'…over there, my aunt gave stones…'

'…over there, hides and meat, a great island, many many trees…'

'…over there, the sea has no end. My sister was lost trying to find an isle…'

'…your brother lives over there…'

'...over there you will find stones...'

'...over there...'

'...over there...'

It might be expected that I would welcome the Southern Hebrides Mesolithic Project's much vaunted 'regional perspective' (Mithen and Lake 1996, 123) as an exception to the tendency to treat islands as insular. This is not the case. Whilst the expansion of fieldwork to Colonsay and Islay is timely I cannot help feeling that new understandings of place and places are sadly lacking and that Mithen and company are still chasing the same misconceptions, deluded into believing that they are people. An early example of this comes from a paper in 1991 (Mithen and Finlayson). Following from the conclusion that red deer remains on Oronsay could not have come from resident populations on that island (Grigson and Mellars 1987) Mithen and Finlayson hypothesised that red deer may have lived on Colonsay, and proceeded to look for microliths on this island, as witness to the presence of hunting parties. This would then be considered as strong evidence that Oronsay was occupied all year round, with logistical mobility explaining the scatters on Colonsay.

The conclusions, which are based only on one site, Staosnaig, and the evident circularity of their logic are not at issue here. It is more telling that the authors' methodology exposes important conceptions of what a 'regional perspective' is. The land masses, separated by the sea, are resources. Colonsay is the meat section of the prehistoric supermarket, Oronsay the seafood delicatessen. The only human relationship with place is extractive, the gaining of food (or procurement of stone for tools (Mithen and Lake 1993)). Distance, equatable with crossing the sea, is a barrier to be overcome, separating Mesolithic stomachs from their satiation. Land is home – the sea is alien. Something rings all too familiar here.

I am not trying to argue that every journey, every casting off, every pull on an oar or unfurling of a sail was a deliberate act in games of people politics. I mean that there was a series of potentials opened up by the sea that could, at any moment, be pulled into sharper focus. That there was a temporality in a seascape which was as much about becoming as being.

Last summer (1996) fieldwork on St. Kilda led to the discovery of numerous fragments of Neolithic Hebridean Ware (Mark Edmonds, personal communication).

Of course the sea was not just a vast social whirlpool. For Mesolithic populations certainly and Neolithic populations probably, the sea was also vital to the dull compulsion of daily subsistence. Detailed environmental evidence from Oronsay's middens has shown that over 12 different species of fish were eaten by Mesolithic populations (Mellars and Wilkinson 1980). Deeper sea fishing was not the norm, as it may have been in some Scandinavian societies, but evidence from the Priory midden suggests that it was not altogether unknown (ibid). And, yes, the mobility offered by the sea would have facilitated the gaining of other foodstuffs, deer or seals, or other raw materials, antler or stone. I deny none of this but would suggest we should recast the questions.

All the time that stories are told – around a fire, on a journey, on a hill top – people listen. Listen and learn. Learn who other people are, and what other places are. And, most importantly, learn who they are themselves. Become caught up in a way of living: ways of moving, talking and understanding.

The point is that human relationships resonate with meaning. The practice of social life, a long, on-going improvisation, would at certain points illuminate kin, gender, sex, age and power relationships. Who had the right to carry stone, or hides? Who would sail? Who could own a boat? A given material might crystallise the relationships holding a network of people together at any one given moment, before this network was transformed once again, by action.

The introduction of new 'Neolithic' technologies – clay, grain, monumental architecture, domesticates – had an important impact. By being caught up in the daily improvisations of life new materials would become central to human change over time. This is not a new insight. What intrigues me at present is the fact that all of these new technologies are intimately connected with the land: breaking, cutting, turning, shaping, moulding, growing, piling. The real Neolithic 'revolution' perhaps occured less at the level of economics than in the way that people experienced the world. I suggest that in the Neolithic people had a much greater concern with land, not in the sense of tenure or territory, but in the way that key events, defining episodes of an individual's life, were more likely to involve the land, or elements of it, than before; to involve a pot, a tomb, cattle or planting. The stories people told to each other were dirtier than before.

My focus here has been to suggest that the sea and islands were part of a web throughout the Mesolithic and that understanding both is central to understanding who these people were. It is very interesting that recent work on the Isle of Arran has demonstrated that Neolithic chambered tombs align themselves on islands offshore (Jones and Taylor 1996). The Thoms believed a number of standing stones on the Outer Hebrides to align on St. Kilda at astronomically pertinent moments (Thom and Thom 1990). Whether declensions are valid is not significant. St. Kilda can be seen from these locations. That monuments align on an island, or are located in a position from which islands are visible is not coincidental.

Places in the past may have been so unfamiliar that all we could recognise would be contours on a map. But this is not to despair, that our present day can include some of this different life – that the yawning absence of the past is a myth – is a central joy of archaeology. Time is not distance. The past is made and unmade in the minds of the living. Here I offer a number of suggestions to the reader, who must make their own decisions, their own reading of my words: their own creation of a past. I do not ask to be agreed with.

During the Mesolithic and Neolithic Scotland's woodlands were changing. A mosaic of species and diverse micro-climates renders generalising difficult. That the woodlands of the mainland were quite as dark and foreboding as Childe suggests (1935) is perhaps slightly unlikely: the allure of primitive woodland runs strong in the glens of Scotland and the halls of academia. Yet, the heavily wooded hill sides and valleys would, undoubtedly, have offered a significant contrast to the islands. Tipping argues that the islands of the Western and Northern seaboards were, at this time, appreciably more open and varied in their fauna than the closed canopy mainland (Tipping 1994). It is not to be doubted that travelling by water was a viable alternative to overland journeys.

