Places in Between: The Archaeology of Social, Cultural and Geographical Borders and Borderlands

By Oxbow Books

The concept of the border as a metaphor has been widely exploited across the Arts and Humanities and a body of Border Theory has been developed, critiqued and "rethought". It is remarkable that this body of theory has largely been ignored by archaeologists, who have instead preferred to examine social and cultural boundaries, frontiers, marginality and ethnicity. This book, which grew out of a session at TAG in 2008, explores some of the possibilities offered by the study of borders from an archaeological point of view and presents new perspectives on borders, both metaphorical and geographical, from locations as diverse as Somerset and China, from the Neolithic to the Cold War.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Release date: May 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9781842175910

Book preview

1

Border Crossings

The Archaeology of Borders and Borderlands

An introduction

David Mullin

I drink to Wales!

Gabriel roars: And I to England! and stands,

facing the other across the table….

Gwen purses her lips.

I give the border she says, very quietly.

Margiad Evans The Country Dance (1932)

The concept of the border as a metaphor has been widely exploited across the Arts and Humanities, indeed, an entire body of Border Theory (Michaelsen and Johnson 1997) has been developed, critiqued and rethought (Welchman 1996). It is remarkable, therefore, that this body of theory, and the exploitation of the border as a rhetorical and heuristic device, has largely been ignored by archaeologists, who have instead preferred to examine social and cultural boundaries, frontiers, marginality and ethnicity. It is one of the aims of this book to explore some of the possibilities offered by the study of borders from an archaeological point of view and present some new perspectives informed by border theory.

The study of borders has historically been the realm of geographers (both political and physical) with particular interest paid to international boundaries between nation states. Prescott (1965) summarised the concerns of political geographers in relation to the border landscape and the investigation of political boundaries has become increasingly relevant since the fall of the Berlin Wall, war in the Balkans and the reconfiguration of eastern Europe. Donnan and Wilson (1999, 157) have suggested that the continuing study of international boundaries will further contribute to the understanding of international power relationships, politics and policy. Recent approaches to border studies are summarised in a number of articles and books by authors including Donnan and Wilson (2001), Kolossov (2005), Newman (2006), Rumford (2006) and Welchman (1996). The discipline has its own journal: The Journal of Borderlands Studies whilst the May 2006 issue of the European Journal of Social Theory also took borders as its theme. There is a Centre for Border Studies at the University of Glamorgan; Centres for Borders Research at Queen’s University, Belfast and Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands; a Department of Border Region Studies at the University of Southern Denmark; a Centre for Law and Border Studies at the University of Texas and a Centre for Latin American and Border Studies at the University of New Mexico. The Association for Borderland Studies organises an annual conference, an International Borders Conference was held in 2006 and the Cleveland State University, Ohio has organised a series of symposia with borders as a theme (Medina-Rivera and Orendi 2007).

Whilst this demonstrates the continuing and sustained study of political and geographical boundaries, the concept of the borderland has expanded to include nearly every psychic or geographical space about which one can thematize problems of boundary or limit (Johnson and Michaelson 1997, 1–2) or, more simply, any place where differences come together (Price 2004, 8). These approaches have frequently referred to the classic work Borderlands/La Frontera by Gloria Anzaldua, where the metaphorical qualities of borders and borderlands are explored: the ways in which borderlands can be simultaneously physical, psychological, sexual, racial and class-based are described and the border between the US and Mexico seen as forming the location where two worlds [merge] to form a third country – a border culture (Anzaldua 1987, 3). Indeed, the ability of those living in border regions to access different kinds of discourse which span different ethnicities, communities and nationalities has led to borderlands being described as at once both dangerous and festive (Lavie 1992, 93) and as representing socially charged places where innovative cultural constructs are created and transformed (Lightfoot and Martinez 1995). Scholars in a number of fields have gone on to explore the rich metaphorical qualities of borders and focus has centred on questions of delineation, division and identity; what it means to border other peoples, cultures and ideas and the analysis of the process of bordering: the interaction of inclusive and exclusive practices which distinguish distinct communities (Ackleson 2004, 324).

One of the central themes of border studies has been inter- and trans-disciplinarity (Newman 2006; Brunet-Jailly 2005): the breaking down of borders between institutions, disciplines and approaches in order to better study border phenomena. Archaeology has, so far, unfortunately contributed little to recent studies.

