Towards an archaeology of invented and imaginary landscapes

Extract

Landscape is a theme with a long standing in archaeology. But whereas archaeologists in the 1960s analyzed the carrying capacity of the environment in order to measure human adaptation, since the 1990s landscapes are increasingly being ‘read’ for understanding how people related to the land. The shift in perspective is clearly a substantial one which does not merely demonstrate a development of archaeological thought: as related developments in human geography and anthropology show, it is rooted in a wider current in the Western world of rethinking fundamental notions such as ‘nature’, ‘culture’ and ‘society’. The concept of ‘land-scape’ or perhaps more generally that of ‘space’ also fits in this series, as was argued by among others Michel Foucault, who claimed that ‘the present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space’ (Foucault 1986, 22).