Review of the 35th Annual Conference of the Theoretical Archaeology Group, TAG 2013

Abstract

The Theoretical Archaeology Group held its 35 th annual conference at Bournemouth. Traditionally this conference takes place at the end of December, a week before Christmas and this gives an end of term, festive feeling to the otherwise serious academic content. The holiday atmosphere was heightened by the title TAG-on-Sea, appropriate enough for a famous seaside resort. The seaside theme was represented in the programme by sessions on marine archaeology and land-, sea-, and skyscapes, but overridingly the content was a platform for dispersing ideas through presentations of completed work and discussions of theoretical and methodological issues. A full programme was offered over two and a half days with five simultaneous sessions at any one time.On Monday afternoon I presented a paper along with nine other archaeoastronomers in the session entitled 'Land, Sea and Sky: a '3-scape' Approach to Archaeology'. The premise here is that the macrocosm of land, sea and sky are reflected in the microcosm of any coastal society and this was ably demonstrated by Dan Brown (Nottingham Trent). Tore Lomsdalen and Olwyn Pritchard (Trinity Saint David) explored this concept via the Maltese megalithic temples and the Welsh dolmens. Archaeoastronomy has moved a long way since Alexander Thom's megalithic science and precision alignments. Now it shows an increasing acceptance that astronomic orientations must fit the archaeology of the site and Liz Henty, Pamela Armstrong (Trinity Saint David) and Fabio Silva (University College London) showed fresh insights into the ways the methodologies of archaeology and archaeoastronomy can be combined through their respective work on the Recumbent Stone Circles of Scotland, the Cotswold long barrows, and the Neolithic dolmens of Iberia. Lionel Sims, anthropologist and archaeoastronomer, showed how a multidisciplinary approach could be effective at Stonehenge. In conversation, Sims said that an attack was made on archaeoastronomy at the plenary session of TAG 2005 at Sheffield, yet not only were archaeoastronomers well-received at TAG 2012 in Liverpool in a session entitled 'The Role and Importance of the Sky in Archaeology' organised by Silva, but were welcomed back to Bournemouth. They showed that archaeoastronomers now embrace the material culture of archaeology and that archaeologists are increasingly embracing the sky as another 'scape'.A rainy Tuesday morning dawned and more delegates arrived and more left. A lasting visual image of TAG is that it is populated by bearers of small wheeled suitcases. This says something more profound about the discipline of archaeology as it finds itself today. There are so many different fields, specialisations and sub-disciplines that its voice Henty, L 2014

The Archaeoastronomy of Tomnaverie Recumbent Stone Circle: A Comparison of Methodologies

“…The use of detailed excavation data, the awareness of location and landscape and the integration of the sky with all its associated events, creates a multivalent approach to prehistoric archaeoastronomy which has no written history or ethnography to support cultural interpretation. This new approach (Silva, 2014;Henty, 2014) which moves archaeoastronomy away from orthodoxy and outdated paradigms could be better named as 'skyscape archaeology'; similar in scope to taskscape and landscape archaeology, but in relation to the sky. conclusion What conclusions can be drawn from this phenomenological approach to archaeoastronomy?…”

Editorial

“…Importantly, it retains all the valuable data as well as surveying and analytical methodologies deployed by archaeoastronomers, while also allowing for the integration of other methodologies well-established in the archaeological and anthropological worlds, such as phenomenology. We believe that this approach is the way forward, and while JSA was still in the planning stage we introduced the term skyscape archaeology in our own papers in archaeology journals (Henty 2014a;2014b;Silva 2014).…”