Gavin Lucas
Biographic Data
| ID | 90386 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Gavin Lucas |
| GIVEN NAMES | Gavin |
| FAMILY NAME | Lucas |
| SIGNATURE | LUCAS G |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Iceland |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1619-7955 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 60 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 719 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 59 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1964 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Shadow Archaeologies: In the Shadow of Antiquity or For Other Modes of Archaeological Worldmaking
The Future of Periodization. Dissecting the Legacy of Culture History
This paper discusses the future role of periodization in the wake of recent critiques of culture-historical chronologies concurrent with the rise of high-definition radiocarbon dating. It is argued that periodization has two distinct facets, a narrative function and a dating function, which should be separated. Archaeology may eventually be able to abandon the latter, but not the former. However, the two aspects are closely intertwined and the go…
Adventures in Timeland
One of the more significant issues to have emerged from the discourse surrounding the Anthropocene has concerned the apparent incommensurability of human and natural history and the vastly different timescales involved. More generally, such discourse raises critical questions about the very different way time is conceptualized in the natural sciences as opposed to in the social sciences and humanities. In this article, I draw on my own disciplina…
Survivals and the persistence of the past
This article explores the latent potential in the anthropological concept of survival, especially through Tylor's usage of the term. Once a core concept of anthropological theory in the late nineteenth century, the idea was critiqued and abandoned in the wake of the structural and functional anthropology of the early twentieth century. However, the concept implies many different things, and in clearing away some of the more problematic meanings, …
Paradigm Lost: What Is a Commitment to Theory in Contemporary Archaeology
A radical shift in orientation alongside the objects of archaeology has occasioned a reconsideration of what theory is in a very general sense. What function does it serve and how might we define it? In retrospect, these questions arise not in the context of paradigms and strong theories, which some consider to have run their course, but in their absence. Here, there is a danger that theory might be jettisoned altogether if its nature and purpose…
Theory Above? Theory Alongside
Archaeological Stratigraphy and the Bifurcation of Time: Solido intra solidum
The goal of this paper is to explore the ways solidity and fluidity have been articulated in relation to understandings of time and the archaeological record. It reflects on the paradox that led the 17th-century Danish scholar Nicholas Steno to write one of the first discourses on stratigraphy: how can solid objects (such as fossils) occur within other solid objects (rock)? His dissertation ( De solido intra solidum naturalitur contento , 1669) o…
A Solid Fluids Lexicon
In our discussions around the theme of solid fluids, we often resort to everyday words, many of them of ancient derivation and rich in association. We have decided to make a list of some of the words that come up most often - barring those that already figure as the principal characters of individual contributions - and to distribute among ourselves the task of writing a sort of mini-biography for each. The resulting lexicon with 19 entries, rang…
The Case Study in Archaeological Theory
The case study is a familiar yet generally taken-for-granted element of archaeological theory. Typically, it is viewed as a kind of 'proof of concept,' an essential way to demonstrate the value of a particular theoretical approach, if not theory in general. In this article, we examine the case study as it has been used in archaeology, exploring its different manifestations and situating them within a wider discussion of the role of cases and exam…
Making Time: The Archaeology of Time Revisited
Prologue
Wild fowl egg consumption in postmedieval Iceland. SEM analysis of archaeological eggshells from the Bishop’s seat at Skálholt, southwest Iceland
What is Theory? What is Archaeology? – Reply to Comments
The Archaeology of Z: Household Economies in Nineteenth-Century Iceland
A very curious larder – Insects from post-medieval Skálholt, Iceland, and their implications for interpreting activity areas
Pots for socks. Commodity itineraries in the North Atlantic during the 17th and 18th centuries
A discussion of trade in the North Atlantic during the 17th and 18th centuries is explored through the movement of commodities from mainland Europe to Iceland, specifically pottery vessels. The paper reconstructs the journeys of three cooking pots from different places in northern Germany and Denmark and along the way, attempts to situate these journeys within the social and cultural contexts through which they pass. In tracking these object itin…
The Mobility of Theory
Halfway through the second decade of the new millennium, it seems many archaeologists are wondering about the future of their discipline.Perhaps this is a perennial issue, but it does appear -especially in relation to theory -that there is real sense of a sea change happening in archaeology.Such moments typically elicit both negative and positive positions, the former often as a prelude to the latter.Thus one characterization of the current state…
