Introductions
Hello, and welcome to Chronotopography ! My name is Dan Hansen, and I am a PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of Chicago. My research concerns the figure of the Picts, the people who inhabited what is now northern and eastern Scotland from ca. 300-900 CE. I am interested in how this identity category of Pict , which was first a Roman exonym, then an early medieval endonym, then a descriptor for a lost past people, came into being and continued to be re-created through people’s ongoing engagement with material remains and places “of the past.” If you would like to keep updated with my dissertation research, I update my project blog biweekly here. More generally, however, my interests lie in the social dynamics of place-making. How is that people, in apprehending and engaging their environments, come to understand particular places in terms of larger cosmological structures? Why are some places “good” and others “bad?” Why are some places seen as “rich with history” whil...