14 - Landscapes, ideology and experience in historical archaeology

Summary

Historical archaeologists have studied landscapes at a number of scales and from diverse theoretical stances (e.g. Casella 2002; Delle 1998; Ireland 2003; Kelso and Most 1990; Leone 1996; Orser 1988;Williamson 1995; Yamin and Metheny 1996). This chapter examines some of the ways in which historical archaeologists have sought to understand the complexities of landscapes past and present (see also Holtorf and Williams this volume, O'Keeffe and Yamin this volume). It traces historical archaeologists' initial studies of ideology and power in landscape through ‘critical archaeology’, and underlines the diversity and utility of such approaches. It considers the emphasis in later studies on the diverse meanings of designed landscapes, especially the critiques of critical archaeologies that presented landscapes as ‘duping’ subaltern populations and that assumed easy distinctions between ideological truths and falsehoods in landscape. Sketching how such contextual critiques have encouraged new interpretive archaeological studies that eschew grand narratives of ‘domination and resistance’ and produce more nuanced understandings, we review more recent approaches to the materialities and experiences of enacted landscapes. Discussing a range of work drawn from around the world, we emphasise the diversity of approaches to historical landscape archaeology, and underline the value of theoretical plurality as archaeologists confront the fluidity, expressive power, and importance of historical landscapes in shaping human social life.

‘CRITICAL’ ARCHAEOLOGIES OF LANDSCAPES AND IDEOLOGY

As Matthew Johnson (1999a: 192) has observed, archaeologists understand ideology to be ‘a set of overt or implicit beliefs or views of the world’. In historical archaeology, the relationship between worldview and the built environment has been a central object of study since James Deetz sought to explore the Georgian Order in the eastern United States (Deetz 1977;see review by Hicks and Horning this volume). Deetz described historical archaeology's ability to draw on multiple lines of evidence to understand ‘the world view that underlay the organisation of [past people's] physical universe, and the way ideology shaped their lives’ (Deetz 1977:23, 40).