If landscapes create a particular way of understanding the world, then they are also important vehicles for naturalization of social and political agendas, particularly those involving social and economic disparity. As already discussed, formal gardens and plantations are prominent illustrations of such agendas, as are pilgrimage destinations. By materializing a hegemonic social memory, landscapes legitimate positions of authority and privilege. Alternative viewpoints, however, instantiate resistance and reshape the landscape. Both social control and rejection of landscape form shape the way in which the world is perceived, engaged, and constructed.
First is the construction of authority. Particularly in state societies, those in power shape landscapes to validate and reinforce their own authority. Discussions of city planning in antiquity demonstrate repeatedly that those who commissioned the constructions invoked spatial principles, grounded in culture-specific worldviews, that would situate the activities of religious and political leaders in the most respected positions, those most imbued with sanctified power. Wheatley’s compelling writings established the relation between worldview and city plan, in ancient China and elsewhere, and especially since his work at mid-century, others have written of how aspects of worldview were manipulated to enhance the authority of those in charge. Steinhardt writes of city plans in a succession of Chinese capital cities as calling on worldview and the authority of the past in this regard, and especially in the time of Khubilai Khan. In his new-built capital, deliberate recreation of a revered ancient urban landscape helped legitimize the political claims of the new Mongol dynasty.
Elsewhere, Maya kings supported their own claims by invoking principles of cardinal directionality of the Maya cosmos, and the symbolic auspiciousness of each of the cardinal quarters for situating ruler’s palaces, arenas for public spectacles, and mortuary monuments. As in China, Maya cityscapes were landscapes of power. In medieval South India, Fritz shows that the idea was literally extended into the landscape beyond the political capital at Vijayanagara. There the king reinforced his authority not only within the urban precincts, but also by regular circuits to a series of hinterland stations where he could be re-identified ritually as the human avatar of divinity. This was indeed an extensive landscape of power, legitimization, and authority, if one without overt evidence of contest or resistance.
Historical archaeology in the US has yielded numerous examples of landscape manipulation in the production and codification of ideology, and in some cases, the resistance such manipulation inspired. Under the antebellum plantation system in the American South, slaves were considered personal possessions and sources of surplus production, and as such were kept under direct surveillance to ensure productivity and efficiency. Beyond the gardens described earlier, the landscape of plantation space was tightly regulated, tracing a physical map of domination and subordination. Overseer and plantation houses were often centrally located in relation to the fields and slave cabins, providing optimum conditions for surveillance by those in authority. The landscape was in many ways reshaped as panopticon.
Throughout the world, colonization and westernization have reinvented landscapes by physical reorganization. As with imperial Romans in Celtic lands, policies of colonization have sought to restructure indigenous landscapes into patterns suiting the colonizers, and often reflecting principles of private property and marked social hierarchy characteristic of states and empires. The landscape policies used to promote hierarchical differences, however, also create space for resistance. An example is the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, in what is now New Mexico. After initial Spanish attempts to quell the rebellion, multiple Puebloan communities expressed their resistance by relocating to defensive hilltops locations, where they established whole new settlements according to staunchly guarded principles of spatial and social order, with material orientation to established indigenous landscape referents. Indeed, fortification and defensive settlement systems emphatically mark contested landscapes, whether involving colonization or competition, and from cases relatively small in scale to those as expansive as the Great Wall of China.
In a different landscape of containment, women’s prisons in nineteenth-century Australia illustrate practices of resistance, attested archaeologically but absent or obscured in written records. Casella writes of a holding facility in Tasmania in which walls, fences, and rules rigidly structured movement and activities, of both staff and inmates. Despite these barriers, however, such barred goods as liquor and tobacco reached inmates in solitary confinement in surprising quantities, and Casella suggests that some of the buttons unearthed might even have been secret currency for the prohibited transactions.
Exclusionist in different and broader ways is colonization and other forms of culture contact that deny the prior and continued presence of indigenous peoples on the landscape. Much of European expansion in North America was dismissive in this way, colonists seeing as ‘vacant’ and unused the landscapes that, in fact, were already long and extensively occupied, and that their residents had imbued richly with economic worth, identity, and spiritual meaning. This kind of contest over landscape continues to this day in many parts of the postcolonial world, involving litigation and attempts at diplomacy, and at times violence. If far from unique, a particularly well-documented instance of such landscape contest is the War of the Little Big Horn, multiple perspectives on which are attested both historically and archaeologically.
It is also possible for competing views of landscape to coexist, with or without overt conflict. Contrasting worldviews, or economic strategies, or political histories may coincide in filling the same landscape with multiple uses and multiple, disparate meanings. One thinks readily of modern cases, as in Israeli and Palestinian occupation of the same land, Mongols and Chinese in Inner Mongolia, or Hopi and Navajo (and non-Native Americans) in what is now the US Southwest. Archaeological examples are sometimes recognized, if infrequently, in mutually proximate populations with distinct architecture and other material forms of culture.
See also: Cognitive Archaeology; Cultural Ecology; Explanation in Archaeology, Overview; Geoarchaeology; Human-Landscape Interactions; Postprocessual Archaeology; Processual Archaeology; Rock Art; Settlement Pattern Analysis.
World History
