Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2006, Page 24

OSCAR ALDRED
Figure 5. Social practices in action in the production of space. A convergence of boundaries,
cairns and a volcanic landscape (Oscar Aldred).
ians and the earliest archaeologists were
more in tune with the visible landscape
around them and had an intuitive relation-
ship to it. However, the earliest archae-
ologists’ later work is characterised with
literary analogies relating to the histories
contained within the Sagas. To compen-
sate for the physical changes to land-
scape since the nineteenth century land-
scape research has objectified the past in
order to understand it. The balance, as I
have suggested, has moved so far in one
direction towards viewing society as a
product of environment that subjective
approaches, which are more in tune with
the identity of landscape and people liv-
ing in it in the past have been passed over.
This is partially a problem of scale as the
recent study is focused on the region just
as it was in the earliest studies but with
one major difference: it is derived from
detailed research that is extrapolated
to address broad trends. These types of
study have been carried out at the expense
of understanding the local dynamic of
human-scale spaces, though where this
is being done the focus remains on eco-
nomic factors connected to environment
rather than social determinants. It is also
a problem with the type of archaeologi-
cal practice, as increasingly used scien-
tific approaches enable a more signifi-
cant contribution of these techniques to
be employed at all scales of work from
a detailed examination of individual eco-
artefacts to Geographical Information
System (GIS) studies of landscapes. One
could view modem archaeology as dis-
22