Professor Knut Andreas Bergsvik: The Importance of Landscape and Landscape Perceptions

Lecture title: The Importance of Landscape and Landscape Perceptions to In-group and Between-group Relations among Hunter-Fishers of Neolithic Western Norway

Date: 11 October 2007, 5.15pm

Venue: Archaeology Lecture Theatre, High School Yards, Infirmary Street, Edinburgh

Biography

Professor Knut Andreas Bergsvik is from the Department of Archaeology, History, Cultural Studies and Religion at the University of Bergen, Norway.

Lecture abstract

During the last few years, several scholars have emphasized the importance of landscape and landscape perceptions among hunter-fishers and early farmers of northern Europe.

In this lecture, such perceptions are first discussed based on ethnographic information from three hunter-gatherer/hunter-herder populations from the recent past: the Saami, the Aborigines of the Western Desert of Australia, and the Tlingit Indians of North America.

The lecture will focus particularly on the role of landscape in terms of in-group and between-group social relations. The results of these considerations form the backdrop of a discussion of data from the Early Neolithic groups in western Norway. During that period, people lived mainly as hunter-fishers, and they were sedentary at sites within relatively small territories at the coast, which had marked social boundaries between them. Interestingly, significant amounts of raw materials with known sources, such as slate, sandstone, greenstone and rhyolite, were spread across the entire region. This means that most people probably lived their entire life within relatively small areas, while at the same time many of their tools had been quarried in landscapes far away.

It is suggested that the contrast between the landscapes that people occupied on a daily basis, and the distant landscapes from which the tools were taken, were important for the structuring of in-group as well as between-group relations.