7 - Lifeways in Stone: Memories and Matter-Reality in Early Medieval Sculpture from Scotland

Summary

INTRODUCTION

This paper explores the cultural biography of early medieval (particularly Pictish) sculpture. It seeks to elucidate the contrasting trajectories of such biographies, and to explore how these trajectories led to the creation of different kinds of social agency within which the sculpture performed a role as well as encouraging the sculpture's divergent use in the construction of different kinds of social memory. Space limitations preclude detailing full biographies; instead, the paper outlines episodes from those case studies treated in full elsewhere (and duly referenced). A key strand of the paper is that all the case studies have a wider significance than their original early medieval purpose. The biographies of early medieval stone sculpture last to the present day; therefore, the biographical approach explores a much longer time frame than that of their initial construction and use, after which their initial purpose began to decay almost immediately. Consequently, a neglect of the wider picture, the longer story, archaeology and art history can miss vital nuances that reflect landscape and social change and can also reflect back on our understanding of the early medieval episodes. Indeed, both of these two key sister disciplines have tended to focus on the logic of conception and construction over the longer-term use and reuse of sculpture, to the impoverishment of its study. At the same time the biographical approach reveals the importance of early medieval monuments in later epochs as an integral and legitimate aspect of their archaeological and art-historical investigation.

SCULPTURE AND BIOGRAPHY, AGENCY AND ENTANGLEMENT

The concept of cultural biography (Appadurai 1986; Gosden and Marshall 1999; Schiffer 1999) and its application to archaeological case studies (Schiffer and Skibo 1987; Skeates 1995; Gosden and Marshall 1999; Meskell 2004; Pena 2007; Joy 2009) is now well established. Here, I want to focus on its application in the field of early medieval sculpture, particularly in north and east Scotland. This section of the paper addresses various theoretical positions that articulate a wide social theory underpinning this approach. The case studies that follow are informed by these theoretical underpinnings but on the grounds of space and repetition they do not repeat them.