Ulla Rajala - Forms of Dwelling: 20 Years of Taskscapes in Archaeology

20 Years of Taskscapes in Archaeology

edited by

Ulla Rajala and Philip Mills

Published in the United Kingdom in 2017 by

OXBOW BOOKS

The Old Music Hall, 106108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JE

and in the United States by

OXBOW BOOKS

1950 Lawrence Road, Havertown, PA 19083

Oxbow Books and the individual contributors 2017

Paperback Edition: ISBN 978-1-78570-377-5

Digital Edition: ISBN 978-1-78570-378-2 (epub)

Mobi Edition: ISBN 978-1-78570-379-9 (mobi)

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the publisher in writing.

For a complete list of Oxbow titles, please contact:

Oxbow Books is part of the Casemate Group

Front cover: A postcard with a view of Odda and Srfjorden from c. 18901900 (Library of Congress).

T IINA IKS

Archaeology, Faculty of Humanities,

University of Oulu, Finland

B OB C LARKE

Department of Archaeology, University of Exeter

A NNE D RAGESET

Department of Archaeology, History,
Cultural Studies and Religion,
University of Bergen, Norway

K ILLIAN D RISCOLL

UCD School of Archaeology,
University College Dublin, Ireland

M ATT E DGEWORTH

Archaeology and Ancient History,
University of Leicester

A NDREW F LEMING

Emeritus Professor of Archaeology
University of Wales Trinity St David

T OM G ARDNER

Department of Archaeology,

School of History, Classics, and Archaeology,
University of Edinburgh

P IRJO H AMARI

Archaeology, Department of Philosophy,
History, Culture and Art Studies,
University of Helsinki, Finland

T IM I NGOLD

Department of Anthropology, School of Social
Science, University of Aberdeen

A RJA K ARIVIERI

Department of Archaeology and Classical Studies,
Stockholm University, Sweden

P HILIP M ILLS

Archaeology and Ancient History,
University of Leicester

A STRID J. N YLAND

Archaeological Museum,
University of Stavanger, Norway

C AROLINE P HILLIPS

Anthropology, School of Social Sciences,
University of Auckland, New Zealand

U LLA R AJALA

Department of Archaeology and Classical Studies,
Stockholm University, Sweden

J ULIAN T HOMAS

Archaeology,

School of Arts, Languages and Cultures,
University of Manchester

C OLTON V OGELAAR

Department of Anthropology,
University of Victoria, Canada

A LEXANDER W ESTRA

USTC Archaeometry Laboratory,

University of Science and Technology of China,

Hefei, Anhui Province, China

A LEXANDER W OOD

Independent Researcher and Field Archaeologist,

Edinburgh, Scotland

20 years of taskscapes

Tim Ingolds seminal paper The Temporality of the Landscape was originally published in World Archaeology in October 1993. That paper was based on a presentation he had given in the session Place, time and experience: interpreting prehistoric landscapes, at the Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG) conference at the University of Leicester in December 1991. Thus, it was fitting that TAG was also the venue chosen for a 20-year anniversary session of this articles publication. Organised by Philip Mills (University of Leicester) and Ulla Rajala (Stockholm University), the 20 years of taskscapes: from temporalities to ceramiscenes session took place in the Bournemouth TAG in December 2013.

The original idea for the 2013 session came from Rajala who had used the concept of taskscape in her PhD (Rajala 2002) and was interested in the development of the concept in the two decades since its inception. The concept of the taskscape and how it may be applied to incomplete archaeological datasets was very much at the heart of the idea of the ceramiscene that Rajala has been developing with Mills since 2008. Mills and Rajala were fortunate to get Tim Ingold himself to give the keynote paper, a revised version of which is published in this book ().

Due to the coincidence of Rajalas postdoctoral position at Stockholm University with the Nordic TAG held there in Easter 2014, Rajala and Mills organised a complimentary session Landscapes of temporalities and activities for that conference. Both the Bournemouth and Stockholm sessions were attended by a wide range of specialists with broad interests. The enthusiasm in the topic has grown, so we are able to invite a few papers that were not given at the original sessions to fill in lacunae in how Ingolds work has influenced archaeologists and anthropologists of different periods.

The importance of Ingolds paper can be assessed using Google Scholar (as Rajala did in November 2014). Ingolds original World Archaeology article was published in the thematic issue Conceptions of Time and Ancient Society. The same issue from October 1993 had several articles from a range of important researchers and archaeological theorists, but none of the other articles has had such a wide impact ( nicely demonstrates the volume of importance.

This introduction starts with an exploration of Ingolds initial idea of the taskscape, and the biographical context which helped form the concept. This is followed by an overview of how the concept has been used and developed over the last couple of decades. The next section details some current uses of the concept, especially Mills and Rajalas (2011a) ceramiscene and attempt to model archaeological interactions within the landcape using ceramic markers for the departed agents. Finally, there is an overview of the papers gathered for this book.

Table 1.1: The bibliometrics of the different articles published in the World Archaeology Volume 25, Issue 2 in Google Scholar (11 November 2014)

Ingolds landscapes and taskscapes

Ingolds (1993) thinking was based on the belief in the unity of archaeology and social anthropology. In a landscape context this approach makes a difference between permanent features and temporalities. Ingold (1993, 1689) considered a landscape and its terrain together as a permanence. As a background to a human life-cycle, landscape and its features are invariant, but they are not immune to change. Flowing rivers, climate and working humans, amongst other agencies, alter the landscape as time passes. Within this Ingolds taskscape is basically a socially constructed space of human activity (Van Hove and Rajala 2004), understood as having spatial boundaries and delimitations for the purposes of analysis (Ingold 1993, 1569; Mills and Rajala 2011a, 2). Taskscape, as well as landscape, is to be considered as perpetually in process and never finished rather than in a static or otherwise immutable state due to the passage of time. In his article, Ingold (1993) assessed the meaning of landscapes and their character as social constructs.