Forms of Dwelling

20 years of Taskscapes in archaeology

Ulla Rajala, Phil Mills

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781785703782
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Arqueología

The concept of a socially constructed space of human activity in areas of everyday actions, as initially proposed in the field of anthropology by Tim Ingold, has actually been much more applied in archaeology. In this wide-ranging collection of 13 papers, including a re-assessment by Ingold himself, contributors show why it has been so influential, with papers ranging from the study of Mesolithic to historic and contemporary archaeology, revisiting different research themes, such as Ingold's own Lapland study, and the development of landscape archaeology. A series of case studies demonstrates the value and strength of the taskscape concept applied to a variety of contexts and scales across wide geographical and temporal situations. While exploring new frontiers, the papers contrast British, Nordic and Mediterranean archaeologies to showcase the study of material culture and landscape and conclude with an assessment of the concept of taskcape and its further developments.

Chapter 1

Introduction: from taskscape to ceramiscene and beyond

Ulla Rajala and Philip Mills

20 years of taskscapes

Tim Ingold’s 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 article’s 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 (Chapter 2).

Due to the coincidence of Rajala’s 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 Ingold’s work has influenced archaeologists and anthropologists of different periods.

The importance of Ingold’s paper can be assessed using Google Scholar (as Rajala did in November 2014). Ingold’s 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 (Table 1.1) and lasting influence in archaeological research – as the reminder of this introduction and the whole volume show. The comparison of the number of references to the different articles in the World Archaeology issue in Table 1.1 nicely demonstrates the volume of importance.

This introduction starts with an exploration of Ingold’s 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 Rajala’s (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)

Author	Citations
Rowlands	215
Ingold	1111
Murray	21
Criado Boado & Penedo Romero	14
Bailey	23
Mizoguchi	71
Barrett	25
Dietler & Herbich	31
Cooper	6
Hodder	44

Ingold’s landscapes and taskscapes

Ingold’s (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, 168–9) 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 Ingold’s ‘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, 156–9; 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.

Landscapes are created by movement and taskscapes and their patterns of activities are collapsed into an array of ‘footprints’ (Ingold 1993, 162). Life processes and life as a process relate both to humans as an entity and the landscapes they are living in: human life has its counterpart in the formation of a landscape through living. Ingold (1993, 162–4) advocated a ‘dwelling perspective’, where a taskscape is created through continuous interactivity between landscape and humans. A landscape is thus actively transformed, but this happens both consciously and unconsciously. We are observing a landscape as an end result of cumulative actions at a specific moment.

For Ingold (1993, 157) temporality is neither chronology nor history but duration. He is not interested in describing regular systems of dated intervals, but in the conceptualisation of a merged time where temporality and historicity are not opposed but lived through in the experience of the human actors who are involved in the process of social life. This is logical from the perspective of those who dwell in the landscape.

Temporality is manifested conceptually in taskscapes where embodied activities are carried out by labour that brings value through the medium of social, lived in time into the landscape (Ingold 1993, 159). Ingold’s (1993, 154) taskscape is ‘qualitative and heterogeneous’, since different agents bring different values into it while the social time is constantly changing. As a consequence, different parts of a landscape are differently evaluated by the actors within it at any given moment.

The bodily experiences of the temporarily fixed setting by the actors are perpetually ongoing (Ingold 1993, 169). A landscape can thus be seen as the scene where humans are weaving in the tapestry of everyday life. The scene is not without an impact on the actions, and this is reflected in the concepts he uses: in ‘space’ meanings are attached to it, whereas in landscape they are gathered from it (Ingold 1993, 155). Thus the different characteristics of a temporal landscape provide meanings for the people who live in it. The analysis of Brueghel’s painting The Harvesters as part of the paper showed how these meanings are given and how they can be analysed at a certain point of time.

The features Ingold (1993, 167–70) specifies from The Harversters are: paths and tracks, the tree, the corn and the church apart from the actors are transient and temporal. They can be considered only partly visible in an archaeological record, but such a suggestion gave a model for the deconstruction of a landscape. Very specifically Ingold (1993, 172) also stated that archaeology is the study of the temporality of landscape. The following section will show how appealing it has been for the archaeologists.

Interactions: archaeological success of taskscape

It seems a pre-condition to the success of taskscape and temporality within archaeology that Ingold’s career has been intertwined with interaction with archaeologists (Ingold 2001). Timothy Ingold studied at the University of Cambridge in the Faculty of Archaeology and Anthropology. Ingold himself suggested that his belief in the integration of the three fields of anthropology originates from the character of the combined first year of the Tripos at Cambridge. Before starting University, Ingold had travelled in Finland and Norway, and visited a Skolt Sámi village in Finland: this visit later resulted in his PhD topic. His fieldwork in Finland made him interested in skill, environmental perception and human-animal relations that all merged in his idea of taskscapes.

Ingold’s course ‘Environment and Technology’ at Manchester in the 1970s informed his book Hunters, Pastoralists and Ranchers: Reindeer Economies and their Transformations (Ingold 1980) that had its greatest impact among Palaeolithic and Mesolithic archaeologists (Ingold 2001). Ingold has had a dialogue with archaeologists ever since profoundly shaping his conception of the relationship and closeness of the disciplines. In the 1990s, when he was applying Gibson’s (1979) ecological psychology, his interests overlapped strongly with those of the postprocessual archaeologists, as outlined below, and reinforced his connection to archaeology. The concerns with time, landscape and the persistence and transformations of human ways of life unified his thinking and that of archaeologists.

Ingold was influenced by many contemporary ideas that had importance in archaeology and anthropology as well as in other humanities and social sciences. The links between perception, behaviour and landscape were crucial when one considers the subject matter of taskscapes. One line of influence came from behavioural geography. Gould and White’s 1974 book Mental Maps had introduced the idea of spatial perception from the viewpoints of different individuals and the conceptualised ideas of areas of interaction, familiarity and ignorance that geographers could map at individual and group levels. Similarly, J. J. Gibson’s (1979) ‘affordances’, the concept describing inherent information about the values and meanings in people’s environment, was influential – not the least because of the emphasis on visual perception and actions. Ingold discussed affordances in his 1992 article ‘Perception of environment’ that to...