Robert A. Dodgshon

Geography's place in time

Abstract. From the moment it began to engage with time in a considered way, human geography has employed a variety of analytical and conceptual approaches to it. Recent work especially has greatly extended the range of these different approaches by stressing the innate variability of time, leading some to talk of ‘multiple temporalities’ and to pronounce time as ‘uneven’ even within the same society. Fractured by such differences over how time may be used and interpreted, the possibility of an overarching concept of time in human geography has long gone. However, this does not prevent us from asking whether it is still possible to produce a coherent review of the differences involved. This paper offers such a review, arguing that setting these differences down within a structured framework can provide a clearer sense of how diverse the debate among human geographers has become and the trends of thought that have underpinned this growing diversity. Among the trends identified, it places particular stress on the shift from objectified interpretations to those dealing with relational forms of lived and experiential time and on how the separation of early discussions of space from those on time, their dimensional stand‐off from each other, has slowly given way to a view in which space and time are treated as sticky concepts that are difficult to separate from each other.

Human Geography at the End of Time? Some Thoughts on the Notion of Time—Space Compression

In this paper I look at the suggestion that time-space compression is changing our experience of time and space. In particular, the extent to which it is seen as raising the importance of a spatial perspective to our understanding of society is contrasted with how some writers have depicted it as rupturing our relationship with the past and its carryover of meaning. For some, this temporal disjuncture is seen as marking the end of History and as reducing our experience of time to a series of ‘perpetual presents’ . These a historical ideas are challenged and a case presented for maintaining an inclusive treatment of what is past, or inertial, within society.

An investigation of former land‐use activity through the physical and chemical analysis of soils from the Isle of Lewis, Outer Hebrides

In this study, the impact of human activity on the pedological environment of an agriculturally marginal site is investigated and the use of soils for analysing the sites land-use history is discussed. For townships such as Knockaird (Isle of Lewis), for which detailed layout/location prior to crofting is not recoverable through plans, such analyses can offer a prospective approach. The nature of traditional Hebridean farming provides an essential background to this prospective or diagnostic approach using soil analysis. Arable farming, at least by the eighteenth century, was characterized by labour-intensive techniques of husbandry with vast inputs of labour required to help transfer manurial supplements such as manure, seaweed, peat and turf. These practices had a considerable impact on the soil environment. A stratified sampling system was undertaken over the township of Knockaird and 335 topsoil samples were collected along predetermined transect lines. Of the seven soil properties investigated (topsoil depth, pH, loss-on-ignition, K, P, Ca, Mg), enrichments of K and P clearly identify the suspected location of the pre-crofting settlement of Knockaird. Sites enriched only in P are a less reliable indicator of human habitation, possibly because P enrichment may result from additions of animal manure as well as by human habitation of an area. Enrichments of K and Ca respectively, observed running the length of two individual crofts, do not appear related to any pre-crofting use of the land but to recent crofting activity. The Ca anomaly suggests liming, whereas the enhanced K levels suggest additions of K-rich fertilizer. This study highlights the importance of identifying the spatial covariance of elements and the need for several lines of geoarchaeological evidence when interpreting former land-use activity through the prospective analysis of soils. Copyright

In what way is the world really flat? Debates over geographies of the moment

This paper highlights the role played by the specious present or moment, what some call the present of the now, in geographical discussions of social change. Its most explicit treatment as a temporal framing for such change has been in performative approaches, with their stress on the capacity of immersive body practices to produce difference through the ongoing repetition of such practices, a difference that plays on what is habitually or instinctively accessed through each specious present. However, we can also find debates focused on large-scale social practices that have combined various forms of structural or institutional contingency (ie customary practices, past investment cycles, etc) with becoming and which see becoming as rooted in the everyday reiteration of such practices, an interpretation that also privileges the moment as the point when becoming is actualised. Brought together, these different approaches provide the basis for a more broadly based interpretation of change focused on the specious present. This paper explores the case for this broader interpretation. It is divided into four sections. The first reviews those philosophical discussions of the specious present that have attracted most attention from human geographers. The second reviews the ways in which the geographical debate has used the specious present as a framing for change. The third examines how these different geographical treatments fill or extend the specious present, whilst the fourth and final section considers the implications of such thinking for how we interpret change.

The little ice age in the Scottish Highlands and Islands: Documenting its human impact

Abstract This paper examines the Little Ice Age in the Scottish Highlands and Islands and uses documentary evidence to show its impact on the farm economy. It has three sections. The first examines how Highland climate may have changed during the Little Ice Age, and notes that increased storminess was probably as much a factor as lower annual mean temperatures. The second takes the most severe phase of the Little Ice Age, the Maunder Minimum, 1645–1715, and uses rests or eases of rent to show how it stressed the farm economy. The third examines evidence for the abandonment of land during the Maunder Minimum. As well as arguing that we need to see abandonment in its social as well as physical setting, it highlights the role played by the temporary abandonment of land and suggests that such abandonment along the western seaboard probably indicates the impact of increased storminess.

