island conversations
podcast series
"Island Notes" composition in Cretan Flat Mandolin by Christophoro Gorantokaki @"Melody Box"
Welcome to SICRI’s “island conversations” podcast series.
The aim of these podcasts is to highlight the work of island studies scholars and practitioners who make a significant contribution to islands’ research, arts, and culture landscape.
The podcasts are accompanied by a curated transcript that is edited to read as an independent piece.
Welcome to SICRI’s Island Conversations podcast series. This is Dr. Evangelia Papoutsaki, the host of this podcast and SICRI’s co-convener.
Today, we have Helen Dawson, an archaeologist with a research focus on understanding what draws people to islands and what happens when they live there, from their initial settlement thousands of years ago to the present. Her work explores cultural interactions, networks and mobility, islander identities and sense of place, abandonment processes, and endangered global island heritage. Helen was born and raised in Sicily and then moved to the UK to study archaeology. Life as an island archaeologist has taken her around the Mediterranean, to the Pacific, and most recently to Jersey. She is currently a research fellow at the University of Tübingen, Germany, where she is developing a new research unit in island studies. Helen joined the Shima editorial board in 2007 and the advisory board of SICRI in 2020 and was elected as chair this year, much to our delight.
Helen, welcome. It's great having a fellow Mediterranean Islander in this island conversation. Our islands, Sicily and Crete, are not only sharing a geographical proximity, but also culture and history.
Hello Valia. It's great to be here. Yes, Sicily and Crete are both really big islands. And I think that is a particular characteristic to think about, [the difference] between larger islands and smaller islands, and how they affect one’s sense of identity. I think growing up in Sicily, I didn't really have a sense of being an Islander. This came later to me.
That's interesting. Let's hear a little bit more about your earlier experiences growing up in Sicily. How was it?
It felt completely normal and natural. Sicily is the largest island of the Mediterranean. I grew up in a big city. So for me, I didn't really have a sense of living on an island, except sometimes when, of course, we were travelling either to the mainland of Italy or when we would go to the UK to visit family, then I would perhaps have more of a sense that I lived on a place that was completely surrounded by the sea, so I either would have to fly or take a ferry to get anywhere else. But because it's such a big island and, it's a bit like Crete, it has a strong history and a strong sense of identity, I never felt isolated or any of those characteristics. If anything, I felt really connected to the rest of the world.
Did you speak in the dialect in your daily interactions or was that a particular dialect from that part of the island, your family’s original dialect. How was it?
I grew up bilingual or perhaps you could say trilingual because we spoke Italian and English at home; but of course there was always a bit of dialect. But I think I grew up during a time when the emphasis was really on speaking Italian and dialect was not really promoted so much. But I could speak it, I could understand it, and now I really appreciate it when I hear it and when I get the opportunity to speak it.
Each region in Italy has its own dialect, and Sicily itself has many different dialects. Being such a big island, in fact there are differences between the cities of Palermo and Catania, where, you know, there's a healthy competition with football, with food, and all sorts of other things.
The Temple of Concordia in Agrigento, Sicily, dating to the 5th century BC, is a masterpiece of classical architecture
(Photo source: Wikipedia, public domain image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_of_Concordia,_Agrigento#/media/File:Agrigento-Tempio_della_Concordia01.JPG)
Did you speak in the dialect in your daily interactions or was that a particular dialect from that part of the island, your family’s original dialect. How was it?
I grew up bilingual or perhaps you could say trilingual because we spoke Italian and English at home; but of course there was always a bit of dialect. But I think I grew up during a time when the emphasis was really on speaking Italian and dialect was not really promoted so much. But I could speak it, I could understand it, and now I really appreciate it when I hear it and when I get the opportunity to speak it.
Each region in Italy has its own dialect, and Sicily itself has many different dialects. Being such a big island, in fact there are differences between the cities of Palermo and Catania, where, you know, there's a healthy competition with football, with food, and all sorts of other things.
Now that you have left Sicily, looking back at your or your childhood and growing up in Sicily, how much of that identity that you have now is linked to an island identity, if we can say that.
