Graduate Student, Department och archaeology and ancient history
Thesis Title: Seaward Landward. Investigations on the archaeological source value of the landing site category in the Baltic Sea region
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Frands Herschend
Ingmar Jansson |
About
Kristin is a PhD student since 2008 at the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies and Uppsala University, Sweden. In 1997-2004, she studied History and specialized in Archaeology with special interest in Maritime Archaeology at Tartu University, Estonia.
Kristin has extensive fieldwork experience from Estonia, Finland and Sweden including employment in several rescue archaeological excavations. She has been engaged in various research-project, such as “Land, Sea and People: Estonian on its way from the Iron Age to the Medieval period. North-Estonia, West-Estonia and Estonian islands 600-1600 AD” and “Coastal Settlements on Prehistoric and Medieval Saaremaa”. From 2003-2008 she worked as a research fellow in the Department of Archaeology at Tallinn University, Estonia.
In her research she specializes in maritime archaeology with particular emphasis on coastal areas, landing sites and harbours in particular.
There is a tendency in archaeology dealing with watercraft landing sites in a wider context to assume a direct relationship between sites in coastal and shore-bound areas and the practise of landing, without any deeper practical or theoretical exploration of the reality of any such relationship. This problem has its origins in the poor archaeological and conceptual definitions of watercraft landing sites obstructing any real understanding of the role of these sites in the maritime cultural landscape. Landing sites are taken for granted and they are undervalued as an archaeological source of explanation; notwithstanding, the concept of the landing site is readily used in archaeology in order to underpin archaeological interpretations on the maritime activities of past societies.
In order to break away from the simplified understandings of past water-bound strategies based on the undefined concept of the landing site, in her dissertation Ilves suggests a definition of watercraft landing sites in a wider social sense as water-bound contact zones; places of social interaction that can be archaeologically identified and investigated. This perspective integrates the understanding of the intentional character of human activity related to watercraft landing with the remaining archaeological traces. Archaeological definitions of landing sites that can be tested against the archaeological data are provided, and thereby, the possibility to archaeologically evaluate and approach the social function of watercraft landing sites is provided.
