The Affordances of Seascapes: (Re)situating Island Monasteries

Organizers:
Ryan Lash (Northwestern University)
Adrián Maldonado (University of Glasgow)

As focal points of settlement, worship, and imagination, islands played a crucial role in the early medieval North Atlantic world. Iona, Lindisfarne, Inishmurray, Skellig Michael and a host of other lesser-known islands were home to early Christian communities varying in size and status. Emphasizing parallels between the Egyptian desert and perilous ocean waters, modern narratives often characterize these sites as remote eremitical communities fundamentally defined by their isolation. This session proposes to resituate these islands both physically and conceptually. Encircled by water that could connect as well as divide, islands were embedded within networks of knowledge, power and materiality with strong links to the mainland and archipelagic seascapes inhabited by both lay and religious communities. This session welcomes contributions from scholars working within archaeology, history and other disciplines to explore how these networks might be identified and analyzed through a range of lenses. In particular, we encourage participants to examine islands as distinctive material and ecological environments that enabled particular forms of devotion and settlement that encouraged the movement of ideas, objects, and people, such as: the production and circulation of physical resources (food; prestige items; lithic materials), pilgrimage as a vector of exchange and interaction between lay and religious communities, and novel theoretical and methodological approaches (new materialism, taskscape, paleoecology) to maritime cultural landscapes.

Ryan Lash (Northwestern University)
Adrián Maldonado (University of Glasgow)
Candice Bogdanski (York University)
Anouk Busset (University of Glasgow)
Andrew Johnson