Time and Experience: Taskscapes Within GIS

Doortje Van Hove

Laboratorium voor Prehistorie, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Redingenstraat 16, 3000 Leuven, Belgium. doortjevanhove@yahoo.co.uk

Cite this as: Van Hove, D. 2004 Time and Experience: Taskscapes Within GIS, Internet Archaeology 16. https://doi.org/10.11141/ia.16.5

Summary

Within the archaeological discipline, the agency debate has re-emphasised the importance of human volition within the archaeological landscape. Human action is influenced by how groups perceive their worlds and, more importantly, structured by the way in which they interpret affordances, created by the dynamic interplay between humans and their animate and inanimate surroundings. This conceptualises the notion of 'taskscape', in which different interpretations of space, time and accumulated experience generate a variety of potential pictures of past human lives. Human taskscapes are dynamic and built upon the historicity of human action, emphasising that spatial patterns of human practice are not static but contexts reflecting back on past and predicting future behaviour.

For archaeological analyses of the spatial structure of past human activities, the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) has mostly been restricted to the recognition of spatial patterns in one-dimensional space and time. Static GIS therefore yields only an ahistorical picture of the past. Dynamic or temporal GIS includes the possibility of looking at dynamic taskscapes over time, enabling them to become both medium for and outcome of human action.

My current PhD research theorises the implications of the implementation of taskscapes for past human practice, through land use modelling within the southern Calabrian (Italy) Neolithic, using temporal GIS. This article will specifically discuss outcomes of dynamic simulation models and interpretations of results to emphasise an alternative approach to southern Italian Neolithic culture.

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Features

This article will appeal to: GIS researchers, Theoretical archaeologists, Archaeologists doing research on the Italian Neolithic, People doing fieldwork in (southern) Italy.
Key Features: A much-needed critique of existing functionalist and spatially-limited socio-cultural models in southern Calabria, a previously under-researched area, Creates a new understanding of Neolithic use of space through time, Explores issues of a theoretical nature (such as agency, taskscape, decision-making and scale) in archaeology and in predictive GIS modelling, Creates a land use model with minimal specifics, which forms a more accurate stage from which a social world can be imagined, Attempts to bridge the gap between archaeological theory and (what is often considered environmentally deterministic) GIS methodologies.
Related archive: D Van Hove (2005) Imagining Calabria - A GIS approach to Neolithic landscapes: PhD thesis, University of Southampton (2003) [data-set]. York: Archaeology Data Service [distributor] https://doi.org/10.5284/1000228
Keywords: GIS, Neolithic, land use, Calabria, agency, taskscape, socio-economic landscape