I don't think I really ever “left” Sicily. I mean, I don't live there physically anymore, but I feel really a strong connection to Sicily and I go back, regularly. So, perhaps, the fact that I've physically left has strengthened that connection even more. We have many layers of identity and I think my being Sicilian is definitely a strong aspect of my identity, but it's not obviously the only one. It's funny because when I grew up in Sicily, I was the English girl but when I was in England, I was the Sicilian girl. There was always something, that people like to define who they see, sometimes through association, but also by emphasising differences, and this was certainly the case I felt when I grew up. Sometimes I felt I didn't really belong in either place. Which could be a little bit tough. [it] Made me feel a bit special when I was young, but growing up I realised that it could also be a little bit problematic not really fitting in either place.
Or it can be an advantage! You know, the ability to navigate as Islanders in different places in mainlands and in islands. But if you could say there are certain characteristics that define the Sicilian identity, what would those be in in your view? What defines the Sicilian identity?
That is a really good question. […], it is also a question that you have to really [think about]… growing up I was always confronted with a lot of stereotypes regarding Sicilian identity. So one of the first things that I would say if I was asked where you're from, if I said I was from Palermo, I would get a funny look and people would associate it with the Mafia, which was always quite annoying because this is what people hear about from movies but it's certainly not what Sicily [is], I mean, there's obviously a big historical component of that, but this is not what being Sicilian is about. So always I would have to take a very deep breath and say, well actually Sicily is not just about that, it's a very culturally rich part of Italy. And I think it's hard to define to be honest. I also don't want to fall into stereotypes by saying that we are “super friendly” and “super nice”, but I think anybody who's been to Sicily probably has experienced amazing hospitality, great food and perhaps an initial being reserved, but then an openness that comes with [Sicilian] people really appreciating that [other] people take an interest in their island.
What was your favourite food when you were growing up? This is the recipe sharing part!
I think probably Gelato or ice cream and I don't have a recipe.
Oh, any particular flavour?
Chocolate, but also watermelon.
Yes, in summer, in the Mediterranean, you will need to have watermelon to cool you down, right?
Watermelon ice cream. Yes, definitely!
Here I am excavating at La Hougue de Vinde in Jersey as part of the JICAS Archaeological Summer School. The site belongs to a distinct burial tradition known as a “cist-in-circle” which developed in the Channel Islands in the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age (circa 2850-2250 BC) (Photo: H. Dawson)
I remember as a child growing up in Crete, I was surrounded by all these ancient ruins that we would go for school visits or they were there in the background. I wonder, because I know Sicily has also so many. How much of that was in your background, that perhaps one day might have had an impact on your choice of studies?
Absolutely, I think you're completely right. So growing up, they were always there, all these amazing temples and I would remember being “dragged”, I would say, first by my parents and then on school trips. […] a lot of people say, I've always wanted to be an archaeologist since I was a child. This is actually something I came to realise a little bit later on in my life when I eventually I went to the UK and I decided that I wanted to study archaeology, but I was already in my 20s at that point. So something obviously in the background must have kind of kept going in my mind about how fascinating and important all this was. But it was only later that I realised that I could actually turn this into a profession. And this was, I think, the right choice for me, for sure.
So you studied archaeology. What brought you to island studies or studying islands? Was that something that you chose from the beginning or did it come gradually as part of your career development?
It came gradually because I started studying classical archaeology, because of course, you know, this is what I knew about, Classical Greece, Rome and of course, Sicily is rich in evidence from these periods. When I was at the Institute of Archaeology in London, I also started developing an interest in prehistory. what I liked about prehistory was that we didn't have any written sources, so it was a lot more anthropological, and it was a lot more like detective work. And then I took a course on the prehistory of the Mediterranean and it really was so fascinating because […] the ruins of [the classical] temples are really so impressive and prehistoric remains are not so visually impressive, but they contain so much information about how we've developed culturally, over millennia and then, how all that leads to this incredible flourishment of classical civilization. So, I gradually shifted my focus from the classical period to the prehistoric period and then I realised that there was so much to be studied on the island of Sicily and on the Mediterranean islands that perhaps was not so known about and that really kind of stimulated my curiosity to study the prehistory of the Mediterranean islands.
What islands have you focused on over the course of your scholarly career? Can you share with us some highlights from your field work on some of these islands?
