The Archaeology of Movement by Oscar Aldred

Author:Oscar Aldred [Aldred, Oscar]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367195397
Google: 1KybzQEACAAJ
Publisher: CRC Press
Published: 2020-12-18T03:52:47+00:00

Moving images

The last few sections of this chapter have laid the groundwork for the subsequent discussion, and the case study in the following chapter. Each section has engaged with the idea that movement is multi-scalar, that it transcends any particular operational level, and instead permeates multiple strands of evidence about the past from the perspectives of mobile bodies and materials. And to this we should add not only human mobilities but also animals, as there was a symbiotic relationship between farmers and animals in ways that transcend the current approach most archaeology takes (Lorimer 2006; Bull 2011; Nimmo 2011). Furthermore, what has been offered are examples of the various operational approaches too, from thinking about practices to individual sites in a landscape, and the objects themselves that primarily constitute archaeology. But what has been present through this chapter, and the previous one to some extent, but is yet to be fully discussed, is the way in which archaeology articulates past movement with past bodies through present ones. In effect, what I am suggesting is that because movement is omnipresent across multiple scales and lies dormant, or latent, in seemingly outwardly static, solid things, it has been disregarded because the connection between bodies, or rather people, and materials, or objects, remains unproblematized mainly from the point of view of mobility. The question that has been raised but not adequately addressed so far is how we connect, in practical terms, rather than in theory, these different strands of movement in a way that brings past people and their actions to life? And rather than rehearse further justification for why this is important and necessary for archaeology, I simply say that, without doing so, archaeology will remain impoverished, and limited in its scope and what it can say about the past, and it will keep on producing images of unconnected histories (Aldred 2014b: 22; quoted in Adey 2017: 33).

Two ideas blend here that establish the direction I want to take in the next chapter. The first is derived from Tim Ingold’s pivotal paper ‘The Temporality of Landscape’ (1993) in which he suggests that archaeology is nothing unless it is about the temporality of landscape. The paper is concerned, amongst other matters, with how people have inhabited landscape’s places, and journeyed along the paths that connected them. The second idea is offered by Gavin Lucas in The Archaeology of Time (2005) in which he suggests that archaeology can be thought about ‘as a mode of temporalization’. However, what these two ideas reveal through connecting paths and archaeology as a mode but have failed to address adequately, is archaeology’s primary concern with mobility. What does this concern look like in archaeological terms? Some of the topics I discussed in Chapter 1 are clearly good examples, like migration and seasonal movements related to transhumance. But they have generally implemented the understanding of mobility poorly. Others, like the case study in this chapter, are better because there is an ability to follow past movement in a way

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