Cookies

We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. You can change your cookie settings at any time. Otherwise, we'll assume you're OK to continue.

Department of Archaeology

Current Research Postgraduates

Mr Thomas Crowther

(email at t.g.w.crowther@durham.ac.uk)

Research Topic

Bridging Gaps through Light: An Archaeo-Anthropological Exploration into the Relationship between Orientation, Landscape and Lightscapes within Iron Age Scotland.

Abstract

Light (and colour) has sadly received little interest in prehistoric studies and when such an interest does occur, it is usually restricted to light’s cosmological associations. With regards to the Scottish Iron Age, studies which explore the role of light have been limited to orientation research and have extended a generalised cosmological model – reinforcing ideas of a uniform Iron Age – across Scotland without consideration of regional or chronological variability. I wish to take an alternative approach to the study of light, aiming to understand how Scottish Iron Age society orchestrated and manipulated light to create social experience and how the differing aspects of light may have worked to reveal and conceal aspects of social life. By converging landscape, lightscape and orientation analysis within studies of Iron Age architecture, I wish to incorporate lightscapes into the examination of Iron Age Scotland, which has retained predominantly functionalist approaches. Utilising site plans, detailed light readings throughout the interior and exterior landscape zones of case studies during differing periods of the day and season will be recorded, creating detailed plans of minimal/maximal areas of luminosity in time and space that will help interpret the social aspects of lightscapes. Together with a phenomenological study that explores the physical and cognitive effects of light and darkness in the surrounding landscapes of Scotland, this thesis aims to challenge functionalist approaches to Iron Age Scottish archaeology.

Is supervised by

Publications

Journal papers: online

  • Crowther, T (2011). Shedding Light on the Matter: An Exploration into the Regional Orientation Patterns of the Brochs and Duns of Iron Age Scotland. Assemblage: The Sheffield Graduate Journal of Archaeology 11: 45-78.

Research Groups

  • Ritual, Religion, Belief and Place Research Group