Home sweet home

So the seminar is over, and normal life has quickly reasserted itself as the only reality. I brought home with me a lot of thoughts about time and travel and maybe I'll write something about those one of these days.

I finally got to visit the Acropolis, which was something of a disappointment. Currently it is really just a big construction site. And although I understand and agree that you can't let millions of tourists to mess with the ancient monuments if you want to preserve them, being forced to look at them from a safe distance leaves me cold. It reminded me of my experience of Stonehenge. After trekking across the fields along the Avenue, it came as something of an anticlimax to circle the henge with dozens of tourists. These places leave me depressed rather than impressed.


If you think places like Acropolis or Stonehenge as landscapes, they are landscapes in the most sterile meaning of the word - something to be gazed at from outside. Maybe it has to do with the materiality of experience. You need to physically engage with the monuments to experience them - to walk among the columns, to see and feel the worn stone, to use yourself as the scale to begin to appreciate their immense size and the achievement it was to raise them. I am beginning to wonder if all this restoration and protection - an attempt to somehow keep the sites frozen in time - is really worthwhile. Maybe we should just let them decay and wander about the ruins.

Athens

I'm in Athens then, in the Nordic PhD seminar for landscape archaeology. The flight was a bit rough from Paris onwards, because there was a lot of turbulence. I never get seasick but I nearly got airsick in that container called an aeroplane. Arrival made the suffering worthwhile, though. Our hotel is in a nice location close to the Akropolis and the Scandinavian Institutes. The weather is balmy. Food, wine and entertaining company are ready at reach.

The most unlikely thing happened: I had agreed to meet three other people at the airport, to share a taxi. While driving at a dangerous speed (considering none of us had our seatbelts fastened) towards the city, it turned out that all the three of us on the backseat had taken masters in landscape archaeology at the University of Leicester! Call that a coincidence!

My significant landscape, or what I do on my holidays

The landscape I am going to tell about is the island and fishing village of Tammio. The island of Tammio is located in the archipelago of the eastern Gulf of Finland. Typical of the archipelago are small, wooded islands. The shores are granite cliffs, smoothed by the Ice Age and the sea.

The island of Tammio has been inhabited since the 16^th century, although there are traces of much earlier inhabitants in the area: there is a Bronze Age burial cairn in Tammio and two Viking Age cairns in one of the nearby islands. The present-day fishing village has its origins in the late 18^th century. It has not been settled year-round since the 1950s, but many people, descendants of the former fishers, spend their summer holidays there.

The village shoreline is filled with boathouses. Behind them, on higher ground not flooded even during the worst storms of early winter, are the dwelling houses. There are around fifty one-storey wooden houses with their adjacent gardens and outbuildings. The houses are usually painted yellow or ochre, while the outbuildings and boathouses are painted red. Most of the buildings date to the 19^th – early 20^th century, which was the heyday of the village. They are concentrated in the western and eastern part of the island, forming a relatively densely built village. Footpaths lead from the shore up to the houses. The rest of the island is mostly forested, with some modern summer cottages on the shores further away from the village.

The village of Tammio is considered a rare and beautiful example of the fishing villages the eastern Gulf of Finland, surviving in almost its original 19^th century appearance. The village has been protected by the NBA, and was nominated as a candidate to the UNESCO World Heritage List a few years ago.

The reasons why this landscape is very special for me have little to do with its importance as a cultural monument, however, and indeed nothing to do with detached academic observation. For me Tammio is a very personal landscape. It was the home of my grandfather, and a few more generations of grandparents lived there. I have spent part of my summers there since childhood. The atmosphere of the island is somehow tranquil and unhurried. In a world where most places I used to know have changed so much in the last decade or two that I can hardly recognize them, Tammio represents for me comforting stability and continuity, and a rare feeling of belonging to somewhere.

Shaping landscapes

I have had the privilege of doing archaeological fieldwork in Jordan since almost a decade ago now, in excellent company. I miss the camaraderie of our team, which I again and again mistakenly took as missing the actual fieldwork. This error resulted in spending five seasons - invariably in late summer which in the Near East tends to be hot - intensively surveying a very small area around a certain mountain. I can claim to have experienced that specific landscape very closely, and in a more embodied way than I would even care (btw, did you know that you can sweat from your eye sockets too?) .

If anything, this experience has made me more doubtful of our capability to understand the perceptions people in the past attached to certain landscapes or places; to put ourselves to the skins of a 1st century Nabataean or a 5th century Christian pilgrim, even less a Neolithic farmer-herder-hunter-gatherer (the last two having apparently been what the Neolithic people were doing in our survey area since they left little traces of themselves). In fact, I think we would be hard pressed even to imagine ourselves as the present-day locals, who can associate every place with a piece of family or clan history - even if we knew that history.

It is a widely accepted view in archaeology that places get meaning through human use and that meaning is deeply rooted in culture and dependent on the group, even the individual. When we went to our survey area for the first time, for us there were no places, only space. The landscape was alien to us before we categorized and labelled it in our own terms: sandstone, limestone, fault line, alluvium, barrage, terrace wall, lithic scatter... Some of the locations in that landscape later became places for us, but they are places of our own making. Such as the places we used to have our tea-breaks in, or the rock that we dubbed "the Indian head" because, from a certain angle, it looks like the profile of a face with stereotypized "Indian" features.


I think this example aptly illustrates that we are 21st century western academics with a scientific mindset and what we are, we are thoroughly. We cannot be anything else. We may learn to walk the paths and we may see the same landforms and monuments or try to reconstruct them in our mind's eye or through the use of our sophisticated technologies. We may try to empathize with the perceptions of past individuals like actors would to a role. And still they will not mean the same things to us. We may get a tantalizing glimpse of meaning through archaeological remains, but our constructions of what past people would have thought rest on our ideas of what they were like and what they should have been feeling and thinking when they perceived something that we, from our own cultural background, consider impressive or important, which probably tells us more about ourselves than them.

(Well, this was supposed to be a rant but ended up more as a musing...)