The terrain of thingworlds: Central objects and asymmetry in material culture systems
Material culture forms a relational system of distributed reality - a thingworld. But how do we get beyond simply saying that all material culture is meaningful and entangled to understanding the internal structure of such systems? Is it a flat terrain among co-equal things? Or are some objects more important than others, as we might intuitively suppose? And if so, why? This article presents an initial discussion of the problem. Using vignettes f…
Interpretation in Archaeological Theory
Archaeology without antiquity
Antiquity-the past-has been fundamental to archaeology from the very beginnings of the discipline, and it remains the central concept around which archaeological research is developed. Over the years, however, alternative ways of doing and thinking archaeology have come forth to challenge this orientation on the past. Despite their growth in scope and sophistication, these alternatives remain at the margins of our community. In this article, the …
Episcopal Economics: Property and power in post-reformation Iceland
It has been common to view the Icelandic economy either from the perspective of the individual farm in terms of its productivity or at the national scale in terms of trade and the role of imports/exports. Given the fact that the economy was largely a tenant-based system with a small number of landowners, there is an important middle ground between the household economics of individual farms and the state-sanctioned trade structures that needs to …
Men in Black: Performing masculinity in 17th- and 18th-century Iceland
Studies in masculinity have lagged behind in the field of gender studies though recent scholarship is making up for this disparity. In this paper, we tackle the question of masculinity and modernity in early modern Iceland through an analysis of archaeological material relating to dress from the site of an Icelandic bishopric and school, Skálholt, during the late 17th and 18th centuries. We explore both the symbolic and performative dimensions of…
Dalrymple Lecture Series 2018–19
The unburied. On archaeological objects and objectives
Assaf Nativ has written a bold and challenging paper and one which prompts a great deal of reflection. Although highly theoretical, it is also a paper that engages quite directly with the concerns of our discipline and is a good example of what one might dub philosophical (or meta-)archaeology rather than philosophy applied to archaeology. Moreover, Nativ has a very clear style of exposition that gives the reader a great deal to sink his or her t…
Later Historical Archaeologies of the North Atlantic
This chapter examines the North Atlantic as a historical entity or domain, tracing specific themes from c. 1500 to the present day. Defined broadly by the area between western Norway and the eastern coast of Canada, it addresses a series of interlocking themes from the local to the regional. From a European or North American perspective, the area is typically regarded as marginal; yet it is precisely its liminal status that forces us to consider …
Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past
Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past turns what is usually seen as a method for investigating the distant past onto the present. In doing so, it reveals fresh ways of looking both at ourselves and modern society as well as the discipline of archaeology. This volume represents the most recent research in this area and examines a variety of contexts including: * Art Deco * landfills * miner strikes * college fraternities * an abandoned council ho…
Landscapes of Settlement in Northern Iceland: Historical Ecology of Human Impact and Climate Fluctuation on the Millennial Scale
Early settlement in the North Atlantic produced complex interactions of culture and nature. The sustained program of interdisciplinary collaboration is intended to focus on ninth- to 13th-century sites and landscapes in the highland interior lake basin of Mývatn in Iceland and to contribute a long-term perspective to larger issues of sustainable resource use, soil erosion, and the historical ecology of global change
Disposability and Dispossession in the Twentieth Century
This article addresses the issue of disposability in modern Anglo-American society, through a historical and archaeological perspective of late 19th- and 20th-century practices surrounding waste. Starting from what is identified as a dilemma in disposability, caught between two moral systems of the household - thrift and hygiene - this article discusses these systems in terms of waste and the activities surrounding it. Through examination of vari…
Interpreting Archaeology: Finding Meaning in the Past
This volume provides a forum for debate between varied approaches to the past. The authors, drawn from Europe, North America, Asia and Australasia, represent many different strands of archaeology. They address the philosophical issues involved in interpretation and a desire among archaeologists to come to terms with their own subjective approaches to the material they study, a recognition of how past researchers have also imposed their own value …
Time and Archaeological Event
