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189 Chapter Twelve Events, Temporalities, and Landscapes in Iceland Oscar Aldred and Gavin Lucas Abstract Events are only events when they have happened; they have tense. Considering then the links between temporality and the event is one way to tease out the importance in understanding “durable ruptures”: the structures that remain resilient to change and have high degrees of residuality.This paper considers long-term structures in the Icelandic landscape by considering them as assemblage-like: composed of elements with variable degrees of reversibility and residuality, but which collectively form coherent structures. The resilience then of the landscape’s elements, such as boundaries and routes, to change by events is dependent on their ability to adapt outside their configured contexts and to act as structural anchors. In doing so the connections between temporality, events, and landscape are explored in one valley, in Þegjandadalur, in northeast Iceland. Events, Objects, and Assemblages In what sense do archaeologists deal with events? And what do we mean by an event anyway? The concept of event is by no means straightforward and there are a plethora of philosophical issues and positions that we cannot address here. Archaeologically, the concept of event has received little attention and tends to be considered in terms of a more privileged opposite, such as process or structure (see Lucas 2008). At a very general level one might define an event as “something that happens”; it is thus a truism to say that archaeologists deal primarily with things not events. Nonetheless, we frequently interpret these things as the residue of events. We excavate a grave and from it infer the act of inhumation, the death of an individual, funerary rites, even larger phenomena such as religious conversion and so on. We survey and excavate landscape features such as sites and boundaries, and from them infer the planning and arrangement, individual and group participation (chiefly-will), acts of enforcement, and 190 Eventful Histories and Beyond larger phenomena such as political and economic influences and so on. But what is implied when we make these inferences? In this chapter, we would like to problematize the nature of this inferential process—but not in terms of formation processes or middle range theory, but rather in terms of the ontological relationship between objects and events. In many ways, we should be wary of dichotomizing object and event—or between social and historical disciplines, which are object-oriented (e.g., archaeology, material culture studies), versus those that are event-oriented (history, ethnography, sociology). Events, of course, only exist through material contexts while one might describe material culture as eventful in the sense that it only functions or signifies in the context of events. From such a perspective, the term eventful archaeology might be more appropriate than the archaeology of events. Nonetheless, stressing such overlap between the two entities “object” and “event,” does not necessarily get us any farther in understanding what we are dealing with or how it might effect the nature of our interpretations.Thus, does this overlap mean archaeologists are in fact digging up events not objects, or rather eventful objects? And if so, what is an eventful object? Moreover, if we are dealing with eventful objects, then our inferential process is surely not about reconstructing past events from object residues, but rather about understanding the relationship between one eventful object and another. And how does this differ from an approach that merely considers the relationship between one object and another? This last point can be clarified through an example. Consider a landscape; one can explore its internal configuration—the boundaries, the farm place and its respective locations —and compare the arrangement to another landscape to look at differences and similarities . From this, we might infer aspects of status or function connected to topography, resources, population, social structure, and so on. Or consider a grave as an object; one can also explore its internal configuration—the skeleton, grave goods, pit—and then compare this to other graves to determine similarities and differences. On this basis, we might infer aspects of identity such as gender or status, which might be interpreted as a material manifestation of social structures or ideology, as enacted through the specific event of the funerary rite resulting in the grave before us. But what role does the event play in such interpretations ? If we consider it carefully, it is nothing more than a shorthand for the particularity that is this grave or landscape—as opposed to any other...

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