Oliver J.T. Harris and Tim Flohr Sørensen have written an interesting and urgent paper, raising crucial points touching upon a question at the very core of archaeology: what can we learn about the lives of prehistoric people, based solely on the material remains? Or, rephrased, how far can we reach on the Hawkesian ladder? To tackle this question, Harris and Sørensen accept the ten-year-old challenge raised by Sarah Tarlow, and suggest a vocabulary that will enable archaeologists to include emotional aspects in their interpretations. As they point out, several studies in archaeology have focused on emotion during the last decade, using burials as their main material. But as they acknowledge that emotions were a part of mundane social life, and not limited to ritualized events such as burials, they want to broaden the span of their inquiry and include materials from other contexts as well. As they do this, they make an interesting point and take a step forward in the development of archaeological interpretation. However, I would argue that they could have explored the issue even further. It would, for example, have been interesting to see them apply their ideas to some of the more mundane archaeological materials, from, for example, settlements that would be more explicitly connected to everyday life. Instead they use a quite spectacular site, where dramatic events have taken place. Is it perhaps easier to make assumptions about emotions when they are suspected to have been intense and exceptional in some way? The mundane emotions still escape us. Nevertheless, the case study chosen by Harris and Sørensen still illustrates their arguments and serves as an example for how the suggested vocabulary may be used.
The theoretical perspective used by Harris and Sørensen, as well as the case study they use to illustrate their arguments, may be compared to my own work on structured depositions in a fen situated at Hindbygården in Malmö in the south of Sweden. Here depositions took place during a period of more than 3,000 years, from the Late Mesolithic to the Early Bronze Age and a few times during later periods (Berggren, forthcoming). The aim of my work is to discuss and evaluate an interpretation of wetland deposits alternative to the habitually used sacrificial category, which may be associated with problematic assumptions. Instead I explore practice theory and the conseqences it has for the concept of ritual, and I use the methodological tools found within this perspective, mainly the concepts of embodiment and objectification. To understand the processes of embodiment and objectification and how strategies of ritualization were used, I focus on the sensuous experiences that may have occurred during the activities at the fen. In a way this case study is similar to Mount Pleasant used by Harris and Sørensen, as the fen too was a place were groups from the local population negotiated their relations, to each other and within the groups.
I have focused on the claim of practice theory that practice generates relations, and I try to understand the structures that were created by, and at the same time formed, the people at the fen, through processes of embodiment and objectification. The environment at the fen, consisting of the changing vegetation and changing levels of dampness, plays an important role as a spatial structure in which people moved as they carried out the depositions. The people also created these structures as they placed the artefacts in certain patterns in and around the fen. The sensous experiences which were the results of these acts created relations between people and groups of people. Differences were created, for example, between those who could be seen and those who were hidden from view, between those who were experiencing the wet peat digging in the fen and those who performed their depositions still dry (standing on a footbridge built over the wettest part of the fen), and between those who made their deposits in the vegetation around the edge of the fen and those who made deposits in the water at the centre. The strategies of ritualization differed through time, and so did the social structures. It seems that the fen, during most of the period it was in use, was utilized by parts of the local population that negotiated their social relations by means of activities such as depositing tools and stones and eating meals. These negotiations were not a part of the competition for the more prestigious positions in society, and the population was probably not a part of the higher strata, but rather of a materially modest part of society. At times, the history of past events at the fen was an important component of the experiences, giving significance to the social negotiations that took place there.
Inspired by Tarlow (1999; 2000), Meskell (1996; 1998) and Nilsson Stutz (2003), I too have considered the emotional aspects of the relations created by the practices at the fen, but not succeeded in reaching any specific conclusions. The activities at the fen were probably of some emotional significance to the participants. I have not discussed the emotions that normally affected people at the fen, which is a shortcoming on my part, as the emotions that the place and the activities evoked in the participants are likely to have played an important part of the experiences. But I have been able to discern patterns indicating that some people, or some groups, at certain times have diverged from the current norms of deposition, a divergence that may be discussed in emotional terms. One example is a small group of people that kept using the fen for depositions during a part of the Middle Neolithic, at a time when the majority of society had turned away from wetland depositions and used other social arenas to create their social relations. The use of the fen in this situation may have been a strategy to separate oneself from the rest of society – some sort of resistance or contestation. I have discussed what this may have meant emotionally for the participants, but found it problematic to specify the emotions. This may have evoked such conflicting emotions as pride or shame, triumph or defiance, in different persons. Harris and Sørensen point to the fact that emotional experiences may differ from person to person, even though they participate in the same event. This is crucial. Tarlow has in her later work nuanced her view on empathy and cautions us to use it as a method, which would be a kind of naive empathy that assumes a universal emotional response in a certain situation. But there is a certain degree of universality in our bodily capacity to experience emotion, rather than the experience of certain emotions. Tarlow states that emotions may only be studied archaeologically on a societal level, as social, emotional values, rather than as individually experienced emotions (Tarlow 2000, 725, 728). So what can be concluded about emotions on a societal level?
