More than the sea: Review of different approaches to seascapes reveals unique transdisciplinary conceptualizations and contributions of archaeology

Abstract

Seascapes mean different things to different people and disciplines. Scholarship over the past 30 years has seen conceptualizations of seascapes move beyond dictionary definitions of seascapes as marine vistas to nuanced understandings of seas variously emphasizing their biological and cultural dimensions. Biological approaches (conservation) focus on marine ecosystems and management aimed at minimizing human impacts with cultural values increasingly acknowledged as critical to the success of marine protected areas. Cultural approaches (heritage, history, anthropology, and archaeology) focus on the symbolic dimensions of seas as culturally constructed and linked to maritime peoples and maritime cultures and identity. Maritime historians have sought to reposition the sea from a backdrop to history to an active and agentive historical actor. Maritime anthropologists have focused on cosmological and cultural underpinnings of customary maritime tenure by small-scale coastal communities. Maritime archaeologists have expanded their research scope from shipwrecks such that seascapes include maritime infrastructure on land. While interdisciplinarity underpins cultural approaches to seascapes, the transdisciplinarity of anthropologically and historically informed archaeologies allows cross-cultural conceptualization of seascapes as extending from the sea (marine seascapes) across adjacent lands (terrestrial seascapes) and ritual engagement with the sea as a sentient and animate realm and cosmologically constructed spiritscape. Ontological notions of sentient seas and agentive seascapes invite future seascape scholarship to further explore more authentic bottom-up, emic, mariners’ and sea peoples’ epistemological positions centering on “how seas think” and “who is the ocean.” Such notions and positions provide enormous scope for archaeologists to further explore the marine and terrestrial expressions of seascapes given that maritime peoples’ social and spiritual relationships with sentient seas are mediated materially by rituals involving sites (e.g., shrines) and objects (e.g., votives) both in the sea and on land.