Sicily itself, but also the smaller islands surrounding Sicily, the Aeolian islands are a group of volcanic islands located to the North East of Sicily. Then the island of Ustica, the islands of Pantelleria and Lampedusa. I visited Malta as a student and I think that was really eye-opening because the Maltese islands have incredible prehistoric megalithic temples dated to the 4th Millennium BC, and they are the earliest freestanding megalithic structures in Europe, and I don't think many people know about them and they're really incredible! I think when I saw those, I thought it's amazing, this is what I want to study. I also did fieldwork on some Greek islands, so I went to some Cycladic islands. I participated in a project on the island of Kythera. Later on I worked on the island of Keros, which is famous for these amazing marble Cycladic figurines. I also did some work on the Balearic Islands, so I've been very fortunate because, through my interests in islands, I've been able to visit and work in collaboration with many other colleagues on many islands.
Here I am visiting the island of Filicudi (Sicily): islanders dug into the hill side to create terraces to build their village in the Early Bronze Age, some 3,500 years ago (Photo: H. Dawson)
So you are a true Mediterranean island archaeologist. You were an explorer of these islands, also from this very interesting prehistoric perspective that you mentioned because, as you said earlier on, we tend to focus on Classic Rome and Ancient Greece. What did you learn about the prehistory of the Mediterranean islands?
Well, the issue with studying prehistory is that we can excavate, we collect data, but then we have to explain what we have found and we need to interpret it. And so for the interpretation, I think looking at island communities and cultures over time is really important and really useful. So my work with Shima and SICRI has been really fundamental in my work as an archaeologist to provide me with ideas and hypotheses to then test in the archaeological record. How does colonisation, settlement, mobility, abandonment [...] affect communities? And what are then the traces that these processes leave behind? How can we interpret this?
You said earlier on that prehistoric archaeological work involves a certain level of detective work because you don't really have that much to draw upon, right? […] I'm really curious now to ask you about Malta and these megalithic temples. What insights do you get out of researching those spaces? Do we know what they were for? Who made them?
Well, these are all really important questions and we don't have definitive answers, but we have some good, some good ideas about who made them. We know that the first inhabitants of Malta came from Sicily. It's often the case that the islands are settled from the nearest mainland or large island. There are obvious obstacles with sea crossings and so on but they came from Sicily, but then they developed a very distinctive culture on Malta, quite different from what was going on in Sicily. And the same, from Sicily, other smaller islands were colonised and they all have their distinctive character and in some cases they show similarities. But I think Malta’s the one that is the most distinctive. And again, we hypothesise that it's not because they were completely isolated that they developed this distinctive culture, but because this was an expression of their cultural identity, and they built these temples as meeting places or as ritual centres, perhaps for feasting. But they're really impressive.
They must be! And as you mentioned, not many people know about them.
Yeah, it's a surprise.
You mentioned earlier on that part of the work you do is looking at island abandonment, and I wanted to ask you, what are some of the reasons through your research that islands have been abandoned in the past? And what kind of evidence provides answers to this?
Well, island abandonment is a really interesting topic for me because mostly we focus on why people went to the island in the first place, what attracted them to those islands, we then sort of assume that they get on with it and that island life continues uninterrupted. But when you study the settlements of these islands, it's often the case, particularly for the smaller islands, that their settlement is not continuous. And it's not just that they move around the island itself, but sometimes it looks like there's complete abandonment of the island. And there's many reasons for this; it could be a range of environmental factors, but it can also be cultural factors. It could be that - you know - an island was part of a trading network and then those routes changed and therefore it doesn't really make sense to continue living there.
So there's never really a single explanation that works in all cases, and it's usually a combination of natural [and cultural] factors. It could be that some resources run out and they were not sufficient enough to sustain the population. Or it could be simply that some historical events happen that meant that it was no longer viable or safe for the population to reside on that island and they move away.
And so I when I started looking at abandonment, there was no study for abandonment of the Mediterranean islands. But there had been similar studies done in the Pacific. So I was looking at the “Mystery Islands” in the Pacific. And these are islands that were found empty by European colonisers when they arrived but that had evidence that they had been inhabited previously and so obviously people were fascinated by why these islands had been inhabited and then abandoned, and there were many explanations, again, that range from environmental to historical. So I tried to apply and explore how this would work in the Mediterranean; and of course there are issues of distance because the distances in the Pacific are much greater than in the Mediterranean. But in relative terms, there are some similarities, I think, between the abandonment of islands across the globe and it is “push and pull” factors, different reasons why people are attracted to a place in the first instance and then they decide to either stay or leave.
