(Sea)ways of Perception: An integrated maritime-terrestrial approach to modelling prehistoric seafaring
(Sea)ways of Perception: An integrated maritime-terrestrial approach to modelling prehistoric seafaring
The seaways have played a significant role in the movement of people, goods and ideologies since prehistory; yet, the ephemerality of movement combined with the paucity of direct evidence for prehistoric seafaring has challenged more refined understandings of the role of early seafaring in anthropogeny. Advances in digital methodologies within archaeology, such as least-cost approaches, allow more nuanced models of movement to be generated but suffer from dichotomous approaches to land and sea. These disentangled land-sea perspectives have long been criticised as ineffectual for understanding past maritime cultures, and previous discussions of prehistoric seafaring more specifically have advocated the consideration of the unique character of maritime space in order to more closely actuate a seafarer’s perspective. Drawing on these ideas, this paper argues that more nuanced approaches to past seafaring are not only necessary but also achievable through holistic perspectives, heuristic methods and scaled-down resolutions, which allow for a more contextualised understanding of the spatiality and temporality—i.e. the human-scale—of maritime movement. This will be demonstrated through an integrated land-sea least-cost method to model Neolithic seafaring around the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. It is not the intention of this paper to advocate solely for the methodology outlined here but rather to demonstrate the need to consider and understand the unique character of maritime space and its many influences on the practices being studied. Only through such contextualised cognition can the perspectives and ideologies of past seafarers and the role of seafaring in anthropogeny truly be understood.
maritime archaeology, GIS, Scotland, Least-cost analysis, Prehistory, Environment, Neolithic, seafaring
Blankshein, Stephanie
5e381628-abca-4861-815e-837d1f8ed5ff
21 September 2021
Blankshein, Stephanie
5e381628-abca-4861-815e-837d1f8ed5ff
Blankshein, Stephanie
(2021)
(Sea)ways of Perception: An integrated maritime-terrestrial approach to modelling prehistoric seafaring.
Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory.
(doi:10.1007/s10816-021-09536-4).
Abstract
The seaways have played a significant role in the movement of people, goods and ideologies since prehistory; yet, the ephemerality of movement combined with the paucity of direct evidence for prehistoric seafaring has challenged more refined understandings of the role of early seafaring in anthropogeny. Advances in digital methodologies within archaeology, such as least-cost approaches, allow more nuanced models of movement to be generated but suffer from dichotomous approaches to land and sea. These disentangled land-sea perspectives have long been criticised as ineffectual for understanding past maritime cultures, and previous discussions of prehistoric seafaring more specifically have advocated the consideration of the unique character of maritime space in order to more closely actuate a seafarer’s perspective. Drawing on these ideas, this paper argues that more nuanced approaches to past seafaring are not only necessary but also achievable through holistic perspectives, heuristic methods and scaled-down resolutions, which allow for a more contextualised understanding of the spatiality and temporality—i.e. the human-scale—of maritime movement. This will be demonstrated through an integrated land-sea least-cost method to model Neolithic seafaring around the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. It is not the intention of this paper to advocate solely for the methodology outlined here but rather to demonstrate the need to consider and understand the unique character of maritime space and its many influences on the practices being studied. Only through such contextualised cognition can the perspectives and ideologies of past seafarers and the role of seafaring in anthropogeny truly be understood.
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Submitted date: 2 September 2020
Accepted/In Press date: 12 September 2021
e-pub ahead of print date: 21 September 2021
Published date: 21 September 2021
Additional Information:
Funding Information:
The authorship of this work and the research on which it is based was supported by the Leverhulme Trust and the University of Southampton. I am most grateful to Prof. Fraser Sturt for his supervision of this research, his continued advice and support on writing it up for publication and his feedback on numerous drafts. I am also indebted to Prof. Duncan Garrow for his comments on the initial and final drafts, which helped to narrow the focus of the paper down and polish the final revision. I am similarly grateful to Felix Pedrotti for innumerable discussions of the methodology and imagery. The analysis that forms the basis of this research benefited greatly from the inclusion of palaeotidal data, and I am thankful to the team that generated this data, specifically Simon Neill for providing and discussing the data and Sophie Ward for her encouragement of this research and her comments on this paper before submission. Interpretations of the resulting seafaring models were strongly influenced by small boat pilots produced by Imray, Laurie, Norie and Wilson Ltd and Bob Bradfield at Antares Charts, and I thank them both for allowing me to reproduce their charts in this paper. Finally, I owe much gratitude to the editors and reviewers who saw the merits of this research and provided thorough and supportive feedback that contributed greatly to the final text.
Funding Information:
The authorship of this work was supported by a grant from the Leverhulme Trust, and the doctoral research on which it is based was partly funded by the University of Southampton’s Vice-Chancellor’s Scholarship.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021, The Author(s).
Keywords:
maritime archaeology, GIS, Scotland, Least-cost analysis, Prehistory, Environment, Neolithic, seafaring
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 451504
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/451504
ISSN: 1072-5369
PURE UUID: 0e111993-7410-475c-b45e-9f830b68b8a8
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Date deposited: 04 Oct 2021 16:33
Last modified: 17 Mar 2024 03:48
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