Historicising Heritage and Emotions

The Affective Histories of Blood, Stone and Land

Alicia Marchant

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367660529
• eBook ISBN: 9781315472874
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Arqueología

Historicising Heritage and Emotions examines how heritage is connected to and between people and places through emotion, both in the past and today. Discussion is focused on the overlapping categories of blood (families and bloodlines), stone (monuments and memorials) and land (landscape and places imbued with memories), with the contributing authors exploring the ways in which emotions invest heritage with affective power, and the transformative effects of this power in individual, community and cultural contexts.

The 13 chapters that make up the volume take examples from the premodern and modern eras, and from two connected geographical regions, the United Kingdom, and Australia and the Pacific. Each chapter seeks to identify, historicise and contextualise the processes of heritage and the emotional regimes at play, locating the processes within longer historical and transnational genealogies and critically appraising them as part of broader cultural currents. Theoretically grounded in new approaches to the history of emotions and critical heritage studies, the analysis challenges the traditional scholarly focus on heritage in its modern forms, offering multifaceted premodern and modern case studies that demonstrate heritage and emotion to have complex and vibrant histories.

Offering transhistorical and multidisciplinary discussion around the ways in which we can talk about, discuss, categorise and theorise heritage and emotion in different historical contexts, Historicising Heritage and Emotions is a valuable resource for students and scholars interested in heritage, emotions and history.

Part I

Affective histories of blood, stone and land in Medieval and Early Modern Britain

1Carved in stone

Engaging with the past in Medieval Orkney

Sarah Randles¹

Orkney, an archipelago of some 70 islands off the northeast tip of Scotland, is now thought of by most Britons, including some Orcadians themselves, as remote and isolated. However, it has had several heydays in which it was an extremely important site, due to its highly fertile land, significantly warmer climate compared to the adjacent mainland of Scotland and its location on major sea routes between Britain and Scandinavia. Successive waves of migration and cultural changes are recorded in a wealth of stone monuments, from the Neolithic period to the present, which define the landscape and provide a highly visible, layered history.

The most famous and frequently visited locations on Orkney are those comprising the UNESCO World Heritage site known as the Heart of Neolithic Orkney. This site was listed by UNESCO in 1999 as a centre of ‘exceptional universal value.’ It includes a number of monuments within a mile from one another, clustering around a narrow strip of land between the saltwater Loch of Stenness and the freshwater Loch of Harray, framed by surrounding hills. It also includes two stone circles and their surrounding henges, the Standing Stones of Stenness (c.3100 BC), which form the oldest stone circle in Britain at 5000 years old, and the more recent Ring of Brodgar about a mile away (c.2500–2000 BC). Nearby is the Barnhouse village (abandoned c.2600 BC) and between them is the new and ongoing excavation of the Ness of Brodgar (c.3500 BC), which has been interpreted as a temple complex. Within line of sight of the stone circles is the huge burial mound of Maeshowe (c.2800 BC), containing a stone-chambered tomb. The Heart of Neolithic Orkney also includes the village of Skara Brae (occupied from 3180 BC to c.2500 BC) at the Bay of Skail on the western coast of Mainland, the largest island in the archipelago.

The Orkney landscape also encompasses many other stone monuments beyond the UNESCO site. The Neolithic Knap of Howar (c.3700 BC), on the island of Westray, is believed to be Europe’s oldest stone dwelling. Round houses and brochs, such as the well-preserved Broch of Gurness (c.500–200 BC), and enigmatic carved symbol stones from the sixth to ninth centuries AD stand testament to the Pictish occupation of Orkney. Norse hogback graves at the Brough of Birsay (tenth to twelfth centuries), the twelfth-century bishop’s palace at Birsay, St Magnus Kirk on Egilsay, and St Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall, founded in 1137, represent the Christian heritage of Orkney. The nineteenth-century Martello towers at Hackness and Crockness, and the ancient sheep pounds and more modern dyke on North Ronaldsay are amongst the most important secular buildings. There are also many other less-lauded stone monuments, including hundreds of churches, stone houses and walls, as well as the ubiquitous ‘lumps and bumps’ in the landscape which may conceal yet-unexcavated historical and pre-historical monuments.

Stone dominates the landscape and commemorates the past in Orkney in a ubiquitous and unavoidable way. With the land, sea and sky, it forms an elemental part of the islands’ heritage, both in the sense of that which is treasured and more broadly that which is inherited, in accordance with David C. Harvey’s statement that ‘heritage is about the process by which people use the past.’² In the case of Orkney’s stone monuments, the choice of stone as a building material has resulted, in part, from the lack of available alternatives. The number of trees on Orkney declined sharply in the early Neolithic period as a result of climate change and subsequent human activity, meaning that stone was used for purposes which might otherwise have been achieved using wood.³ The survival of not only the houses but the furniture at the Knap of Howar and Skara Brae attests to both its utility and ubiquity. The materiality of the stone itself is integral to its prevalence and survival. The stone used in Orcadian monuments is, for the most part, found locally, allowing it to display a close relationship between the built environment and the land. While not immune to change over time, stone was the most durable of the materials available to builders and artists, making it a suitable substance with which to make artefacts of social and cultural significance which were intended to last, but at the same time was soft enough that it might be shaped and inscribed. The Neolithic and many later buildings are constructed of Orkney flagstone, a hard granite formed in strata, which is exposed at the sea line and easily worked, separating into long, narrow building blocks, as are evident in the tall, narrow standing stones at Brodgar and Stenness, which have endured millennia of exposure to Orkney’s relentless winds. It also lends itself to being used like bricks in smaller pieces to build walls, including in the massive, terraced blocks which form the walls of Maeshowe. Later, in the Christian period, builders favoured the softer Old Orkney red sandstone, prized for its colour and its ability to be worked and carved, used to great effect in Kirkwall’s St Magnus’ Cathedral, but far more susceptible to erosion.

