Paper short abstract:

The imaginary landscapes of Minoan frescoes may be understood in a new light when considered as synaesthetic material culture, offering multisensory experiences to, and of, the divine.

Paper long abstract:

Depictions of plants are relatively common in Minoan iconography, and have earned this society as reputation as "flower-lovers". Large-scale frescoed landscapes have been the focus of much scholarly attention, and interpretations are many and varied. Some such scenes also feature female figures amidst the plants or on adjacent walls, often understood as divinities. Proposing a link to religious ritual and the concomitant power associated with its control has therefore been especially common in readings of this imagery. This paper takes a fresh look at these imaginary landscapes and their associated hybrid plants, and suggests that to simply "read" them may be to neglect a key aspect of their function as synaesthetic material culture. Sensory information is not just biological, but culturally conditioned, and can be expressed in iconography in various ways. Such imagery is not only for visual consumption but serves to trigger or enhance other sensory responses. Using this concept, Minoan painted floral scenes need not be merely symbolic, but can be understood as providing year-round aroma, which functioned on two sensory levels: pleasing divine beings, and bringing humans into closer contact with experiences of divinity. Further archaeological evidence from the Bronze Age Aegean supports the theory that olfactory offerings played important roles in rituals, and that a more embodied interpretation of material culture may offer fresh insights. Moreover, controlling interaction with these landscapes (and with the divine) through manipulating physical experiences of them can be seen as a subtle yet deeply corporeal wielding of power.

Paper short abstract:

The uplands of South Wales played a central role in the subsistence of the Iron Age Silures. Along with this, the natural landscape may have brought about a spiritual connection that led to the upland area gaining a symbolic power within the culture of the Silures.

Paper long abstract:

South Wales during the Iron Age was mostly occupied along the lowland coastal regions. The tribe of the area, the Silures, may have limited their upland occupation due to a sacred connection with the area. Using a phenomenological approach, the upland area of South Wales can be seen as providing socio-economic, cultural, and even spiritual aspects to the native lifestyle.

Limestone in the area may have become symbolic through the natural interaction with water apparent at caves, caverns and sinkholes. As well, an economic connection can be found in its use in Silurian Lydney-Llanmelin ware pottery. A ridge from Risca to Pontypool in the south-east has been viewed as a reclining female figure with a head, breast, and body. Similar connections to landscape have been found in County Kerry, Ireland, and South Dakota, USA. Most importantly, the agro-pastoral subsistence of the Silures relied heavily upon the uplands for their resources. This creates a close connection to the land that, when coupled with the limestone and reclining female, can inevitably lead to strong spiritual reverence.

The natural landscape of South Wales and the resources provided to the Silures from the exploitation of limestone and an agro-pastoral subsistence may have created a spiritual connection over time that resulted in a reverence for the uplands.

Paper short abstract:

In landscape dynamics different social groups can read as well create social and even ideological messages, through which a social position can be craved for and or derived. In the process of the creation of a new landscape in the salt marshes of coastal Flanders, comital power had a unique opportunity to organise space, society and environment. Their concepts were adopted and transformed into more subtle dynamics in the landscape in the centuries that followed. The coastal landscape of Flanders and its direct and indirect symbolic features were and are as such active means of constructing continuously changing realities.

Paper long abstract:

Landscapes are the dynamic result of how subsequent changing social contexts and their spatial features, from the management of the environment to architectural elements, as well as dependent senses of place constitute society and one's position in society. As such in the dynamic of landscape different social groups can read as well create social and even ideological messages, through which a social position can be craved for and or derived. In the process of the creation of a new landscape in the salt marshes of coastal Flanders, comital power had a unique opportunity to organise space, society and environment. In doing so, the counts communicated their princely, neo-Carolingian ambitions, amongst others through the construction of comital castles and collegiate churches in Bruges and other towns, but also the construction of sluices and water-infrastructure. Comital agency also resulted in the creation of dependent social groups with their own imprint upon the landscape, making subtle distinctions to appropriate landscape-ideology, i.c. moats, churches and so on. These subtle distinctions however were reinterpreted after the adoption and transformation of their messages by free farmers from the late medieval period on, signifying the shift in society from comital power base to commercial agro-system.

The coastal landscape of Flanders and its direct and indirect symbolic features were and are as such active means of constructing continuously changing realities. It shows the complexity of landscape dynamics and our understanding of them.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the relationship between the materialisation of power relations and the reification of social structure in high medieval south-eastern Ireland.

Paper long abstract:

The physical environment provides a key interface between social structure, the symbolic universe of explanation (cf. Berger and Luckmann 1967) and human action. It is argued in this paper that the material encoding of power relation figurations into the landscape via monument construction provides a crucial means for the (re)shaping of habitus and the internalising of social power relations. This is especially true in episodes of colonial landscape transformation, such as that which occurred in south-eastern Ireland in the Anglo-Norman period. These episodes provide an opportunity to examine the reinterpretation and/or reordering of place, i.e. space transformed by human interaction.

Secular and ecclesiastic conspicuous monumentality are examined in this respect. Also under examination is the extent to which it can be said that there are archetypal monuments associated with different facets of power, proposing the castle, or elite defended residence, and the church, or monumental ritual centre, as two such archetypes with cross cultural parallels across space and time.

Paper short abstract:

In considering state formation process archaeologically, it is useful to consider how the tumuli of ‘chiefly’ person(s) were constructed in the landscape. I will consider these issues from the viewpoints of the ‘alternation of generations’ of local chiefs, and the symbolic meanings of the landscape formed through building monumental tumuli.

