Henty & Silva/From the Ground to the Sky 1. Introduction: Ten Years of Skyscape Archaeology

From the Foreword by Timothy Darvill

Celebrating ten years of skyscape archaeology through this volume provides an opportunity to rejoice in what has been achieved and reflect on issues that might be relevant to the next ten years. The 12 papers and the debate contributions selected from the Journal of Skyscape Archaeology that have been assembled here show the progress that has been made not only in bridging the gap between archaeology and archaeoastronomy but also in forging a whole a new sub-discipline: skyscape archaeology. At its heart is integration, bringing skyscapes, landscapes and seascapes together in order to build holistic interpretations of ancient worlds that embrace the lives of people, their wider communities and the physical spaces and conceptual domains that they created and manipulated.

What has been happening in the study of skyscapes over the past decade or so mirrors the development of landscape archaeology during the 1970s and 1980s (Darvill 2008). Here the scale of analysis changed from a focus on single sites to the analysis of whole life-spaces, with an accompanying flip from looking at how the environment shaped people’s actions to how people interpreted the world, how they shaped it both physically and conceptually, and how they turned abstract spaces into meaningful places. A key concept, equally valid for terrestrial, aquatic and celestial worlds, is the notion of the “scape”. The term first came into the English language in the late seventeenth century with the word “landscape”, derived from the Dutch “landskap”, in order to label the emerging artistic tradition of painting the great outdoors rather than the biblical scenes and portraits favoured in earlier centuries. The “-skap”’ or “-schap” element is now obsolete, but originally referred to a “cabinet” or a “shelf” in the sense that an image of the land was selectively defined and packaged-up within the frame of the picture. Landscapes were cultural images representing, structuring and symbolising a constructed reality.