La Hougue Bie in Jersey is one of the largest “passage graves” in Europe, dating to the Neolithic around 4000-3500 BC; it is topped by a medieval chapel and the Germans dug a bunker into the side of the mound during the second world war (Photo: H. Dawson)
That brings to mind some your work that you have done in collaboration with others about the island laboratory. It's kind of a contested term now, but in Anthropocene [era] we are looking at islands as a potential place where we can learn what is going to happen. And in that work you were revisiting the concept of the island laboratory and trying to integrate environmental and socio cultural approaches. Could you speak a little bit more to that because I think it links to what you just mentioned.
Yes, there's a long tradition of viewing islands as “laboratories” or “microcosms”, places where we can understand more easily complicated processes on the mainland. But I think we also have to appreciate the context, the historical context, when these concepts were developed, which was really during a period of colonial expansion of Europeans into other parts of the world. And so this idea of islands as laboratories or places of experimentation, I think it's really quite problematic and it takes a very top down approach and I think now we are in this phase of what I call the “loss of innocence” of island archaeology, where we are also confronting some of these assumptions and trying to reframe our views about islands in the context of decolonization. I think we need to be aware of the implications that this terminology brings with it. From a scientific perspective, it may be convenient to treat islands as laboratories, but I think it kind of disregards the actual people who live on the island, and this is something that we really need to think about.
And so, there is a certain lure of islands, if we can say that. I'm referring here to the fascinating conversation you had with Jonathan Pugh on the lure of island studies as a cross-disciplinary conversation, and I wanted us to talk a little bit about that. What is the lure of island studies from a cross-disciplinarity perspective?
This was a paper that we wrote a couple of years ago and we were interested in exchanging views on this. Jonathan Pugh is a geographer, I'm an archaeologist and we noticed that we think about island studies as interdisciplinary, but it’s actually, perhaps, more multidisciplinary than interdisciplinary. It brings together many disciplines together, but in fact there is not a lot of interdisciplinarity really happening. So we wanted to test this, to try and really learn from each other's perspectives. And so we kind of had this conversation around certain questions and definitely we are both working in fields where islands feature really prominently. There's a lure of islands and there's also a lure of island studies, which is not quite the same thing, but it's connected. And we need to be also careful that this kind of lure doesn't lead us down working with frameworks or concepts that can, in the end, be damaging for the communities that we work with and study.
And that brings me to what is your current island research on?
I'm at the moment working at the University of Tübingen, where we want to set up an interdisciplinary research unit in island studies. We're a group of, a team of archaeologists, geographers, historians. My focus is on the Mediterranean islands. Again, I am going to focus on the issue of abandonment and how abandonment and mobility affect community identity. What happens to islanders when they leave the island and they go to maybe another big island or back to the mainland? What happens to their sense of being an Islander? For this, I really need to work with anthropologists, and I would like to develop projects with Islanders because I would need to talk to them to understand how, what their sense of identity is and how it's affected by mobility, if it's strengthened or how it changes when they move around from one place to the other.
As archaeologists, we work with material remains, but then interpreting those material remains requires really this kind of anthropological perspective, speaking to people. We don't have that luxury in archaeology; we cannot speak with skeletons! So we need to interview people who have had that experience in more recent times, and of course, there are differences [with the past]. But we can at least use those insights as frameworks to guide our interpretations and formulate hypothesis that then we can try to test and, again, you know, archaeology sometimes come up with definitive answers, but it's always asking new questions actually.
That might be answering indirectly my question about the contribution of your disciplinary field of archaeology to island studies and how that has evolved over time. Just now, you mentioned your work that calls for interdisciplinarity or cross-disciplinary conversations and approaches. So how has anthropology come into island studies, and what contribution does it make to this field?
Well, when I joined Shima in 2007, there weren't many archaeologists working in island studies and so one of the things that I did early on was to co-edit a special issue for Shima in island archaeology and then I participated to the conferences that SICRI organised and I told all my colleagues about island studies, they didn't really know about it- So it's kind of working on many levels because island archaeology itself, I mean, when I started 20 years ago, was also quite a new subject, let's say. And so they were developing in parallel. I think we're at a good point where island archaeology has a good representation within island studies, much more than it did 20 years ago. Sorry, the question was about the contribution of archaeology?
