After receiving her PH.D. in 1999 from the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge, Dr. Blake became a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Classics at Stanford University. During her tenure at the Cotsen Institute, Dr. Blake will be writing a book that explores “the relationship of place and identity—the dual processes of characterizing spaces and constructing identities—using case studies from Roman North Africa, the prehistoric Andes, nineteenth-century Brazil, the Sardinian Bronze Age, and Iron Age Sicily.” She also will teach a graduate seminar called “Identity Politics in Archaeological Perspective.” Look for an article by Dr. Blake in the Spring/Summer 2001 issue of Backdirt.
Can you tell us about your research on the nuraghi and the giants’ tombs?
The nuraghi are conical stone towers dating from the second and first millennia bc on the island of Sardinia. There are some 7000 scattered all over the island, and they characterize the landscape today. They were apparently farmsteads in the Bronze and Iron Ages. The giants’ tombs are freestanding stone tombs consisting of a single chamber fronted by a semicircular forecourt. These tombs contained multiple burials and were roughly contemporary with the nuraghi and presumably used by the towers’ residents. Finds at the tombs indicate that feasts and gatherings occurred in the forecourt area. My research has focused on the spatial patterning of these two types of monuments because I am convinced that how people arrange space can tell us a lot about how they lived and what they believed.
What is particularly fruitful about studying spatial patterning?
The way people organize space through arrangement of objects in it, transformation of “space” into “place,” may be equated with the process by which natural materials are transformed into “material culture” by human action: places are remnants of past practices. From that standpoint, when you look at a suburban mall, an antebellum cotton plantation, or a nuraghe, you may analyze these places as you would an artifact: by its physical features, its context, its function, and its meaning. Places constrain the activities occurring in them, and it can be argued that places can have a real impact on social development, serving to naturalize worldviews. For this reason, studying spatial relationships at archaeological sites has the potential to illuminate social practices and ideology.
What aspects of social development particularly interest you?
Currently I’m interested in how social development and group identity-formation are linked. I see the messy recursive interplay between the established social structure, everyday practices, and the changing identities of the participants as shaping the course of a society. I’m finding that this approach works well for later western Mediterranean prehistory, where we have cultural groups at different levels of complexity who do not fit neatly into the standard evolutionary typology of societies and for whom the usual models of social development are inadequate.
How does studying folklore help you?
I’ve wrestled with folklore’s relationship to archaeology, as Sardinia is rich in folklore, and many local traditions surround the nuraghi and the giants’ tombs. How people use and perceive the monuments now can tell us about the significance of the monuments in the past, but not in any direct way, as I doubt there are any vestigial meanings or knowledge of them. Still, the local perspectives are useful. They emphasize the sensory and aesthetic experience of the monuments, which archaeologists often forget. They recognize the uniqueness of each monument as opposed to seeing each as merely an example of a “type.” The very fact that there are no residual meanings alerts us to the fact that similar ruptures may have occurred in the past, particularly given Sardinia’s long and checkered history. So, for example, the nuraghi’s subsequent reuse in the Roman period shouldn’t be written off as simply inertia or cultural conservatism but is a phenomenon that needs explanation.
Can you tell us about the course you’ll be teaching?
In the humanities and social sciences, identity is a central theme, and the struggles to assert an identity and ascribe one to others are frequently evoked to account for human behavior. This seminar looks at contemporary theories of identity—both group and personal—based on gender, class, ethnicity, culture, and so on, and how they may be applied to the past. Can these sorts of identities be detected in the archaeological record? We’ll be drawing on modern and ancient case studies to explore the usefulness and relevance of this concept.