Archaeologists have long been concerned with boundaries and frontiers, but this could be seen as the product of a paradigm rooted in culture-history and concerned with the identification of bounded, homogenous cultural units. The identification of such units has historically been deeply implicated with the legitimisation of national interests and identity through archaeological enquiry. Through the early 20th century, archaeologists such as Kossina and Childe formalised these approaches, the former intrinsically linked with the rise of German National Socialism and the identification of a superior culture linked to an ethnic group which coincided with modern Germany. Kossina (cited in Childe 1956, 28) developed the concept of an archaeological culture as representing clearly recognisable people or tribes, claiming that it was possible to identify groups such as the Germans and Celts and their territories in the archaeological record. Childe (1935, 198–9), went on to define culture in terms of the prevalence of common traditions, institutions and way of life which result in distinctive distributions of material remains. Cultural assemblages related to peoples or folk, but culture and race did not necessarily coincide. For Childe, cultural innovation was constrained by tradition: ways of doing things learnt in childhood were kept in place by cognitive and social norms and thus bounded, homogenous cultural entities were constructed that corresponded to particular peoples, ethnic groups, races or tribes. Culture was perceived as prescriptive and made up of sets of shared beliefs and ideas, maintained by regular interaction and transmitted via socialisation. The result was a continuous and cumulative cultural tradition where change is only possible by particularly innovative groups who were either naturally more creative or advantaged in their environment or biology. Diffusion was thus the key to the explanation of cultural change and the archaeological project was seen as the mapping and describing cultural histories.

Recently, the concept of archaeological material as representing the fragmentary traces of cultural groups with shared ideologies, beliefs and ways of life has given way to approaches which emphasise the role of identity, ethnicity and the person, and the situated and contingent nature of both human experience and social categories. In particular, dissatisfaction with concepts such as culture, society, social group, and increasingly the individual, has led to the diffusion of approaches to material culture and its relationship with the societies, groups or individuals which produced it. Indeed, the rise of phenomenological and landscape archaeologies could be seen as a deliberate avoidance of such questions. This is also reflected in the fragmentation of archaeology as a discipline. Artefacts tend to be studied in isolation: pottery, stone tools, faunal remains and environmental evidence are analysed by different specialists, the links between these classes of evidence rarely studied and their relationship to the built environment frequently overlooked. This fragmentation is enshrined in the way in which excavation reports are constructed and seeps into archaeological discourse: in a recent volume dealing with Monuments and Material Culture (Cleal and Pollard 2004) these two classes of evidence are separated into two different sections (eleven papers relating to monuments, five to material culture), as if they should not be seen as in any way overlapping or related to each other. This is ironic as, in Avebury area with which the volume deals, there is good evidence for the use of certain materials across artificial, archaeologist-constructed boundaries: imported oolitic limestone being used as tempering material for pottery and within the construction of chambered tombs, for example. The significance of such practices cannot be appreciated in a discipline which constructs its own internal boundaries.

One approach which has attempted to reconnect human agents and material culture has been the emerging interest in the role of ethnicity in the organisation of social relations. In an archaeological treatment of ethnicity, Sian Jones (1997) has suggested that, as material culture has an active role in the generation and signification of ethnicity, this undermines the common assumption that degrees of similarity and difference in material culture provide a straightforward indicator of the intensity of interaction between past groups. Material culture should not be seen as a passive reflection of socialisation within bounded ethnic units. Rather, it is actively structured and structuring throughout its social life and has no fixed meaning, but is constantly subject to reproduction and transformation. Distinctive material culture cannot therefore be taken as indicating the presence of a particular group, nor is it an index of social interaction or an indication of a shared normative framework. Monuments and assemblages of material culture have instead to be understood in the context of heterogeneous and often conflicting constructions of cultural identity as, even within a self-identifying ethnic group, identity and the material used to signify it are differently lived and differently articulated by different people. Nevertheless, ethnic identities are not free floating constructions in which individuals can identify themselves and others in any way which suits them: particular ethnic identities are produced under specific sociohistorico-political conditions.