The megalithic temple of Ġgantija on the island of Gozo (Malta) is more than 5,500 years old, making it one of the oldest standing-stone structure in the world (Photo: H. Dawson)
Yes, and the contribution has been evolving over time, making space [for island studies].
[…] I really benefit from conversations with my colleagues in island studies, with yourself, Valia, and the other conveners and board members of SICRI and from all the meetings that we have. But I hope that, in return, archaeology also provides a long-term perspective on some of the issues that islanders may be facing today. So this is not just a historical perspective, but really, at a deep level, how people interact with the island environments and this, you know, archaeology is really good at looking at, adaptation, sustainability, all things in the past that are really still important and relevant today.
Absolutely! I was wondering, is there such a thing as island archaeology, or is this something that you're talking about because this is what you do?
That's a good question! I like to think that it exists. It's really a thing! At the end of the 90s, there were a number of scholars who were really debating this question. There was a special issue in the Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology between scholars arguing whether there should be such a thing as “island archaeology” or whether it should be just archaeology that happens to be on islands and the consensus was that islands have particular features that warrant specialist study, the fact that islands are surrounded by the sea, of course, but they come in different shapes and forms. So there was a debate, like, can we really generalise given how different they are, but at the same time they share some characteristics. So, there was a bit of a debate going on about this. Then in 2007, the Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology was created and I think with that came the first conferences and it became gradually established as a field. So, yes, I think it is now quite mainstream.
Clearly, within your discipline, islands are important to study. In their own merit, so to speak.
Yes, I believe so. I mean, this is what I've been doing for the last 20 years and I still find interesting things to study about islands! It has again given me the possibility to do comparative work. I study the whole Mediterranean. When I published my book, I did a comparative study of island settlement and abandonment of 150 islands from Cyprus in the east to the Balearics in the West and across a really long time period of about 10,000 years from the time they were first inhabited to the beginning of the classical period. So it has given me a tremendous insight into the variation, but also some of the overarching processes, some of the challenges that I think islanders face generally, […] it is much harder to establish a settlement on an island and to maintain that settlement long term than it is on the mainland or on the coast. So although islands and coasts share many similarities, I think islands have special challenges and of course being an islander is not just about the sea. There are big islands such as Sicily, Crete, Cyprus that have big mountains in the middle, and so we tend to forget that being an islander is not just about the sea, but it's also about creating new places to live in a range of environments. Some islands in the Mediterranean are volcanic and are really quite high and they have such a big range of different environmental zones that require different types of adaptation. Of course, the interaction with the sea is really important, but it's one that we tend to focus on, but there are many other ones, many other types of island environments, too.
Definitely! I think in a previous conversation we had we talked about what is your perception of the island while you're living and growing up on the island. And I refer to me growing up in Crete, I wasn't seeing the sea every day, the sea was behind the mountain. I was seeing the valley with the olive trees and the vineyards. So, the sea wasn't my visual point of reference. However, I knew that I was on an island because in the conversations there was always a reference to the ferry going to the mainland, and certain expressions, because in order to do certain things you had to go to the mainland, you couldn't do things on the island. And I guess that would have been similar in Sicily.
Yes, definitely! And then […] hearing you say this, makes me wonder, what would it have been like for a prehistoric person, 7000 years ago in Sicily, living on top of a mountainous part of Sicily. Would they have had the same awareness or not that they were on an island? Would it have mattered to them? I mean, when does this identity, this sense of identity develop and why? And is it when people interact with people who come from the outside or is it when they receive an item through trade that is clearly not local? Is it when they are under attack, or could there be many explanations for when an Islander identity develops? For example, in the Mediterranean, in the Bronze Age, we see a big development of art that is linked to the sea. In Crete, for example, Minoan culture has many representations of sea creatures, of boats, and I think that suddenly, by this time, by the Bronze Age, about the third or second Millennium BC, there is this awareness that the islanders of Crete and the Cyclades are part of this maritime world; and I think there is this sense of being an islander that is very strongly linked to a maritime identity.
