Temporary freedoms? Ethnoarchaeology of female herders at seasonal sites in northern Europe

Attending to Place and Time: Seasonality in Early Modern Scotland and Cyprus

“…There are similar tensions in the shieling system of early modern Scotland, though the contexts and expressions of those tensions are quite different. The small size, upland locations, and relative simplicity of the shieling huts ( Figure 7) contrast with the complexity of rural society more widely, with its broad network of intercommunal negotiation and consensus-building, challenges to and maintenance of strict roles of gender and status, and complex systems of communal rights (Costello, 2017(Costello, , 2018. The shielings clearly enable a form of sociality that is very different from that of the lowland townships.…”

“…The Ben Lawers survey noted a strong correlation between shielings and peat moors, with tracks leading above the head dyke, which delimited the arable areas, to the platforms used for drying the peat after cutting in May (Boyle, 2003: 27–28). In Ireland, there are good examples of shielings being associated with peat cutting and perhaps iron mining (Costello, 2018: 176–77). Like shielings, illicit whisky distilling was closely integrated with the lowland or lochside settlement: one such distilling site, for example, was hidden below a waterfall in a small gorge only 20 minutes’ walk from the settlement of Rowardennan on Loch Lomond, and just a couple of minutes’ walk from the main path to the settlement's shielings (Given, 2004: 156–60).…”

Interdisciplinary approaches to a connected landscape

“…Regular summer movement to upland shielings is known across Scotland and the rest of Europe during the post-medieval period, though it took different forms in different areas. It started to die out in the 17th century, particularly in the Lowlands, though it continued until the early 20th century in Lewis (Whittington 1973: 567-9;Fenton 1999: 130-42;Costello 2018;Dixon 2018;Kupiec & Milek 2018). The nature of the practice in lowland Perthshire, even in the 18th century, is not well understood (Cowley & Harrison 2001: 30-1) and earlier medieval practice is even less well known (Dixon 2002: 41;2018: 71).…”

Editorial

“…Articles are divided here between those that deal with seasonal gatherings and events, situated in separate locations from settlements and requiring travel by participants, and others that were intramural to rural or and urban settlement. In some cases the temporary sites under consideration were occupied for part of the year by just some members of a community, for example the upland summer settlements or 'booleys' in western Ireland (Costello 2018). These places often brought together multiple communities, playing a vital role in engendering social cohesion.…”

“…This evidence of greater mobility for farming communities is relevant to the first millennium CE in Europe as well, where emphasis has often been on identifying large-scale migrations, rather than considering the possibilities of seasonal mobility, temporary sites and cycles of ritual movement. Transhumance practices were active in upland landscapes as late as the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Costello 2018), and coastal communities in many regions carry an identity shaped by the mobility and risks involved in maritime exploitation (Barrett and Orton 2016). The assemblage and re-assemblage of communities as part of the 'rhythms of life' in these rural communities would have codified experiences and nurtured political subjectivities.…”