Jones’s approach to ethnicity was heavily influenced by the work of Frederik Barth (1969), who investigated the maintenance of ethnic boundaries and argued that the definition of ethnic categories should be based on the actor’s own characterisation of themselves and others. Crucially, Barth suggested that there is not necessarily a one-to-one relationship between ethnic units and cultural similarities and differences: boundaries are not passive reflections of cultural differentiation, but are actively made and remade in relation to the actors perception of what it means to belong to a particular group. These ideas were further developed by De Vos (1982) who defined ethnic groups as communities which are self consciously united around particular traditions, territory, language or religion. Alternatively, ethnic groups can be defined as a segment of a larger society who are thought by themselves and others to have a common origin and share aspects of a common culture.

These definitions avoid treating cultures as fixed, monolithic entities and enable an analysis of the processes involved in the construction of ethnicity. Society is, however, made up of many groups, not all of them defined by ethnicity. Critiques of archaeological approaches to ethnicity have pointed out that there may be no distinction between ethnic groups and other self-identifying groups, such as those based on gender, class or kinship and approaches to ethnicity have also neglected the explanation of cultural change and transformation. Furthermore, the ways in which such self-identifying groups come into being cannot be adequately explained by the mere description of their cultural traits. A counter to these critiques is that ethnicity can be distinguished from other forms of social grouping such as class, gender and kinship as these can be located within ethnic groups: in effect, such social distinctions are secondary to ethnic identity. Ethnicity, then, is primarily constituted by a consciousness of difference: ethnic groups can be viewed as "self-conscious identity groups constructed through the process of social and cultural comparison vis-à-vis others, rather than as a passive reflection of cultural tradition…" (Jones 1997, 115–6).

The ways in which people come to recognise these commonalties and differences has been poorly theorised, but based largely on Bourdieus’ (1977) concept of habitus: the ways in which people talk, move, make things and interact is structured by, but also structures, the habitus and creates sets of dispositions, acquired through social experience. If ethnicity is viewed in this way, then it is not a passive reflection of similarities and differences in cultural practices and the structural conditions in which people are socialised, and neither is it entirely produced by the process of social interaction: habitus, as a shared set of dispositions, engenders feelings of identification among people which can be consciously appropriated and given form through existing symbolic resources. Ethnic sentiments and interests are derived from similarities in the habitus, but so is the recognition that certain cultural practices are symbolic representations of ethnicity. Manifestations of ethnicity may, then, be seen as the product of an ongoing process which involves the objectification of cultural difference and the embodiment of those differences within the habitus.

Although implicit in the nature of the habitus, locality has a key role in the formation of a sense of belonging and is thus implicated in the ways in which people view themselves and others. Nadia Lovell (1998) and Anthony Cohen’s (1982, 1985) work on belonging has shown that the sense of belonging to a particular locality can evoke a sense of loyalty to place which may be expressed through myth, ritual, the veneration of certain objects or particular ways of doing things. Whilst phenomenological approaches to archaeology have attempted to address some of the relationships between people and places, these have tended to focus on experience in terms of the visual and sensual experiences of particular individuals (for example Tilley 1994). Belonging is, however, also emotional, temporal and can be central to the shaping of local understandings of the world.

There is a complex relationship between ethnicity and identity and the concepts are often used interchangeably to explain how people classify and order their social world (Edwards 1998). It is possible, however, for groups to base their perception of their own identity not on claims to ethnic identity or ethnic similarity, but on (perceived or real) shared histories, origins and localities. Groups may, alternatively, accept that their origins may be diverse, but the sharing of common habits, sentiments and locality may contribute to a sense of belonging (Parkin 1998). As the landscape in which such groups dwell becomes historicised through human experience, this adds depth to the understanding of belonging: the identity which a collective presents to the outside world is informed by its internal intricacies, which are themselves affected by locality (Cohen 1982, 12). Indeed, it has recently been argued by Kaiser and Nikiforova (2006) that identity and location are mutually constituted and cannot be disentangled and Gunn Allen (1997, 357), in an echo of Edward Elgar’s musing about the music of trees, raised the question: is it we who invent the stories and thus inform the land, or does the land give us the stories, thus inventing us?

