Real and Imagined Islands: Wet Ontologies in the Neolithic of North Western Europe

Summary

Researchers across the breadth of academia, from oceanographers to political scientists and archaeologists, have all begun to redress the critique of ‘sea-blindness’ leveled at modern society in recent years. The result has been a re-positioning of activity on the water within our accounts of human lives and thought processes – add water and stir. The results have been inspirational, controversial, and at times utterly inoperable beyond the broadest of heuristic devices, when it comes to relating them to prehistory and the questions we have as archaeologists.

In this paper we take a different tack, building an approach to both land and water that is rooted in human activity archaeological data and the imagination. Recent results from work on the land and water of the Western seaways of North-west Europe will be used to re-evaluate how we approach space, place and narrative within the context of the Neolithic.

For context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnQ2Lk20n3U

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20809