This paper re-examines the concept of the archaeological event as a means to avoid dual or multiple levels for historical phenomena, which a scalar view of time creates. Central to this procedure is an examination of the nature of residuality in relation to the archaeological record; it is argued that our concept of residuality needs to be broadened to encompass a more general view of material organization where the property of reversibility is f…
Modern Disturbances: On the Ambiguities of Archaeology
This paper discusses the relationship between modernity and archaeology from two directions. The first half examines the historical development of archaeology in relation to the concept of prehistory where prehistory is viewed not as a chronological period but an ontological condition, defined by a dialectical tension between discourse and materiality. The second half explores this dialectic through archaeological approaches to the modern world, …
Destruction and the Rhetoric of Excavation
In this paper a recurrent perception of archaeological excavation as destruction is addressed. By examining this rhetoric in discourses about fieldwork in the UK, the theoretical issues implicit in its use are examined, issues that affect not only Britain but also other European countries and beyond. Tying it into notions of the archaeological record and the archaeological resource, the traditional model of the archaeological process is found to …
Bloody slaughter: Ritual decapitation and display at the Viking settlement of Hofstaðir, Iceland
This article attempts an interpretation of an unusual assemblage of cattle skulls recovered from recent excavations at the Viking Age monumental hall of Hofstaðir in Iceland. Osteological analysis of the skulls indicates ritual decapitation and display of cattle heads, and this article seeks to explore the meanings of this practice in relation to the context of the site and the wider historical and ethnographic literature. It is argued that the b…
Some Reflections on Heritage and Archaeology in the Anthropocene
Are we now living in a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene? Geo-scientists discuss whether there is a need for a new concept covering the last 250 years' immense human impact on the earth. How are we going to understand and define ‘heritage’ and archaeology in a rapidly changing global environment? The ‘linguistic turn’ in humanities and social sciences has had a huge impact on both archaeology and heritage studies since c. 1980. A criti…
Time and the archaeological archive
This paper begins by reviewing conventional understandings of the historical and archaeological record and questions the lack of problematizing the nature of time in relation to the archive. Drawing on the concept of memory in both mental (testimony) and material terms (trace), the paper argues that we need to address the temporal paradox at the heart of any archive, namely the continuity of the past into the present. Using the concept of palimps…
The Mobility of Theory
Halfway through the second decade of the new millennium, it seems many archaeologists are wondering about the future of their discipline.Perhaps this is a perennial issue, but it does appear -especially in relation to theory -that there is real sense of a sea change happening in archaeology.Such moments typically elicit both negative and positive positions, the former often as a prelude to the latter.Thus one characterization of the current state…
Archaeology and contemporaneity
This paper discusses the concept of contemporaneity as it is used in archaeology. In particular, two general usages are examined. The first concerns the idea of contemporaneity in the context of archaeological dating and chronology, the second relates to the characterization of the archaeological record as a contemporary phenomenon. In both cases, related concepts are explored, namely synchronism and anachronism respectively. The paper offers a c…
The symmetries and asymmetries of human-thing relations. A dialogue
This paper presents a dialogue about the question of symmetry and asymmetry in human-thing relations, and the links between such asymmetries and those encountered in power relations amongst humans. The conversation discusses various issues, such as whether symmetry is possible in any kind of relation, how one defines asymmetry, whether there are different kinds of asymmetry, and how inequality between humans is related to the asymmetries in human…
An Archaeology of Colonial Identity: Power and Material Culture in the Dwars Valley, South Africa
This book is the based on the work of many people, and while I discuss many of them in the general context of this book in Chapter 1,1 would like to emphasize here the contribution of all those people involved. My apologies in advance to any I have omitted to mention. The backbone of the book is based on a project, 'Farm Lives' conducted between 1999 and 2002, funded exclusively by the McDonald Institute for Archaeolog ical Research at the Unive…
The paradigm concept in archaeology
One of the most critical ideas to bridge the theoretical and historiographical domains is the paradigm concept. From Thomas Kuhn’s highly influential studies on the history and philosophy of science in the 1960s, the paradigm concept was taken up in most if not all disciplinary discourses by the late 1970s and early 1980s, archaeology included. Historically, it provided a framework within which to understand the development of disciplinary questi…