Changes in Scottish Township Organization During the Medieval and Early Modern Periods

AbstractThe paper draws attention to the widespread arrangement of modern Scottish farms into small, related groups or pairs. These groups or pairs are usually distinguished by place-name prefixes like East, West, Mid, Nether, Lower, Upper and Meikle or suffixes like Mor(e) or Beg. Such seemingly split farms have always been regarded as the product of runrig divisions carried out during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, various sources show that many examples, possibly the majority, existed before the eighteenth century. Prompted by these signs of their early existence, an attempt was made to establish when particular examples first developed. This was done by comparing rental statements or land charters over a period of time, thus deriving a serial view of the changing pattern of toun or farm names and their total number within individual estates. In a few select cases, it was even possible to locate direct documentary evidence for the early splitting of touns. From this evidence, it was ...

Livestock Production in the Scottish Highlands Before and After the Clearances

Livestock production has long been important to the Highland economy, before no less than after the clearances for sheep that first spread across the region from the mid-eighteenth century onwards. However, key questions about how it may have developed over the century or so immediately prior to the clearances have still to be answered, as well as questions about how the clearances actually changed farm output. Using stocking data primarily for the southern Highlands and Islands, this paper proposes to examine four particular questions. First, by way of an introduction, it will briefly consider the role of stock within the traditional or pre-clearance township economy. Second, it will use detailed data for the closing decades of the sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth century to characterise the broad stocking balance of townships at the point when detailed figures first become available. Third, it will look at stocking figures for the eighteenth century with a view to establishing how livestock production may have altered during the century or so prior to the clearances. Fourth, and finally, it will consider how the clearances changed the character of livestock production.

Geographical Change: A Study in Marching Time or the March of Time?

Discussions of long-term geographical change have tended to stress changes in landscape produced by the sustained or unfolding operation of particular processes rather than changes in the nature of the processes themselves. This paper calls for more study of the latter, It is argued that in the very long term, human spatial order has been organised around a succession of qualitatively different systems, each reflecting changes in the scale at which society was integrated and in its ideological constructs. A succession of five different systems of spatial order are examined, each replete with its own processes and forms of integration. It is further argued that exploring how one system gave way to another provides us with a geographical contribution to the wider debate on societal evolution, one in which the spatial structuring of the processes involved appears crucial to their operation.

Infield-outfield and the territorial expansion of the English township

Abstract In their recent survey of British field systems, A. R. H. Baker and R. A. Butlin suggest that infield-outfield was “a primitive form of agrarian organisation” and that “both on a priori grounds and on the basis of surviving evidence it is now possible to argue that a form of infield-outfield system was at some time practised throughout the British Isles”. They negotiate the acknowledged scarcity of manuscript evidence for the practice in what they call “the vales and plains of lowland England” by suggesting that in these areas “it soon evolved into more intensive field systems” such as the two or three field system. The impression theygive is that this particular evolution was under way by the start of the Middle Ages but that, given the uncertainties of the evidence, one could not entirely discount the possibility of infield-outfield being well-established in lowland England right up until the eleventh century.[1] Altogether, their argument summarises for us what might be regarded as the established view.

Regulated Space and the Rise of Markets

Through a series of books and papers, Karl Polanyi argued strongly and eloquently for seeing early state-formation as associated with a profound change in the character of exchange. Prior to the appearance of states, exchange was embedded within society. By that, he meant that exchange was not separately organised as an economic process, with its own free-standing institutions and mechanisms, but was accessory to other spheres. In a work published posthumously, he talked about exchange being ‘instituted in terms of kinship and made to serve not just economic ends, but also, political and religious ends’ (Polanyi, 1977, p. 61). Amongst primitive and archaic societies, it was the interweave of kinship relations that ‘formalized the situations out of which organized economic activities spring’ (Polanyi, 1977, p. 55; see also, Polanyi, 1968, especially pp. 7–23). The exchange relations built around such economic activities involved status transactions, meaning that they served to establish the symmetry or asymmetry of social relationships, that is, the reciprocal flow of gifts between tribes or the flows between a tribe and its chief or ruling theocracy. In effect, exchange had an instrumental meaning that went far beyond any purely economic meaning. With the emergence of early states, there emerged alongside these status transactions a new form of integration based on trade, transactions that referred ‘not so much to the status of men as to the importance of goods’ (Polanyi, 1977, p. 58).