Staging Posts: Thinking through the Orkney archipelago

Abstract

The Orkney Archipelago, around 10 miles off the north coast of Scotland, has seen 6000 years of human settlement, with many archaeological artifacts offering significant insights into the formation of a deep-rooted island culture. The various transfigurations of this island culture to present-day Orkney indicate how external influences shape cultural inheritances, yet how this culture retains fundamental qualities; of imagination, resourcefulness, and territorial interconnections. This issue of how we negotiate the complexity of archipelagic relations is presented through a framework of process-based terms, of formations, transfigurations, constellations, aggregations, and tensions. This framework offers a degree of conceptual specificity, bringing focus to processes of relation change, movement, and interaction, across varying spatial and temporal scales. Underpinned by observational fieldwork, what emerges in this study is a sense of island life, bringing light to cultural and environmental processes, often most intensively manifest around strategic staging posts.