But this is only one possible expression or manifestation of an islander identity and there can be others. Going back to the example of the Maltese temples, there's an excellent study done by a Maltese colleague, an archaeologist called Reuben Grima, and he's looked at the iconography of the temples, and his study is really fascinating because the way they're decorated, some parts of the temple are decorated with maritime motifs, boats, waves, fish and other parts of the temple are decorated with terrestrial motifs, animals and trees, and he interprets this iconography of the temples as a representation of the “islandscape”, as almost the temple is a miniature representation of the archipelago. And so here you could say this is an expression of an islander identity through the building of the temple itself, and the way it's decorated. And, of course, this is an interpretation, but it's one that I find very suggestive and really interesting because, you know, we should not think of an islander identity as something monolithic. It's something very fluid that changes over time and that has different scales [and layers]. But it's something that's always, always there, I think, and sometimes it's stronger, sometimes […] you want to express and emphasise something like a sense of belonging and association with the others. Sometimes you want to express a sense of being different from the others. I think islands facilitate this process of identity formation and expression.
The Aeolian Islands are a small group of volcanic islands off the coast of Sicily; in the Bronze Age their inhabitants traded with people coming from as far as the Aegean (Greece) (Photo: H. Dawson)
Fascinating. You've just given me such a wonderful, complex, nuanced interpretation of island identity that it doesn't really fit into one set way.
That is why it was so difficult to answer your initial question: what does it mean to be Sicilian? it means so many different things, I think. It's really hard to come up with an answer, and I think we have to really think about how many different meanings this concept can assume can take.
Yes, I think the island allows you to have multiple identities. It is much more fluid, and I find it a lot more freeing as an identity.
Yes, how is it being Cretan for you, Valia, if I may ask you?
That’s my personal experience. It is a big question. It depends on where you stand and where your point of reference is. I am in the South Pacific, on another island. So I'm looking at my identity from another island sort of space, and I can relate. There are no contradictions in this: I live in Aotearoa, New Zealand, but have my tūrangawaewae, as they call it, Te Reo Māori, which is your belonging or where your roots are. I feel no contradiction, and I feel no pull. I feel I am in my natural environment. I'm an islander so I can recognise that environment. I can navigate this environment of living on an island, big or small, surrounded by the ocean and engaging in communities shaped by the Moana, the ocean shaping that community. But that identity changes when I am on the mainland. On the mainland, I often feel a certain antagonism as an Islander. It's as if I have to prove myself, that I have a distinctive identity. When people ask me where I am from, I often say I am from Crete. I am not giving a nation-state response, Greece. I live on Waiheke Island rather than the entire Aotearoa, NZ. So yes, that's the beauty of the island identity, where you are standing, and in what conversations you are involved. If I am in Crete, my identity is very specific to the locale I am in. I was born and brought up using a dialect. You know, in Crete, we say, “Apopu kratoune i rises sou,” which means “where are your roots holding to?” there is no “from where”; there is no distance. You know, the assumption is that you have roots, and they are holding on to something regardless of where you are.
Oh wow, that's beautiful!
Speaking of identities, Helen, I wanted to refer to some of the work you have done on network science and island archaeology. Could you speak to it a little bit?
Yes, it goes hand in hand with what we were just discussing about Islander identities and how we tend to think of Islander identity as this kind of process of divergence from the mainland, the development of distinctive cultures. For a long time, we thought that islands developed distinctively because they were isolated, but we now know, ... archaeological evidence shows that islands in the Mediterranean and globally really were very rarely completely isolated, even [remote] islands in the Pacific had interaction and exchange. We now understand this development of Islander identities in the context of interaction and this is where network science really can be helpful because it provides, I think, a better framework for understanding this. Instead of looking at centres and peripheries and margins, it's looking at the connections and islands as also being central in their own right, because of course, if you reverse the perspective to the island itself, I think, nobody living on an island would consider themselves “peripheral”. And we sometimes think of islands as “in-between” spaces, but I think this again depends on the context.
Network science is something that's become really popular in archaeology and I thought it would be interesting to see how it applies to the study of islands. I think it has given me new ideas again in relation to how we understand the development of cultures on islands I'm working with. This is something that we want to develop through our research unit at the University of Tübingen and in parallel, recently I've been working in a new archipelago, the Channel Islands and again here there's really interesting evidence of interaction between the islands and between both sides of the channel with France and the UK. Again, the Channel Islands develop a distinctive island identity, as manifested through megalithic architecture. some of it shows similarities with the mainland, and some of it is very specific and distinctive to Jersey and even to some of the other islands. And again, I think we should understand this, not through the concept of isolation. I think of insularity as this alternating of phases of sometimes isolation, sometimes more connectivity. That's why we have to have this kind of historical perspective and archaeological perspective too.
