"Goodbye to the island(s), Hello to the rain..."

I've been meaning to write this post for the past few weeks, but attempting to get back to normality seems to have gotten the better of me... I snapped this pic of the Grenadines from the window of the plane as we left St. Vincent to return to Grenada. Just before leaving St. Vincent, I had an interesting conversation with colleagues about what 'island life' means to different people. When you're on a relatively small island like Grenada, it's hard to forget, because you are almost always within sight, sound or smell of the ocean. My colleague then pointed out that if you're on one of the bigger islands in the Caribbean, such as the Dominican Republic for example, it can be quite easy to forget you're on an island because you can travel inland and be away from the sea for extended periods of time.

This comment was something that I felt I could relate to. Living in Belgium, I am often teased as coming from 'the island', or for being a former 'island dweller'. Technically, Britain is an island, but I personally have never felt a sense of 'island community' living there because it does not feel like you are on an island. For me, Britain is too big to give me that island feeling.

As archaeologists we aim to interpret past human interactions. This can be extremely difficult in the absence of written texts. We don't often find an instruction manual on how artefact x was made or used, or how people felt using the object. So how do we interpret all the things we find during an excavation? How do we relate all those post-holes we found at La Poterie, to the fragments of ceramic? How do we relate those fragments to whole vessels? And how to we then relate all those interpretations to what life would have been like? I'll be honest, it's a fairly long, difficult (and sometimes argumentative) process, which we are now starting to do (I'll give more blogs on my specific post-ex work, so don't panic). However, we do need to be careful that we don't interpret the past based on our understanding of the present. Just because I might use a specific shape of bowl for mixing cake ingredients, this does not mean that everyone uses that type of bowl for mixing, someone else may use it as a fruit bowl, or maybe they don't use it at all and it's purely for decorative purposes or only for special occasions. I think interpreting the past remains of island communities needs similar caution. Just because I felt very aware that I was on an island while on Grenada, does not mean that the past populations who lived there felt the same. Personal perceptions can be very powerful, because they give us a method of relating to the thing we are trying to explain. But, we need to be flexible, and realise that our perceptions may be different. My Belgian colleagues class me as an 'island dweller' because I am from Britain, while I feel that Britain is just a less connected mainland. I have to wonder whether a similar interaction occurred between the Europeans and the indigenous island population? And to what extent should the concept of 'island awareness' play a role in our interpretations of the site?