The sense of belonging, in particular to a locality, is, then, central to the formation of identity and may, in some cases, cut across internal divisions, based on class, race, gender and ethnicity. Anthony Cohen’s (1982) study of the Shetland Island community of Whalsay, illustrates the ways in which being Whalsa implies a commitment to both a way of life and to a community which perceives itself as culturally distinctive. Belonging means more than having been born in a place, but rather suggests an integration into a set of cultural practices, social organisation and community, which can have social, political and economic implications. Ian Hodder (1982) has suggested that a person’s security and livelihood are guaranteed by belonging to a wider group and that belonging to one group and not another allows the other to be treated differently to us (for example by justifying the theft of cattle). In contrast, on Whalsay, the community is economically dependent on close cooperation and society is structured in such a way that the individual is inseparably tied into the whole.

Both the self-identification of difference and the feelings engendered through senses of locality and belonging, can act to form, in Anthony Cohen’s (1985) phrase, communities of meaning in which individuals form groups which have internal consistency, but which may cross-cut other social networks or might be constructed from selected parts of different social categories. These communities are not necessarily homogenous or inflexible and may not correlate to recognised cultural or topographical boundaries, but represent ongoing attempts by the groups involved to understand their particular, historical, situations. The construction of these communities of meaning can lead to the erection of social boundaries, as a consequence of the interaction between different historically constituted groups, the nature and location of which may shift through time depending on the needs and desires of the groups involved. Boundaries may also work to define members and non-members of particular groups: us versus them, but may also act as interfaces, where cross-cutting social networks permit interactions between different social and ethnic groups, allowing innovation and change, as well as the manipulation of group identities.

Whilst the consideration of ethnicity and communities of meaning have reformulated arguments about what it means to belong to particular societies, and the ways in which specific groups are created through the process of self-identification, it is taken for granted that the groups involved form sub-sets of larger social units. The nature of these larger units has been under-examined and recent approaches to the archaeology of personhood and phenomenology (Carrithers et al. 1985; Fowler 2004; Tilley 1994) have tended, instead, to focus on the role of the individual. Whilst these approaches have led to the formulation of some fascinating and engaging arguments, it has led to a neglect of the ways in which individuals and social units interact, reflected in Shanks and Tilley’s phrase There is no such thing as ‘society’; there can be no abstract and universal definition of society (Shanks and Tilley 1987, 57). This can (despite its echoes of Thatcherism) perhaps best be seen as part of the post-modern turn in archaeological interpretation and a rejection of approaches in which the identification of social groups, or even an acceptance that they exist, is a concern, lest it be confused with outmoded culture-historic approaches which are seen by some as simplistic and imperialistic.

The critique of models which treat societies as monolithic and bounded should rightly be part of academic discourse, but nuanced and complex approaches to the archaeology of territory and boundaries have been poorly developed. The formation of territories is frequently regarded as the inevitable result of the need of social groups to draw boundaries and live within a bounded space. Territoriality is, however, not unavoidable. Sack (1986, 19) defines territoriality as: the attempt by an individual or group to affect, influence or control people, phenomena, and relationships by delimiting and asserting control over a geographic area. A place may be used as a territory at one time but not another and the assertion of control over places may be imprecise, seasonal and strategic (Sack 1986, 8). Territories are unlike other forms of place and require constant maintenance: the delimitation of a space does not create a territory unless the boundaries of the space are used to affect behaviour or control access. These boundaries, and the means by which they are maintained, are not unalterable and may have a degree of porosity, vary in their composition and be turned on and off as desired (Sack 1986, 24). Territoriality is always used in conjunction with other spatial strategies and is socially constituted: societies which do not have formal hierarchies or other forms of institutionalised difference will use territoriality in different ways to those that do (Sack 1986, 52–3). Despite the recognition of the strategic and relational nature of territorial strategies, there is still a tendency to equate territory with monolithic cultural groups and culture areas. There is an assumption that group identity and territory must coincide and that where there is a people there must also be a territory (Tonkin 1994, 18). For some groups, however, identity can be highly predicated on movement and the transcendence of territorial settlement and boundaries can become defining features of communal identity (Lovell 1998b, 4). Identity can also be deterritorialised, existing between places rather than bound to particular homelands (Fog Olwic and Hastrup 1997).

In a review of the history of the archaeological study of frontiers, Lightfoot and Martinez (1995) recognise that, since the 1970s, the dominant discourse in the field has centred around core-periphery models. This approach is typified by De Atley (1984, 5) who defined a frontier as an area which is liminal, a fringe or outer boundary of a core group which is exploited by the core group in a number of ways. These may include using the frontier as a growth area for an expanding population, as a buffer zone between groups