Social Worlds of Knowledge: Aspects of technology and the social

Material culture has typically been considered either as the result of functional expediency, or in purely symbolic terms. In the first instance the form of the material object is everything, in the second instance the form of the object is secondary to what it signifies. Although there has been a recent focus on the materiality and physicality of material culture, there has been less interest in how the physical nature of material culture is actually shaped by aspects of the social and cultural. In focusing on technology an emphasis is placed not only on the physical form of things, but also on the sequence of activities which lead to this form, technology is then seen as shaping not only what things look like, but how things are made.

The contributions to this session set out to explore these broad ideas in the context of both artefactual material, as well as field monuments and landscapes. Studies range from the Neolithic to the Post-Medieval, and are concerned with ceramics, metalwork, the form of chambered tombs, burial cists, brochs and field systems.

Beyond Utility: symbolic aspects of pottery manufacture, use and deposition

The prevalence of the assumption that pottery is a utilitarian container, an indispensable piece of domestic paraphernalia, ensures that ceramic manufacture, use and discard are perceived as exclusively technical or functional processes. Ceramic ethnoarchaeological accounts demonstrate that these assumptions obscure the many symbolic concerns that are known to pervade pottery use. This paper emphasises the capacity of pottery to facilitate and sustain symbolic understanding. The inception of pottery in the Neolithic of Britain and Ireland is explained with recourse to its symbolic potency rather than domestic utility. Aspects of the production, use and deposition of Early Neolithic pottery in these areas are examined to demonstrate the plausibility of this argument.

The Material Histories of Neolithic Pottery: structure and contingency

This paper will argue that many of our understandings of Neolithic pottery are unhelpful because they view material as simply reflecting social relations, however those social relations are imagined as working. This distances us from the material history we are trying to understand, and reduces any patterning we see to a single pre-determined cause.

I will argue instead that we can use the evidence for social activity during the 'life' of this pottery; its production, use and deposition, to build a history from the bottom up. A pot has the meaning it has because of its contingent history and associations. By looking at the detail of the 'lives' of pots I will explore the history of these meanings at both a site and regional level.

From the Womb to the Tomb: Pots, Metaphors and the shape of technology

Pots are made, used and broken by people on a regular basis throughout their lives, yet the influence of the social bears little relationship on the production and use of pots in many conventional analysis of archaeological ceramics. Pottery does not exist in a cultural vacuum, rather its material production and use is shaped by a series of cultural ideas concerning its place in the social world, indeed the particular nature of these ideas will influence the precise way in which this technology is conceptualised.

This paper will explore the way in which those metaphors concerned with the personification of objects are instrumental in determining the shape of technology in relation to different categories of vessel and the way in which these metaphors influence the specific biographies and identities attached to pots. This paper will focus on a specific case study which centres on the production and use of Late Neolithic Grooved ware at the settlement site of Barnhouse, Orkney.

Artefacts and Technology: bronzework-ritual and practical production

Technology as a distinct concept post dates the industrial revolution and its uncritical use has done much to hinder comprehension when dealing with the material culture of prehistoric society. Through an analysis of bronze swords and spears of the Later Bronze Age, this paper seeks to underline two essential aspects of the culture which produced them. Firstly, the inseparability of ritual and practical aspects of all acts related to material culture, from manufacture to deposition, and secondly, the continuous nature of the interrelationships between form, function and the symbolic significance of objects.

The Architecture of Sound

We live in an environment full of sound, yet prehistory has tended to remain a silent world. While people were able to generate noises in the past, the degree to which material culture can reveal the role fulfilled by sound in Neolithic Britain remains unclear. Monuments have been increasingly understood as visual and physical expressions of the social order which could direct movement and perception. This investigation has sought to extend these possibilities by considering whether some architecture may also represent a technology for the creation and manipulation of sound.

While it seems unlikely that prehistoric communities possessed an intimate knowledge of acoustic science, it may be possible to determine whether their structures incorporate features which appear to exploit any physical principles of sound. Drawing upon research conducted on megalithic tombs over the past year, it is suggested that the design of many monuments is suited to the generation of unusual acoustic effects. This may contribute a further dimension to our understanding of monuments in the Neolithic, and in particular our awareness of the range of social processes and decisions which culminated in the construction of specific architectural forms.

The Technology of Decay

This paper examines the creation of particular material forms and the social implications of the technology involved in their manufacture. Drawing on examples of cists and similar stone-built structures in later prehistoric Orkney, this paper will involve an interpretative reading of these structures arising from the excavation of a specific cist. As a result, an argument is advanced which explores the possibilities of a whole range of social meaning being embodied in their construction.

Brochs: Dry Stones and Society

The broch is a monumental architectural form, presenting an almost seamless and apparently impenetrable face to its surroundings. It has therefore seemed natural for archaeologists to ascribe a defensive function to these forbidding structures, to view them as impermeable stone containers for the protection of people and things in troubled times. Whilst there are good empirical reasons to question a purely defensive interpretation of the brochs, the concept of 'defence' itself is theoretically weak in this context; it fails to account for the architectural complexity of these structures and the ways in which their meaning may have been created through routine practices, including those involved in the processes of building and reconstruction. Using material from sites in Caithness, this paper will argue that, far from being a monumental, unchanging reflection of the isolationist and warlike tendencies of their builders, the brochs were implicated in interpretative social strategies of permeability and exclusion, involving the re-working and elaboration of social spaces through the technology of dry-stone architecture.

Improving their Minds; Technological and Social Aspects of the 'Improvements' in Nineteenth Century Orkney.

The technologies employed in farming Orcadian land underwent a fundamental change in the wake of the agricultural 'improvements' of the mid-nineteenth century. As the term 'improvements' implies, these changes were seen to be evolutionary; a natural progression from the inefficient combination of small farms, crofts and common pastures to the organized and productive system of enclosed fields and large farms.

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that these changes were neither evolutionary nor purely economic, and that social and cultural beliefs were integral to the technologies which shaped the Orcadian landscape both before and after the 'improvements'. An examination will be made of the conflicting beliefs and practices of tenants and landowners, and of the effect which the physical changes made to the landscape had on its inhabitants. The discussion will centre on the island of Rousay, where the survival of an early nineteenth century field system allows comparisons to be made with the surrounding 'improved' landscape.

Space and Material Culture: Dimensions of Causality in the use of a Tropical Forager Rockshelter

The study of hunters and gatherers is traditionally dominated by functionalist and ecological approaches. This applies equally to examinations on a micro level (inter-site) and on a macro level (inter-site). In the former case site and location use is examined in relation to the practical necessities of refuse disposal and economic tasks, in the latter case the relation of sites to each other is often explained as a function of optimal acquisition strategies. The role of material culture in forager societies is usually conceptualised in the same terms.

Ethnoarchaeological research might be a useful way to overcome such simplistic concepts and to examine material culture and its patterning as a product of social and cultural practice. A possible approach to the problem is illustrated by the analysis of a rockshelter campsite of the Semang-Negrito foragers of Southern Thailand.