Space as place: understanding emptiness in archaeological landscapes

Summary

One of the basic tenets of the landscape approach in archaeology is that we need to think beyond the idea of discrete sites and consider instead the use of an entire landscape (or landscapes). From this perspective, places in a landscape that do not contain "sites" as understood in the conventional sense were nevertheless woven into the lives of ancient people. This means that, in order to understand the past, we need to understand both the places where people left things behind and the places where they left no obvious trace, as well as the relationships between them. This not only affects the interpretation of the past but also how archaeological data is collected. These ideas are explored in this paper with examples from public archaeology in Rhode Island and from research in Iron Age Ireland, to begin to develop ways to think about the "empty spaces" of the past.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Mind the Gap: Archaeological Approaches to Null Data Spaces   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

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