Landscape has a long history in archaeology, although that history differs across intellectual traditions, especially in the English-speaking world. Many authors call attention to the etymology of the word, from the Dutch landschap, and its relation to a genre of painting in seventeenth-century Europe. For some, the distinctly Western ‘gaze’ involved, and the perspective views that simultaneously distance the scene and make possessions of its contents, are bound up with the patronage of wealthy landowners underlying the creation of the pictures. For other authors, landscape is more concerned with territory, and with economic or ecological dimensions of nature and environment.
Not surprisingly, theoretical perspectives about landscape in archaeology have changed in tandem with wider intellectual, political, and economic currents, most consistently reflecting attitudes toward forms of human involvement with land. Sherratt discusses pertinent European trends within a wider set of fluctuations in European intellectual movements since the Renaissance. In his view, times of stability support considerations favoring comparison, determinism, order, and stages, a collectivity he glosses as an Enlightenment attitude, in which emphasis is given to evolution, and in spatial analyses, to settlements. He associates landscape studies with times of political and economic instability, in which Romantic attitudes favor contextual, relativist, and meaning-oriented studies. To consider further how definitions and theory have shifted in intellectual time and space, the remainder of this section adapts from more extended discussion elsewhere, treating Anglophone traditions, primarily in Britain and North America.
Turning first to late-nineteenth-century North America, Euro-Americans equated the notion of landscape with nature unspoiled by humans. Somewhat ironically, Yosemite, Niagara Falls, and other places modified by Olmstead for health or esthetic reasons quickly became naturalized in popular thought. Despite Sauer’s 1925 scholarly distinction between ‘cultural’ landscapes and ‘natural’ ones, the notion of landscapes as pristine nature remains frequent in the US, among scholars as well as the public. In Britain, by contrast, a deeper, long-standing interest in prehistoric and historical landscapes is tied in part to genealogical interest in local and regional traditions, and was given immense boost from availability of aerial photography and production of the Ordnance Maps after World War I.
Americanist archaeological landscape studies of the late twentieth century derive most directly from cultural ecological studies of Steward and Willey’s settlement pattern research. Both were significant foundations for the positivist ideas dominating US-based archaeology in the late twentieth century, and both supported examination at a regional scale. Theoretical trends in the US New Archaeology broadly paralleled those in a New Geography at mid-century, and archaeologists cited widely from Chisholm, Chorley, Haggett, and (early) Harvey. In this time of economic and political optimism (despite the Cold War), landscapes and other kinds of space were objects to be measured and compared, analyzed, and interpreted via powerful statistical models. The land remained a neutral and passive object, used by people but otherwise relatively detached from them.
In Britain as well, scientific approaches prevailed in archaeology amid the economic and ecological perspectives of the 1960s and 1970s, and a similar array of positivist geographers was influential. Whether emphasizing a functional view to reconstructing ancient land use, or focusing on social and economic systems at varied spatial scales, landscape archaeology at this time was broadly consistent on both sides of the Atlantic.
Already in the 1970s, however, positivist stances increasingly were challenged in both the US and UK, by post-positivist philosophies, humanist concerns, and calls for social relevance - and social justice - in uncertain times of economic flux and the Vietnam War. Space (including landscapes) and human action were recast as matched participants in perpetually recursive mutual constitution. Existentialism, feminism, idealism, phenomenology, and interactionism proved to be important philosophical influences.
Despite these challenges, positivist archaeology remains strong in the US, if with widening exploration of post-positivist stances. In landscape research, theory from economic geography, ecology, and anthropology continues to support inferences about social and economic dimensions of land use. Some landscape analysts focus more closely on physical terrain, with theory drawn at least as often from the physical and natural sciences as from the social. In all of the foregoing, location and distribution of material resources figure importantly, if with growing attention as well to monuments and rock-art or other material inscriptions of social meaning. Historical archaeologists in the US tend more toward humanistic perspectives, writing of landscapes most often in terms of colonial gardens. Although reference remains relatively sparse regarding existentialism, feminism, idealism, phenomenology, and other strands of social theory sparking recent social geography, growing attention turns to the potentials in practice theory, structuration, and Marxist thought.
In the UK, landscape research is generally more humanistic and post-positivist, and archaeologists invoke social theory from a range of sources, especially structural Marxism, phenomenology, various forms of practice theory, and occasionally, feminist thought. Most practitioners stress the idea of landscape as socially constructed, emphasizing that the same piece of ground holds different social attachments and contrasting symbolic meanings for different people and groups, at any one time and through time as well. Attachments and meanings may be attested materially, inscribed on the land in architecture, rock-art, or other media; additionally, or alternatively - and more challenging for archaeologists - the attachments and meanings may reside in memories, shared orally, if at all. Location and distribution of material markings figure significantly as subjects of inquiry, especially stone monuments, construction, and rock-art, and objects or settings commonly thought to materialize performance of ritual. Materially unmarked landscape elements gain increasing importance as well, as inferred cues in orienting and organizing human activity. Whether expressed materially or not, however, attachments and meanings are commonly considered fundamental for orienting individuals and societies, integral to social identities and often, to moral grounding.
World History