Episcopal Economics: Property and power in post-reformation Iceland
It has been common to view the Icelandic economy either from the perspective of the individual farm in terms of its productivity or at the national scale in terms of trade and the role of imports/exports. Given the fact that the economy was largely a tenant-based system with a small number of landowners, there is an important middle ground between the household economics of individual farms and the state-sanctioned trade structures that needs to …
A Solid Fluids Lexicon
In our discussions around the theme of solid fluids, we often resort to everyday words, many of them of ancient derivation and rich in association. We have decided to make a list of some of the words that come up most often - barring those that already figure as the principal characters of individual contributions - and to distribute among ourselves the task of writing a sort of mini-biography for each. The resulting lexicon with 19 entries, rang…
Archaeology without antiquity
Antiquity-the past-has been fundamental to archaeology from the very beginnings of the discipline, and it remains the central concept around which archaeological research is developed. Over the years, however, alternative ways of doing and thinking archaeology have come forth to challenge this orientation on the past. Despite their growth in scope and sophistication, these alternatives remain at the margins of our community. In this article, the …
The Archaeology of Capitalism in Iceland: The View from Viðey
Pálstóftir: A Viking Age Shieling in Iceland
This paper discusses the recent excavation of a 10th century shieling in the highlands of eastern Iceland and places it in the context of other sites and research into Viking age shielings in the North Atlantic. Although the basic economic role of shielings in relation to livestock and summer transhumance is not contested, it is argued that a more complex interpretation needs to be developed around such sites, to consider their ideological and po…
Paradigm Lost: What Is a Commitment to Theory in Contemporary Archaeology
A radical shift in orientation alongside the objects of archaeology has occasioned a reconsideration of what theory is in a very general sense. What function does it serve and how might we define it? In retrospect, these questions arise not in the context of paradigms and strong theories, which some consider to have run their course, but in their absence. Here, there is a danger that theory might be jettisoned altogether if its nature and purpose…
Variations on a Theme: Assemblage Archaeology
This paper provides a commentary on the other contributions to this special section. It offers an extended reflection on some emergent themes in this collection, themes which resonate with my own perspective on assemblage theory. Two issues in particular are addressed: typology and time
The Case Study in Archaeological Theory
The case study is a familiar yet generally taken-for-granted element of archaeological theory. Typically, it is viewed as a kind of 'proof of concept,' an essential way to demonstrate the value of a particular theoretical approach, if not theory in general. In this article, we examine the case study as it has been used in archaeology, exploring its different manifestations and situating them within a wider discussion of the role of cases and exam…
The terrain of thingworlds: Central objects and asymmetry in material culture systems
Material culture forms a relational system of distributed reality - a thingworld. But how do we get beyond simply saying that all material culture is meaningful and entangled to understanding the internal structure of such systems? Is it a flat terrain among co-equal things? Or are some objects more important than others, as we might intuitively suppose? And if so, why? This article presents an initial discussion of the problem. Using vignettes f…
Archaeology at the edge. An archaeological dialogue with Martin Hall
Archaeology in South Africa has always been political and no one has articulated this relationship better than Martin Hall in a career that has spanned both the political upheavals in South Africa and the theoretical transformations in archaeology over the past four decades. In research that has traversed the Iron Age to the Internet, he has explored the multifarious ways in which material culture operates in everyday life and how power is mobili…
An Investigation into Differences in Respiratory Illness in Overseas and UK Students: A Report to the Medical Research Council's Committee on the Aetiology of Chronic Bronchitis
It has been suggested that overseas students may have a worse experience of respiratory illness while in the United Kingdom than students from the United Kingdom itself. If this were so it might be due to infection of overseas students with viruses to which United Kingdom students are, by adult age, immune, or because of differences in living con- ditions between the two groups of students in the United Kingdom
Of Death and Debt. A History of the Body in Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Yorkshire
This paper addresses the way in which social identity is articulated through the body at death and linked up with cycles of gift-giving and the architecture of tombs during the Neolithic and earlier Bronze Age in eastern Yorkshire. The dynamics of funerary rites are explored and longer-term historical changes in the archaeological record are interpreted in terms of modifications to these 'everyday' dynamics. Grave goods, seen as part of a network…