The route taken by Harris and Sørensen, focusing on the material aspects of emotion, is fruitful for archaeology. The materiality of things and places is stressed in their four concepts. Things that are handled, and spaces that are moved through, are crucial for the understanding of emotions that are not ‘exclusively subjective, individual and immaterial’ (p. 146). The starting point of Harris and Sørensen also appears to be based on practice theory, as they concern themselves with practice and the outcome of practice: relations. They also use sensuous experiences as they try to understand the emotions that are created as people engage with the world. Their study and mine have these prerequisites in common. With this common starting point it is possible to discuss the emotional aspects of the experiences and the significance these emotions may have had for the social relations that were created. But is it also possible to discuss the emotional motivation behind certain acts using this theoretical perspective? Is this in accordance with the collapse of the mental and the bodily?
As I mentioned above, I found it difficult to interpret the specific emotional aspects of the activities that took place at the fen. Harris and Sørensen mention that it may never be possible to specify exact emotions. Instead, they say, we may recognize how the affective fields and atmospheres were generated, and I agree that this may be a productive path to follow. For example, they interpret in a credible way the atmosphere at Mount Pleasant as the creation of a feeling of being-in-place. They also make specific interpretations of these in their case study, for example the meaning of the affective field at Mount Pleasant as a feeling of community. Harris and Sørensen state that different people may have associated with this community in different ways. This is important, as we do not know whether some participation in building the henge was coerced, which may have created a different emotion compared to voluntary participation. This is why it may be too specific to interpret the feeling of community as something positive, and as a way of solving conflicts and disagreements as suggested by the authors.
Apart from these few critical points, I believe the vocabulary suggested by Harris and Sørensen could be very useful. Could it be applied to my case study, the fen at Hindbygården? Wetlands and other delimited places may have been a part of an affective field in society where people negotiated their social relations and created different social identities. The emotions experienced at those places were different depending on the participants and the social organizations they created. The place at the Hindbygården fen had an atmosphere created by the people performing the activities, the material things that were handled, the spatial structures that were created and experienced and the ritualization strategies that set the fen apart from other places. The atmosphere changed depending on how many people were present and what kind of activities they engaged in. The spatial structure of the fen guided the movement of people. During the Late Mesolithic they experienced the fen as an open glade in a dense forest and the fen functioned as a stage for the few people depositing axes there. An audience may have been standing on the edges. The structures were objectified in the spatial conditions and were embodied in the participants. The practice created relationships between the participants according to their experiences. Later, during the Early Neolithic, the edge vegetation, as well as depositions made between the plants, created a framing of the fen that may have functioned as a threshold between the inside and the outside. This created a difference between people, a relation between those who performed depositions inside this frame and those who stayed outside. During the Late Neolithic the fen was experienced as a grove in a more open landscape, with a less obvious frame, but still with a distinct border. These spatial structures created by the vegetation, the objects and the practice, as well as the relations and the social structures, may have been a part of the atmosphere at the fen. This atmosphere created emotional experiences in the participants through their attunement to the particular social negotiations they expected to occur at a place such as the fen. The specific emotions differed, during the long period of use, but also between participants active at the fen at the same time.
The vocabulary suggested by Harris and Sørensen is helpful, as it brings emotional aspects to light in archaeological interpretation. But, as I believe has been shown, both in their case study and in mine, the significance of emotions may only be discussed to a certain degree. We may conclude that emotions were an important part of experiences in a certain situation, perhaps at a societal or a social level, for example in the case of a divergence from a norm, but the specific emotions are difficult to specify.
