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).

Car j'ai découvert une grande vérité. A savoir que les hommes habitent, et que le sens des choses change pour eux selon le sens de la maison. Et que le chemin, le champ d'orge et la courbe de la colline sont différents pour l'homme selon qu'ils composent ou non un domaine. (A. de Saint-Exupéry, 1948: Citadelle, 28).

While feeling in tune with most of Lemaire's theses, I disagree on some points which are not altogether secondary.

Archaeology, anthropology, human geography: three disciplines born out of a nineteenth-century imperative among Europeans to apply a coherent model of understanding (Wissen-schaft) to varied forms of social life within a differentiated physical world; three disciplines stretched between the epistemology and methods of the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) which promised certainty, and the hermeneutic reflexivity and critical doubt of the Humanities (Geisteswissenschaften) which promised self-knowledge. Each of these disciplines is today in crisis, and for the same reason. Europe as the place of authoritative knowledge, of civilization, has been decentred upon a post-colonial globe; the white, bourgeois European male has been dethroned as the sovereign subject of a universal and progressive history. Thus, the enlightened intellectual project represented by archaeology, anthropology and human geography, whose findings were unconsciously designed to secure the essentially ideological claims of liberal Europeans, are obliged to renegotiate their most fundamental assumptions and concepts (Gregory, 1993). The linguistic turn in the social sciences and humanities which has so ruthlessly exposed the context-bound nature of their scientific claims — what Ton Lemaire refers to as a critical awareness of their inescapable cultural and historical mediation — forces a recognition that their central conceptual terms, such as ‘culture’, ‘nature’, ‘society’, and ‘landscape’, are far from being neutral scientific objects, open to disinterested examination through the objective and authoritative eye of scholarship. They are intellectual constructions which need to be understood in their emergence and evolution across quite specific histories. Ton Lemaire seeks to sketch something of the history of landscape as such a socially and historically mediated idea: as a mode of representing relations between land and human life, which has played a decisive role in the development of archaeology as a formal discipline. On the foundation of this history he develops a critique of the social and environmental characteristics and consequences of modernity, and seeks to relocate archaeological study within a reformed project of sensitive contemporary ‘dwelling’ on earth.

Lemaire's reflections on the concept of landscape struck a chord with me, and I found myself nodding in agreement with much of what he has to say. I did, however, have some difficulty in coming to terms with the idea that the landscape is wholly an invention of bourgeois sensibility. Moreover, in his emphasis on the landscape as an object of contemplation, ‘totalized by a human gaze’, I feel that he neglects the activity of depiction – whether this be painting, drawing, writing or musical composition – in favour of the end products, finished works. I should like to focus my comment on these two points.

I wish to thank Augustin Berque, Denis Cosgrove, and Tim Ingold for their critical and stimulating comments on my article. I shall discuss the main arguments in their reactions in the order I received their paper respectively. To begin with, I agree with Cosgrove that the relation between landscape and modernity is ‘more complex and ambiguous’ than in my summary and I agree further with him, quoting Rose (1993), that the viewing subject in its distanced and proprietorial relationship with the environment is mostly a male subject. At least since Merchant's Death of nature (1980) we are aware of the gendered nature of the modern scientific approach of nature. But although it is true that there are ‘several histories of nature’ and that many details may be put forward to complete my view, I nevertheless contend that the main lines in my short history of ‘the invention of the landscape’ are basically right.

Archaeologists are prone to retrospection. In 1974 Gordon Willey edited a book in which a series of writers looked back over their most famous projects. Some of their contributions were both revealing and frank but in other cases, I suspect, the authors were trying to write themselves into history. It can be dangerous to retrace our steps over the same intellectual ground, but we may still want to attempt this so that we can come to terms with unfinished business. We study some problems which will not let us go. This paper considers a typical example.

The transformation between the two landscapes of Cranborne Chase, the earlier characterized by ritual and ceremonial monuments the later by an agricultural landscape, encapsulates the most significant transformation in the later prehistory of Britain. Indeed, the emergence of intensive agricultural practices which employ a wider range of crops, achieve increasing levels of crop purity, enclose and manage the land according to new patterns of territoriality, and establish long-lived nucleated settlements, is a more general feature of the European Bronze Age. It was upon this foundation that the agricultural practices of the Iron Age were embedded.

It is one o clock in the morning of December 20. Buffalo is cold, five degrees below zero Fahrenheit with a wind chill of minus twenty five degrees. The Niagara River is frozen solid except at the Falls. Sounds travel far on these cold nights. I hear a loud crash as if the ice is beginning to crack. I fantasize about the spring and the ice breaking up into thousands of small icebergs that float down the river. Icebergs bring to mind GIS software. Like icebergs, GIS software is frequently attractive and even starkly beautiful. Yet GIS systems are sometimes foreign and can be very inhospitable. As in the case of those frozen fantasies, GIS software may look better from a distance than close up. (Zubrow 1990b, 184)

Milco Wansleeben provides a useful review of some of the current problems of GIS, and I find much agreement with his comments. As he states most effectively, GIS provides the ability to execute repetitive routes rapidly. When practised well, it will not save time but allow the more thorough interrogation of the data within the same time.