The sense of a visible, tangible past, together with Orkney’s tranquil agrarian landscape and abundant wildlife, led the Orkney Islands Council to promote the islands to tourists in 2004 with the slogan ‘Find time in Orkney.’⁴ In 2009, more than 140,000 visitors, around seven times the number of the resident population, came to do just that.⁵ The stone heritage of Orkney, reflecting the constructions of successive cultures, is both its emotional ‘heart’ and an essential part of its economic lifeblood. The extraordinarily well-preserved archaeological record allows us not only to see the relics of the past for ourselves, but also to glimpse the way that subsequent groups of Orcadian inhabitants viewed the past of their own landscape, including traces of their emotional reactions to their built environments. The unavoidable presence of a past literally set in stone meant that as new settlers arrived or new cultures were embraced, the people of Orkney were obliged to confront and make sense of this stone heritage in emotional as well as practical ways. As Benno Gammerl has noted, emotional styles are shaped by the physical environments in which they take place,⁶ but they are also subject to the prevailing beliefs and practices of the emotional communities which encounter these spaces. This chapter is concerned specifically with the Norse inhabitants of Orkney in the Middle Ages and their responses to the earlier Pictish and Neolithic monuments that they encountered, as well as the material legacy of those responses. This investigation into the longer and multi-layered aspect of the historical built environment of Orkney responds to David C. Harvey’s call to add ‘temporal depth’ to the study of heritage.⁷

The earliest traces of human settlement in Orkney date from the Mesolithic period (c.9000–4000 BC), and are mostly limited to the stone tools used by hunter-gatherers. The Neolithic period (c.4000–1800 BC) saw the gradual evolution of Orcadian society into a primarily agricultural one, and the expansion of the population by means of migration from mainland Scotland. The Neolithic people of Orkney erected chambered burial cairns, ceremonial buildings and standing stones, many of which have remained to become a celebrated part of Orkney’s built environment. While the Bronze Age (c.1800–800 BC) did not have a significant impact on Orkney’s material culture, the Iron Age (c.600–100 BC) saw the building of stone roundhouses, which evolved into fortified brochs. During the first half of the first millennium AD, Orkney was inhabited by a group of people known as Picts, and for a time Orkney was part of the Pictish kingdom of Scotland, though it is not clear whether the Picts of Orkney were predominantly descendants of the Neolithic inhabitants or of immigrants. By the eighth century, Christianity had been established in Orkney, attested in the stone record by a carved eagle, the symbol of St John the Evangelist, at the Knowe of Burrian.⁸

The Norse settlement of Orkney

By the end of the eighth century, however, pagans from Norway had begun to settle in Orkney. The nature of their encounters with the Pictish people who had preceded them remains, in the absence of documentary sources, a matter of controversy, but it is indisputable from the archaeological evidence that the Norse came into contact with Pictish stone buildings and continued to use these sites.⁹ At the Broch of Gurness, in the ninth century, a pagan Norse woman was buried on the site of the disused broch, while several Norse pagan-era graves have been found near an Iron-Age settlement at Pierowalls on the northern island of Westray, suggesting that the sites had acquired or retained some pragmatic or religious significance for the colonisers. At the Brough of Birsay, a tidal island which housed a Pictish settlement, Norse hogback graves are placed near the site of a Pictish slab marker, and a rectilinear twelfth-century Norse church was built over, and at an oblique angle to, the rounded, still-visible remains of Pictish dwellings, in what seems like a deliberate assertion of colonisation. It is clear that Norse culture entirely dominated the islands from the ninth century onwards, and its presence is attested in stone.

Although they had arrived as pagans, by the end of the tenth century Norse Orcadians had converted to Christianity. According to Orkneyinga Saga, written around 1230 by an Icelander, which provides almost all of the documentary evidence for the history of Orkney before the late Middle Ages, this was a sudden, forced conversion. Olaf Tryggvason (later king of Norway and Saint Olaf, or St Ola, as he is known in Orkney) converted Sigurd, Earl of Orkney, in 995, by the simple measure of turning up with a flotilla and threatening to kill him and ravage the islands with fire and steel if he did not consent to be baptised. Sigurd agreed, and the whole of Orkney turned to Christianity, though it is do...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Historicising heritage and emotions
• Part I Affective histories of blood, stone and land in Medieval and Early Modern Britain
• Part II Affective histories of blood, stone and land in Australia and the Pacific
• Bibliography
• Index