archaeological examples from The Bahamas and Turks & Caicos Islands are used to examine social spaces on small islands.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Life in the Diminutive Realm: Human Adaptations to Smaller Island Environments

Keywords

Spatial Coverage