To set to sea, to sail or to row, becomes, in this light, a rather different event. Not a mundane extractive round, but a realisation of the wider communities that linked populations. On such a journey a husband or wife might be found, an enemy placated, a prestigious gift obtained or an ignominious debt paid off. The sea was no neutral, no barrier, but the very stuff of life for Mesolithic populations: without the potentials for life opened up by the sea they would not have recognised themselves. Islands were linked in a net of no discernable or fixed form, but one that arose from the continued lived experiences and improvisations of human beings. If we ignore the seascape that these people enjoyed then we can never begin to understand how they inhabited their world. And my aim is get closer to past lives than alienation and objective rigour might allow.

I do not desire the power of the author and I will not appropriate it. I do not desire to define, prescribe and dictate, to see 'how it really was' or to get to the bottom of things (Steedly 1993). I wish to avoid closure, and play with resonance, to flash images, moods and ideas to you. To craft a 'tactile' and 'fugitive' narrative (Bender 1996) that relies on the reader for its constructions. To deny denial and pursue invention. To offer play and improvisation: archaeology as fun.

During the Mesolithic the populations of the Western seaboard were, in many respects, defined by their life upon and within the sea. I believe that it was through the continual interaction with this fluid world, and the worlds this opened up, that people grew into social individuals. Human identity is not given or fixed but a continually revised result of improvisation within the world. In the Mesolithic this world was very wet.

The Hebridean islands lie close together. Journeys between these islands would not have taken the crew of a boat out of sight of land (although the weather might have). Whilst this has consequences for the technologies of sailing and for the risks involved in any given journey, it is also of great interest in dealing with seascapes at a more personal level. I have spoken of the sea as a link, as a bridge to wider possibilities for individuals. Places, as understood through biographical experiences, through stories told or heard, would have become caught up in these individual's histories. But meanings shift, and places are not rigid. One year, full of friends, the next, after a slight, enemies. The point is that whilst islands are inter-visible, people can point, and talk, and tell stories…

Perhaps the island myth is a legacy of the Victorians. After all, they discovered the primitive on their doorstep – the Gael. What else could explain such backwards souls, such lost civilisations. Water was a barrier. Islands were isolated. The same Victorian myth machine that produced the great lie, of Britain's noble isolation: the island people held apart from the worst excesses of continental life.

In summing up the recent 'Man and Sea' conference which dealt with the maritime Mesolithic Anders Fischer reacted to criticisms of the gendered title by suggesting that the term 'boat person' be used to describe Mesolithic individuals (Fischer 1993, 432). Whilst Fischer's tongue may have been firmly in his politically correct cheek he was suggesting that, as a common technological denominator of a disparate group of peoples, the boat was a useful unifier for analysis.

It might be pertinent to twist his words a little, and look at some of the unintentional senses which arise from this phrase. I would suggest that boats and the person were intimately connected for Mesolithic populations. I would suggest that aptitude on the seas, a knowledge of them, of where to fish and currents to avoid – 'boat-man-ship' – were defining characteristics of some Mesolithic persons. I would suggest that through the daily encounter with boats and the sea, through both the mundane and the exotic, the predicted and the improvised, individual's identities were shaped and reshaped. The boat person existed because it was through boats, and through the potentials for life that resonated beyond the mere technology of floating, that a person could live the only life they knew. The transformation of the Neolithic was that the boat-person, in these senses, ceased to exist. A person became defined by other activities.

Let's think about fishing rather than complacently assuming its completion. Think about setting to sail in a small canoe, with a small group of people. How long did a journey take? Who went? How many people can fit into a 12 foot dug out? What stories were told at sea (Malinowski 1922)? What rhythms of life did fishing require? (See Pollard 1996 for a very interesting discussion of the temporality of exploiting of intertidal zones).

Architecture is, amongst other things, a way of constructing the sense of a place. If these early architectures are referencing other islands, other places across the sea, it is because these islands were significant to the builders. I do not wish to define these meanings. What I suggest is simply that, into the Neolithic, we can see a concern with the wider world beyond the immediate shores. No island was an island then either.

"There is a time just before dawn when the rays from the sun appear like spokes of radiating firesticks above the horizon … Sabarl call this time budobudo wali lakana siyayo, "the sorcerers' apprentices withdraw their spears". Every day at this time … nursing mothers awaken … descend the ladders of their houses, walking towards the sea… Slowly they advance into the water until they stand waist deep. Then they express their milk in arcing streams several times into the sea. Bending, they take a swallow of water from the ocean's surface, then dive to the bottom of the lagoon, gripping a rock as an anchor and drinking in several mouthfuls of sea water, "like a fish"." (Battaglia, 1990, 44)

Recently the term 'landscape' has received much critical attention. In a highly productive cross-disciplinary atmosphere a number of assumptions have been unpacked, opening important new spaces for knowledge. It is not helpful to discuss landscapes in isolation from their human counter. Landscapes are neither a passive stage for human life nor a omnipotent director. Our narratives should begin to move past the tired nature-culture dualism and begin to examine ways of living in places. To be human is to inhabit, to make meaning in the world, to tell stories and undertake tasks. The world is understood in specific ways at certain times (Schama 1996). Nothing is given.

I have found these words in many places: on a beach on South Uist, in a library, the pub, my kitchen, on the bus, the train, a museum, seminars, conferences, the Peak District. Washed up in so many places they seem disparate. I have tried to find some links that might join them; trawling and hooking, netting and weaving. My task is incomplete, and can only remain so.

©Graeme Warren 1997

©assemblage 1997