Harm Tjalling Waterbolk (1924) is regarded, together with Pieter J.R. Modderman (1919) and Willem Glasbergen (1923–1979), as the direct inheritor of the founder of Dutch archaeology Albert Egges van Giffen (1884–1973). From the middle of the 1950s, after Van Giffen's retirement, this troika shaped the rapidly growing academic archaeology in the Netherlands. Until well into the 1970s and 1980s they occupied the most prominent chairs at the universities of Groningen, Leiden and Amsterdam. One look at Waterbolk's impressive list of publications (almost exclusively articles) tells us that for half a century he has been an authoritative participant in developments in Dutch archaeology. He has been involved, directly or indirectly, in the modernization of excavation practices, in changes in the organization of academic education and research, in the introduction of new methods and techniques and in shifts in theory and interpretation. He has made a valuable contribution to the development of large-scale settlement research, to the shaping of the Dutch legal foundation of university education (the study of prehistory in the Academisch Statuut), to the expansion of palynological research and the C14 method, and to the conceptualization of long-term continuity in the spatial organization of historical communities. His work is interesting because of the blending of a scientific interest in the history of the cultural landscape and a committed and critical involvement with the protection of such. Enough reasons to interview him ten years after his retirement. We meet Waterbolk in Meppel, a small town in south-west Drenthe, on one of the few hot days in the summer of 1996. It has been agreed that we will first pay a short visit to his birthplace in Havelte and to Van Giffen's grave in Diever. Before long it becomes clear that during the tour a web of named places and paths is gradually unfolding, each with its own historical tale and associated with personal memories. The afternoon is spent in the area between Balloo and Rolde, 5 kilometres east of Assen, the capital of the province of Drenthe. This area, which has an un-Dutch concentration of still existing and visible megalithic tombs, burial mounds, Celtic fields, and prehistoric roads, has recently become the subject of Waterbolk's interest (Waterbolk 1994a, and in press b).

To place ‘regional projects’ and ‘cultural identity’ next to each other in the title of a conference session is extraordinary, indeed baffling: questions of cultural identity have hardly ever been addressed in conjunction with a regional project. In fact, many of us who were attracted to regional research some time ago saw in it an opportunity to escape from the quest for identity which, in the form of ethnogenetic concerns, had dominated the practice of archaeology since 1900 and to explore instead issues of an entirely different nature: adaptation to the natural and social environment, economic rationality and its long-term effects on such adaptation, the formation of hierarchical polities, and the like.

Before developing my comments on the Heidegger theme I would like to express my admiration for the project Julian Thomas presents in Time, culture and identity. With his point of departure in Heidegger's early reasonings, Thomas is underway on the important path of a deconstruction of the Cartesian/modern dichotomies between past-present, mind-body, nature-culture and subject-object that dominates contemporary archaeology. In short, Thomas points towards an approach, where the connection between experience-time-existence and the crucial relationship and interdependence between human being and other beings (things/artefacts), provides a powerful alternative to the traditional approaches towards these dichotomies. This alternative partly situates itself between idealism and empiricism, between subjectivism and objectivism. Thomas' project also contributes to the deconstruction of the exaggerated modern/postmodern combat that in some ways seems to have led the theoretical discourse within archaeology to a dead-end. Therefore I can only agree with the main orientation of Thomas' reasonings put forward both in his book, and in his précis of Time, culture and identity, presented in Archaeological dialogues 3.1 (Thomas 1996).

I am grateful to Håkan Karlsson for his thoughtful commentary on some of the issues concerning Heidegger and archaeology which were raised in a previous issue of this journal, and find myself fascinated by his project of a ‘contemplative archaeology’. However, one or two points of clarification could be made in relation to Karlsson's contribution. Firstly, as a number of authors have pointed out (e.g. Anderson 1966, 20; Olafson 1993), the gulf between Heidegger's early work and that which followed the Kehre may have been more apparent than real. While his focus may have shifted from the Being of one particular kind of being (Dasein) to a history of Being (Dreyfus 1992), the continuities in his thought are more striking. Throughout his career, Heidegger was concerned with the category of Being, and the way in which it had been passed over by the western philosophical tradition. It is important to note that in Being and time the analysis of Dasein essentially serves as an heuristic: the intention is to move from an understanding of the Being of one kind of being to that of Being in general. What complicates the issue is the very unusual structure of this specific kind of being, for Heidegger did not choose to begin his analysis with the Being of shoes or stones, but with a kind of creature which has a unique relationship with all other worldly entities. ‘Dasein’ serves as a kind of code for ‘human being’ which enables Heidegger to talk about the way in which human beings exist on earth, rather than becoming entangled in biological or psychological definitions of humanity. In this formulations, what is distinctive about human beings is that their own existence is an issue for them; Dasein cares, and this caring is fundamentally temporal.