The Orkney Archipelago, around 10 miles off the north coast of Scotland, has seen 6000 years of human settlement, with many archaeological artifacts offering significant insights into the formation of a deep-rooted island culture. The various transfigurations of this island culture to present-day Orkney indicate how external influences shape cultural inheritances, yet how this culture retains fundamental qualities; of imagination, resourcefulness, and territorial interconnections. This issue of how we negotiate the complexity of archipelagic relations is presented through a framework of process-based terms, of formations, transfigurations, constellations, aggregations, and tensions. This framework offers a degree of conceptual specificity, bringing focus to processes of relation change, movement, and interaction, across varying spatial and temporal scales. Underpinned by observational fieldwork, what emerges in this study is a sense of island life, bringing light to cultural and environmental processes, often most intensively manifest around strategic staging posts.

Orkney Archipelagostaging postsrelational change