Creating Communities by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Archaeology
ISBN: 9781782973287
Publisher: Oxbow Books Ltd
Published: 2009-06-30T04:00:00+00:00

Scene by the brook: early Neolithic landscape perspectives in the Paris Basin

Penny Bickle

Introduction

The early Neolithic or Rubané Récent du Bassin parisien (RRBP) settlements of the Paris Basin provide us with a rich and varied collection of remains. The villages of longhouses are overwhelmingly set into wooded river valleys, occupying a zone that would have been the boundary between a denser woodland and open flood plain (Bogucki 1988; Gronenborn 1999; Ilett et al. 1982; Whittle 1996). However, as our ecological understanding of this landscape is gradually becoming more refined (Bakels 1995; Bernard 1998; Chartier 1991; Leroyer 1997), there has been little rapprochement between the powerful understandings of the place of houses, animal bones, ceramics, lithics and human burials in the lives of RRBP communities, and their wider landscapes. Thus, while invaluable research has been carried out on the social aspects of the houses (Coudart 1998), the animal bones (Hachem 1995; 2000; Sidéra 2000), the ceramic assemblages (Constantin 1985), the lithics (Allard 1997) and burials (Jeunesse 1997), the place of the RRBP communities within their landscapes remains a missing part of the archaeological discussion.

The challenge of landscape archaeology is not only to study what falls between the sites on distribution maps, but also to consider the practices and routines which brought past peoples into their landscapes. This is, of course, to ask questions of past communities and their experiences in their physical and social worlds, rather than of the material remains themselves. The thinking of the phenomenological philosophers has been extremely influential on the practice of exploring prehistoric landscapes (Cummings and Whittle 2004; Edmonds 1999; Tilley 1994; 2004; Thomas 1996). The insight provided by this work has allowed archaeology to realise that people and their on-going daily engagement (whether social, with the environment or with material objects) cannot be separated into categories of natural and cultural, physical and social, routine and ceremony (Ingold 2000; Tilley, 1994; Thomas 1996; 2004). The aim of archaeological landscape studies, specifically those informed by a phenomenological approach, is thus not to explore the role of the natural world in which a community lives, but rather to examine the conditions of engagement with the landscape to better explore situated experiences in the past.

This does not mean, however, that the phenomenological approach is without limitations. While it can inform a general attitude to landscape, phenomenology does not provide a methodology. Thus, as Tilley (2004, 1) states, ‘phenomenology is a style or manner of thought rather than a set of doctrines, rules or procedures that may be followed’. Phenomenology does not therefore prescribe the questions that we should ask of the past. It also posits that the natural sciences are not the only way of understanding the world, without discrediting the valuable discoveries made through these subjects. In order to expand the archaeology of the early Neolithic landscape of the Paris Basin, I will take a phenomenological perspective as a starting point, but will develop narratives around the reconstruction of the physical environment and the tasks that framed people’s engagement with the landscape.

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