Here you can see the well-planned layout of the stone huts at the Middle Bronze Age village on the island of Ustica (Photo: H. Dawson)
I always feel irritated when I go to conferences, and people refer to the insularity of islands or the insularity of [island] communities, appropriating islandness into a negative frame of isolation because, as an Islander, I never felt isolated. In fact, the sea always provided an avenue for exploration.
Absolutely, I think that it's challenging, it's not easy, and despite that, there's always this kind of openness, I think, this sense of being interconnected. On the one hand, the sea is not a barrier, but on the other also not extremely easy to cross either, but people did that. So it's not an obstacle, but it's actually enabling interaction. So, yes, I am completely with you on that.
There are, of course, different factors for that isolation. I'm referring here in particular to the impact colonisation has had on clusters of islands that they are geographically close like, for instance, the Caribbean, where different islands have been colonised by different European countries and they maintain these colonial connections with the metropolis. Aruba, for instance, can communicate more easily with the Netherlands than with other islands [in the region]. It's a lot more expensive to fly to each other's islands than going to Europe, which also informs their intellectual and scholarly development.
Yes, and I think that also shows how historical factors are really, really important. And you know, sometimes, maybe not so much in other disciplines, but in island archaeology, there was this very strong biogeographical environmental approach initially, where everything was shaped by geography and by the environment, and we now know that this is much more complex and that - really - historical, social, cultural factors play a big role in why people interact with other people, not just because they are nearby, but because there's a choice, a decision to interact with people somewhere else because of their connections. So, in terms of networks, in this sense, they allow us to explore these different connectivities, not just based on geographical factors, but also based on cultural and historical factors.
Fascinating! I could have this conversation going for another hour or two with you, Helen. All of a sudden I'm discovering island archaeology and I want to know a lot more. What kind of legacy would you like to leave behind as an island studies scholar, an island archaeologist?
Well, it's a difficult question. I hope that my contribution to island archaeology has helped promote the study of islands, but in a way that is fair to Islanders themselves, to challenge some of these stereotypes and colonial concepts that are sometimes used in archaeology. Archaeology itself is a discipline that was born during colonial periods and I think islands really exemplify this extremely well. So in a sense, over the last two decades, I've also experienced my “loss of innocence” and I started off very enthusiastically with islands as laboratories and now realise how much more complicated it is. I'm now really trying to develop my research in a way that reflects that. Through SICRI, I'm really excited to be part of the New Voices in Island Studies Initiative, that we work on together, with you Valia, and through the SICRI board, to make sure that we get new perspectives and that we work with Islanders to make sure that island studies is fair in the end.
Absolutely, inclusive island voices, not just island scholarship, but in collaboration with Islanders. On that note, I would love to have this conversation going a bit more, but I think we have touched on a lot of interesting topics and those who are not familiar with island archaeology would find this conversation really interesting and informative. So, thank you very much for taking the time! I'm delighted that you have taken on the role of the Chair of the {SICRI} Advisory Board and look forward to collaborating with you more in the future.
Thank you, Valia. It's been a pleasure.
References
Dawson, H., Picornell-Gelabert, L., Calvo-Trias, M., Servera-Vives, G., & Valenzuela-Oliver, A. 2023. The “island laboratory” revisited: Integrating environmental and sociocultural approaches. The Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology, 18(4), 547–556. https://doi.org/10.1080/15564894.2023.2235673
Dawson, H. 2020. Network science and island archaeology: Advancing the debate. The Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology, 16(2–4), 213–230. https://doi.org/10.1080/15564894.2019.1705439
Helen Dawson and Jonathan Pugh 2021. The Lure of Island Studies. A Cross-Disciplinary Conversation. In European Islands Between Isolated and Interconnected Life Worlds: Interdisciplinary Long-Term Perspectives edited by: Dierksmeier, Laura; Schön, Frerich; Kouremenos, Anna; Condit, Annika; Palmowski, Valerie
Dawson, H. 2014. Mediterranean Voyages. The Archaeology of Island Colonisation and Abandonment. Routledge, London
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