Emotional aspects of a fen

Abstract

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.