In modern Western culture, thinking and attitudes related to the landscape are dominated by a rational-economic and profane perception of space. We are so familiar with this that we tend to attach a universal, absolute character to this way of thinking. However, research undertaken within various social disciplines in the last decennia increasingly emphasises the specific cultural character of this Western line of thought. The profanisation, rationalisation and commodification of space appear to be processes belonging to the general development of Western culture since the Renaissance, and in particular since the Enlightenment. If we wish to gain insight into the ordering and meaning given to space in other cultures, we have to distance ourselves from these specific Western values. The landscape is not a simple objective fact; each culture has its own specific pair of glasses, through which the surrounding physical space is named, ordered and interpreted. The classification of space and the attachment of meanings to it are therefore pre-eminently cultural constructs. According to Lemaire (1970, 14), space and the perception of space in a culture are not a feature of minor importance, but they express the identity of that culture in a privileged way; if one wants to grasp a culture in its real dimension, one should look to identify the perception and organisation of its space.

Roymans' paper is ambitious – and short. Perhaps a little too short: there were a good many junctures where I felt there was much more that could be said, and certainly the bibliography could be greatly extended. The excitement of the paper lies in the methodological cross-over between archaeological and folkloric materials, which I found both convincing and informative, and in the time-depth that Roymans permits himself. In a rather odd reversal, I felt that the paper was more interestingly complex than the Introduction suggested.

Several years ago, when I visited the Netherlands for the first time, a famous historian with whom I was walking along a road through the polders observed that the national character of the Dutch had formed through many centuries of efforts to shape nature, and that nature in its turn bears the imprint of their character. I was greatly interested by this remark on the interaction between mentality and landscape and I asked my colleague to write an article on this subject for the periodical Odissei. Chelovek v istorii (‘Odysseus. Man in history’), which focused on issues of historical anthropology and which I am publishing for several years. Although unfortunately I did not receive the article as such, I was all the more interested to read Nico Roymans' work. The perception of space and landscape does in truth change through history and it would be incorrect to interpret the natural environment as a rigid framework in which the history of mankind unfolds. It is said that culture is man's second nature – but would it not be nearer the truth to say that it is his only nature? Man is a symbolical being (animal symbolicum), who finds his way in this world by means of symbols and who perceives reality through these points of reference, which he creates or reproduces. There is no sphere of activity beyond the boundary of this symbolical world. For this reason the perception of human activity cannot go beyond or neglect this all-embracing symbolical universe. Nevertheless far from all historians have mastered the art of reading or deciphering the sign systems of the past or present, since it is by no means easy to learn to read in this manner.

Roymans' article is an original and valuable contribution to an interpretation of the ‘cultural biography’ of the landscape of a specific area by combining archaeological and folkloric evidence. His study concentrates on the sacred places of this landscape, especially the urnfields and barrows, because ‘these are focal points from which local communities order and interpret the surrounding landscape’. The author rightly stresses that funerary monuments not only had a certain significance in the societies that constructed and used them, but that they also had a prominent place in the landscape of later societies up until pre-modern times. He suggests that, in the Meuse-Demer-Scheldt region, there has been ‘a long-term incorporation of prehistorical burial monuments in the mythical landscape of later inhabitants’. Archaeology itself, for that matter, should be understood in the perspective of the (dis)continuing biography of the landscape because it presupposes the destruction of the ancient mythical geography, including the Christian one. Archaeology is the product of the ‘modernisation’ of space: it is presupposing and reflecting (upon) the coming of the modem world with its rationalisation and Entzauberung (disenchantment) of the landscape. In a similar way the study of folklore (Volkskunde in both Dutch and German) has been made possible and interesting by the waning of rural popular culture as a consequence of both the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution. Thus, it is no accident that modernity produced the conditions of becoming aware of the mythical meaning of the landscape exactly at the time that its traces are disappearing in the physical landscape as well as in the memory of the rural population.

I wish to thank Barbara Bender, Aron Gurevich and Ton Lemaire for reviewing my contribution and for making critical comments on the ideas put forward in it. I should like to take this opportunity to comment briefly on the main points in their reviews.

The study of architecture in relation to the social organization of space is a popular field of research within the discipline of anthropology and other social sciences. In archaeology, it has not played a significant role, although in recent years a number of publications have appeared and clearly the interest of archaeologists in this area of research is growing (Kent 1990; Samson 1990; Richards and Parker Pearson 1994).