Patricia Murrieta Flores supervised by Dr David Wheatley
The importance of movement as one of the main expressions of the vivid interaction between space, time and action in human societies has not been considered in archaeology until relatively recent times. While the most studied evidence of movement in archaeology has been the material culture associated with the final goal or intention of some forms of mobility (e.g. traded goods), the less researched has been the materiality related to the actual action of movement. In this sense, traditional approaches have overlooked essential aspects of travelling, such as the processes that made possible to carry out voyages like terrestrial navigation, or the activities that took place in between points of origin and destination during a journey. The archaeological study of these processes and variables of movement has been largely ignored, firstly because of the difficulty implied in the recovery of data from non “static” fixable locations (e.g. settlements), but mainly, because of the fragmentation of the material elements that can be regarded as evidence of movement at a landscape scale.
In the case of Iberia, traditional research has addressed the role that some elements in the landscape (e.g. megalithic monuments) could have played in movement, discussing their possible function as guidance for herding activities or as territorial markers. Despite the fact that from these studies the knowledge regarding the function of the megaliths has been expanded, it is necessary to say that arguments in the literature regarding the function of megaliths as markers, seems to be often mixed and to some extent vague, claiming usually that they played both roles, as landmarks and waypoints. Practically in no case, the authors seem to explore thoroughly any of these concepts or their implications. As part of an ongoing investigation, this paper looks to explore these issues and to understand the possible materiality associated with the actual ‘action’ of movement. We focus specifically on the development of a theoretical understanding of the role that landscape markers may have played and the implications that their use might had for past communities. The development of the theory behind the use of landscape markers is thought as an indispensable first step, in order to study later, specific cases of movement during prehistory through computational approaches such as GIS spatial analysis.
Breaking the Boundaries 