Forgetting the Past
A Medieval Fishery on Whittlesea Mere, Cambridgeshire
EXCAVATION at the site of two medieval fishing platforms on the edge of Whittlesea Mere in Cambridgeshire recovered a substantial assemblage of fish remains, pottery and lead weights. Although no structures survived due to peat shrinkage, distribution patterning of the finds enabled a reconstruction of activity and deposition on the site through time. These interpretations can also be placed in a wider context of medieval fisheries and fish consu…
Critical Approaches to Fieldwork: Contemporary and historical archaeological practice
Destruction and the Rhetoric of Excavation
In this paper a recurrent perception of archaeological excavation as destruction is addressed. By examining this rhetoric in discourses about fieldwork in the UK, the theoretical issues implicit in its use are examined, issues that affect not only Britain but also other European countries and beyond. Tying it into notions of the archaeological record and the archaeological resource, the traditional model of the archaeological process is found to …
The archaeology of alienation: A late twentieth-century British council house
In July of 1997 we were allowed two days’ access to a recently abandoned council house; the project started from an idea of exploring the theme of alienation from a dual perspective of the material culture of a marginalised and socially disenfranchised person or family in the late twentieth century and the process of marginalisation and alienation that we, as archaeologists, effect on the people we study – whether now or two thousand years ago. T…
Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past
Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past turns what is usually seen as a method for investigating the distant past onto the present. In doing so, it reveals fresh ways of looking both at ourselves and modern society as well as the discipline of archaeology. This volume represents the most recent research in this area and examines a variety of contexts including: * Art Deco * landfills * miner strikes * college fraternities * an abandoned council ho…
Disposability and Dispossession in the Twentieth Century
This article addresses the issue of disposability in modern Anglo-American society, through a historical and archaeological perspective of late 19th- and 20th-century practices surrounding waste. Starting from what is identified as a dilemma in disposability, caught between two moral systems of the household - thrift and hygiene - this article discusses these systems in terms of waste and the activities surrounding it. Through examination of vari…
Reading Pottery: Literature and Transfer-Printed Pottery in the Early Nineteenth Century
The Changing Vernacular: Archaeological excavations at Temple End, High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire
Excavations beneath and around the late Georgian Glinester House at Temple End, in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, revealed the presence of at least three major phases of building. Dating from the 16th century these structures appear to be a succession of farmhouses lying at the centre of wider farm complexes. While these buildings are located within the former lands of Temple Manor, from which the area and farm name derives, no evidence of a medi…
Modern Disturbances: On the Ambiguities of Archaeology
This paper discusses the relationship between modernity and archaeology from two directions. The first half examines the historical development of archaeology in relation to the concept of prehistory where prehistory is viewed not as a chronological period but an ontological condition, defined by a dialectical tension between discourse and materiality. The second half explores this dialectic through archaeological approaches to the modern world, …
Historical archaeology and time
The concept of time in archaeology has, until recently, been relatively under-theorised and discussed. In the past few years, however, a number of volumes dedicated to the topic have emerged (Karlsson 2001; Lucas 2005; Murray 1999), while time-related issues such as social memory in the past have also been the subject of research (e.g.Van Dyke and Alcock 2003).On the whole, this work has focused upon prehistoric and medieval periods, although the…
The Cambridge Companion to Historical Archaeology
The Cambridge Companion to Historical Archaeology provides an overview of the international field of historical archaeology (c. AD 1500 to the present) through seventeen specially-commissioned essays from leading researchers in the field. The volume explores key themes in historical archaeology including documentary archaeology, the writing of historical archaeology, colonialism, capitalism, industrial archaeology, maritime archaeology, cultural …
An Archaeology of Colonial Identity: Power and Material Culture in the Dwars Valley, South Africa
This book is the based on the work of many people, and while I discuss many of them in the general context of this book in Chapter 1,1 would like to emphasize here the contribution of all those people involved. My apologies in advance to any I have omitted to mention. The backbone of the book is based on a project, 'Farm Lives' conducted between 1999 and 2002, funded exclusively by the McDonald Institute for Archaeolog ical Research at the Unive…