Paper long abstract:

In considering state formation process archaeologically, it is useful to consider how the tumuli of 'chiefly' person(s) were constructed and how these tumuli, settlement area and fields formed the landscape for the living people. In this paper, I will consider these issues from the viewpoints of the 'alternation of generations' of local chiefs, and the symbolic meanings of the landscape formed through building monumental tumuli.

This paper examines the Kofun (mounded tomb) period of proto-historic Japan which is dated from middle 3rd to late 6th centuries. In this period, more than 5,200 keyhole-shaped tumuli were built across a wide area of the Japanese archipelago. These tumuli varied in size from 20m to more than 400m, and each tumulus was for one or several persons. The characteristics of these tumuli are summarized as below: 1) in many cases, a new tumulus was built when the chiefly person(s) died or once the person in question had achieved chiefly status, after which point the tumuli of previous generations were abandoned; 2) because of 1), this lead to the continuous practice of tumulus construction especially in the western and central part of the archipelago, resulting in a remarkable density of mounded tombs. I will discuss how the social power of local chiefs was maintained, legitimized and renewed through this process of continuous landscape formation. In this way we can understand how the building of new tumuli was embedded in the process of social reproduction over a period of three hundred years.

Paper short abstract:

This paper argues that an iconography redolent at Irish royal sites represents a material manifestation of early Irish kingship ideology. Through examining the monuments perpetuating that ideology, it examines how authority was constituted and power exercised at royal sites between c.400-800AD.

Paper long abstract:

In early medieval Ireland kingship was vested in places. Power was exercised through the manipulation of ceremonial landscapes which were redolent with antiquity. Despite the many complexities of the Irish hierarchy of kingship, scrutiny of royal sites (Tara, Cashel, and Clogher) reveals a labyrinth of interconnected monumentalities; sets of common cultural, architectural, iconographic and spatial motifs prevailed upon repeatedly to construct kingship. This 'iconography' represents a tradition: a monumentality of ideologies of kingship with roots which, though persisting into the medieval period, lay ultimately in prehistoric practices. Motifs like internally ditched enclosures, mounds, figures-of-8 and a northeast/southwest axis can be found at expressed at 'royal sites' during the Bronze Age and Iron Age. With the arrival of Christianity the ideology and iconography appropriate to the begetting of sacred space and the imagining of royal sites was appropriated, re-interpreted and re-imagined by the early ecclesiastical elite. This paper analyses how the symbolic system and imagining of place contained within that iconography of kingship changed during the period 400-800AD. It explores how power was constructed and exercised, and how authority was constituted, imagined and challenged in early medieval Ireland. In so doing, it argues that this iconography and tradition of monumentality was central to discourses of power, place and ideology, and concerned, ultimately, with re-defining the materiality of people and place. By tracing the changing contexts through which these motifs are found expressed, it will be suggested that one can observe an evolving ideology of kingship and a political context which necessitated such developments.

Paper short abstract:

Deliberately constructed coastal settlement mounds developed as a crucial component in the cultural landscape of Viking-Norse Orkney: structuring local systems of economic and social authority, while becoming central to – and symbolic of – the exercise of power in those areas by the Orkney Earls.

Paper long abstract:

Viking-Norse settlers in Orkney first stamped their authority on coastal landscapes by building over existing settlement. In so doing they deliberately constructed settlement mounds which dominated the landscape physically and legitimised their authority by appropriating mound symbolism potent in both the Norwegian homelands and Orkney.

These mounds were then enhanced over the Viking-Norse period in a purposeful process of superimposing buildings, yards and middens. Mounds symbolised control of the local landscape and people: monumentalising the power to command labour and to create the midden and detritus crucial to repeated re-building on mounds of coastal wind-blown sand. A large mound represented local social and economic success: considerable labour, generous feasts and more productive farming, fishing and gathering were needed to generate their conspicuous contours. Local people navigated by mounds socially and well as geographically.

Coastal mound settlements are also linked to Skaill (ON skáli) place-names, indicating a role in the overarching power structures of the Orkney Earldom. Authority was exercised through a retinue of powerful men and reciprocal arrangements of support and tribute based on personal loyalty. Feasting and formalised hospitality were central to this system. The Skaill sites were among those which hosted peripatetic powerful men, and brought local power structures in contact with political requirements to pay tribute and provide food and lodgings. Settlement mounds thus symbolised the developing power structures of the Earldom. Later, as the administrative system of Latinate Christian kingship permeated the Earldom, mounds lost their symbolic power and the settlement of authority moved elsewhere

Paper short abstract:

Landscapes of violence articulate meaning through culturally embedded symbolic vocabularies. This paper explores how these meanings can be unpicked through an inter-disciplinary analysis of battlefield landscapes in early medieval Britain.

Paper long abstract:

This paper takes as its starting point the idea that warfare is a communicative strategy that - through the medium of violence - enacts social ideas of power, domination and hierarchy. It is, in other words, a performance that simultaneously enacts and absorbs cultural ideas that exist within a wider cognitive framework. Like other ritual and symbolic behaviour, the places where violence occurs should not be considered as mere backdrops to the action (or, as traditional military history would have it, a tactical resource to be exploited or an obstacle to be circumvented) but as socially constructed places with profound embedded meaning.

Social attitudes to landscape undoubtedly impact on the way that warfare is practised - most obviously in the choice (or avoidance) of locations for battle - but also by informing the wider cognitive framework in which violence - with all its performative symbolism - is conceptualised.

After outlining the theoretical basis for the crucial relationship between landscape and warfare, the paper goes on to reference several battles recorded in documentary sources of the early Middle Ages in Britain. In an avowedly inter-disciplinary approach, the paper shows how ancestral, territorial, religious and supernatural power were manifested and articulated through violent action in the landscape.