The seaways have played a significant role in the movement of people, goods and ideologies since prehistory; yet, the ephemerality of movement combined with the paucity of direct evidence for prehistoric seafaring has challenged more refined understandings of the role of early seafaring in anthropogeny. Advances in digital methodologies within archaeology, such as least-cost approaches, allow more nuanced models of movement to be generated but suffer from dichotomous approaches to land and sea. These disentangled land-sea perspectives have long been criticised as ineffectual for understanding past maritime cultures, and previous discussions of prehistoric seafaring more specifically have advocated the consideration of the unique character of maritime space in order to more closely actuate a seafarer’s perspective. Drawing on these ideas, this paper argues that more nuanced approaches to past seafaring are not only necessary but also achievable through holistic perspectives, heuristic methods and scaled-down resolutions, which allow for a more contextualised understanding of the spatiality and temporality—i.e. the human-scale—of maritime movement. This will be demonstrated through an integrated land-sea least-cost method to model Neolithic seafaring around the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. It is not the intention of this paper to advocate solely for the methodology outlined here but rather to demonstrate the need to consider and understand the unique character of maritime space and its many influences on the practices being studied. Only through such contextualised cognition can the perspectives and ideologies of past seafarers and the role of seafaring in anthropogeny truly be understood.

自史前以来，航道在人员、货物和意识形态的流动中发挥了重要作用；然而，运动的短暂性加上史前航海的直接证据的缺乏，挑战了对早期航海在人类学中的作用的更精确的理解。考古学中数字方法的进步，例如成本最低的方法，允许生成更细微的运动模型，但受到陆地和海洋二分法的影响。这些分离的陆海视角长期以来一直被批评为对理解过去的海洋文化无效，之前对史前航海的讨论更具体地提倡考虑海洋空间的独特性，以便更密切地激发海员的观点。借鉴这些想法，即。人类规模——海上运动。这将通过综合陆海最低成本方法来证明，以模拟苏格兰外赫布里底群岛周围的新石器时代航海。本文的目的不是仅仅提倡这里概述的方法，而是证明需要考虑和理解海洋空间的独特特征及其对所研究实践的许多影响。只有通过这种情境化的认知，才能真正理解过去海员的观点和意识形态以及航海在人类学中的作用。