Archaeology at the edge. An archaeological dialogue with Martin Hall
Archaeology in South Africa has always been political and no one has articulated this relationship better than Martin Hall in a career that has spanned both the political upheavals in South Africa and the theoretical transformations in archaeology over the past four decades. In research that has traversed the Iron Age to the Internet, he has explored the multifarious ways in which material culture operates in everyday life and how power is mobili…
Bloody slaughter: Ritual decapitation and display at the Viking settlement of Hofstaðir, Iceland
This article attempts an interpretation of an unusual assemblage of cattle skulls recovered from recent excavations at the Viking Age monumental hall of Hofstaðir in Iceland. Osteological analysis of the skulls indicates ritual decapitation and display of cattle heads, and this article seeks to explore the meanings of this practice in relation to the context of the site and the wider historical and ethnographic literature. It is argued that the b…
Landscapes of Settlement in Northern Iceland: Historical Ecology of Human Impact and Climate Fluctuation on the Millennial Scale
Early settlement in the North Atlantic produced complex interactions of culture and nature. The sustained program of interdisciplinary collaboration is intended to focus on ninth- to 13th-century sites and landscapes in the highland interior lake basin of Mývatn in Iceland and to contribute a long-term perspective to larger issues of sustainable resource use, soil erosion, and the historical ecology of global change
Visions of archaeology. An interview with Tim Murray
Tim Murray has occupied a unique, and at times contentious, position within Australian archaeology. His primary interests in the history of archaeology and theory made him 'a luxury no department could afford' in the fieldwork-dominated atmosphere of 1980s Australian archaeology, though he has since gone on to establish himself as a leading figure in both Australia and the international community. The politics of archaeology has also been a centr…
Pálstóftir: A Viking Age Shieling in Iceland
This paper discusses the recent excavation of a 10th century shieling in the highlands of eastern Iceland and places it in the context of other sites and research into Viking age shielings in the North Atlantic. Although the basic economic role of shielings in relation to livestock and summer transhumance is not contested, it is argued that a more complex interpretation needs to be developed around such sites, to consider their ideological and po…
Time and Archaeological Event
This paper re-examines the concept of the archaeological event as a means to avoid dual or multiple levels for historical phenomena, which a scalar view of time creates. Central to this procedure is an examination of the nature of residuality in relation to the archaeological record; it is argued that our concept of residuality needs to be broadened to encompass a more general view of material organization where the property of reversibility is f…
Time and the archaeological archive
This paper begins by reviewing conventional understandings of the historical and archaeological record and questions the lack of problematizing the nature of time in relation to the archive. Drawing on the concept of memory in both mental (testimony) and material terms (trace), the paper argues that we need to address the temporal paradox at the heart of any archive, namely the continuity of the past into the present. Using the concept of palimps…
The Tensions of Modernity: Skálholt During the 17th and 18th Centuries
Between 2002 and 2007, large-scale excavations at the episcopal manor and school of Skálholt in the southwest of Iceland unearthed a massive assemblage of material culture dating from the mid-17th to late 18th century. One of the key questions this paper will address is the position this settlement had within the wider religious, cultural, and economic changes that were taking place over this time period, both within Iceland and the North Atlanti…
Some Reflections on Heritage and Archaeology in the Anthropocene
Are we now living in a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene? Geo-scientists discuss whether there is a need for a new concept covering the last 250 years' immense human impact on the earth. How are we going to understand and define ‘heritage’ and archaeology in a rapidly changing global environment? The ‘linguistic turn’ in humanities and social sciences has had a huge impact on both archaeology and heritage studies since c. 1980. A criti…
Understanding the Archaeological Record
This book explores the diverse understandings of the archaeological record in both historical and contemporary perspective, while also serving as a guide to reassessing current views. Gavin Lucas argues that archaeological theory has become both too fragmented and disconnected from the particular nature of archaeological evidence. The book examines three ways of understanding the archaeological record - as historical sources, through formation th…
History (48 works) · Archaeology (40 works) · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies (26 works) · Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies (25 works) · Sociology (25 works) · Art (19 works) · History (19 works) · Philosophy (19 works) · Geography (16 works) · Epistemology (14 works)