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Landscape Archaeology, Prehistory, and Rural Studies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

Andrew Fleming
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Extract

This essay considers whether it is possible for landscape archaeologists, particularly those concerned with prehistory or with periods not significantly text-aided, to go beyond the pursuit of methodological virtuosity and the production of local studies, and make useful contributions to discussions on mainstream social and economic issues in human history. A major problem for landscape archaeologists – and indeed for prehistorians – is that as soon as they stray beyond routine archaeological description and analysis, they face the scepticism of anthropologists, historians and human geographers. I argue that we can learn from scholars from these other disciplines but should not try to ape them. We need to define more clearly our own field of operation. It has become fashionable to consider past landscapes as texts; comparisons between the contexts of ‘messages’ conveyed by documents and by landscapes lead me to suggest that ignorance of the nature of oral tradition and its articulation within material culture is one of the prehistorian's greatest blind spots. In choosing the most useful scale for analysis, the prehistorian should develop the concept of the small community, rather than the ‘site’ or the region, and consider the modification of such a community's ‘mental map’ of the landscape as a critical indicator of social process.

Type
Research Article
Information
Rural History , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , April 1990 , pp. 5 - 15
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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