The Challenge of Defining “Landscape”
On the face of things, the meaning of landscape seems relatively straightforward. In fact, very few native English speakers pause to reflect before using the word. In everyday usage, landscape is a noun meaning “inland natural scenery, or its representation in painting”; a verb meaning “to lay out (a garden, etc.) as a landscape; to conceal or embellish (a building, road, etc.) by making it part of a continuous and harmonious landscape”; or — in the era of home computing — an adjective meaning “oblong” (Oxford English Dictionary [OED]: landscape). But further research in the OED belies the simplicity of the word, revealing at least eleven noun meanings in addition to that provided above, and one additional verb meaning. Clearly this is not a word that should be used without careful consideration and, as archaeologists Wendy Ashmore and Bernard Knapp (Knapp and Ashmore 1999:6) suggest, scholars in different disciplines deploy it in different ways.
Many of these uses build on that of geographer Carl Sauer, who first suggested landscape as “the unit concept” of Anglophone geography, deriving it from the
landschaft discussed by the German geographers of his day (Sauer 1925). Sauer defined landscape as
a land shape, in which the process of shaping is by no means thought of as simply physical. It may be defined, therefore, as an area made up of a distinct association of forms, both physical and cultural. (25-26, my emphasis)
For Sauer, geography as a discipline was
based on the reality of the union of physical and cultural elements of the landscape. The content of the landscape is found therefore in the
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physical qualities of area that are significant to man and in the forms of his use of the area, in facts of physical background and facts of human culture. (29)
Sauer’s landscape was not simply a scene captured by an observer, as by a painter or photographer, but rather a kind of gestalt derived from the observation of several similar scenes. Interested in establishing landscape as a generalizable unit of analysis, Sauer insisted that — despite its organic quality and what we might later call its “historical contingency” — landscape is not singular:
Whatever opinion one may hold about natural law, or nomothetic, genetic, or causal relations, a definition of landscape as singular, unorganized, or unrelated has no scientific value. (27)
In The Nature of Geography (1939), Richard Hartshorne discussed the importance acquired by the landscape concept since the publication of Sauer’s 1925 essay. For Hartshorne, the term involved an ambiguity that could not be reconciled, owing to its origin in the German landschaft. On the one hand, the German word might refer to a “restricted” or specific “piece of land” (150). On the other, however, landscape had a meaning that was entirely observer-dependent and/or aesthetic; referring to the
“appearance of a land as we perceive it” (150). Hartshorne’s path around this ambiguity was to shift the study of geography away from the study of landscape toward the study of region and space. Contrary to the course chosen by Hartshorne, other geographers of the mid-20th century opted to continue using landscape as a unit of analysis, using it as a way of approaching environmental perception. As described by Kenneth Olwig (1996:630), however, this approach had its own potential pitfalls.
Olwig’s own project is to recover the “substantive meaning of landscape as a place of human habitation and environmental interaction” (1996:630). The instrument for this
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recovery is an historical and contextual treatment of the term landscape from its various early Germanic uses, through its entry into modern English at the end of the 16th century, up to the present. Along the way, Olwig traces the shifts and ambiguities of the term. For example, in earlier uses, landscape referred not only to a particular area or piece of physical land, but also to the jurisprudence, politics, and social organization that
structured life on that portion of land. Further, Olwig suggests, the works of 15th- to 17th- century landscape painters depicted much more than the scenery these artists observed. Often these paintings drew attention to and/or reproduced the same subtle legal, political, and social structures at work on the land itself (see also Schama 1996). Olwig
demonstrates that the “actual” and the “aesthetic” meanings of the term landscape do not need to be at odds with one another or to create, as suggested by Hartshorne, an
ambiguity that cannot be reconciled. Rather, in its substantive meaning, landscape can also be conceived as a nexus of community, justice, nature, and environmental equity, a contested territory that is as pertinent today as it was when the term entered the modern English language at the end of the sixteenth century. (Olwig 1996:630-631)
Similar debate has surrounded the meaning and importance of the term landscape in archaeology. Christopher Tilley notes that the situation and movement of landscape between the extremes of nature and culture — essential among the qualities first
identified by Sauer — makes the concept “unstable” (Tilley 1994:37). Editors of volumes on “landscape archaeology” struggle to find a definition of the term that satisfies all contributors and adequately encompasses their studies. For example, in the introduction to Archaeologies of Landscape (1999), Ashmore and Knapp present no fewer than three distinct definitions of landscape. The only certain agreement among these definitions is that landscape has a human / social component.
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More recently, in the Handbook of Landscape Archaeology (2008b), Bruno David and Julian Thomas try to reconcile the contemporary, individual understandings of the term offered by more than 70 contributors. David and Thomas make an observation very similar to Olwig’s in geography:
The tension between landscape as an entity to be viewed like a painting from afar, and either analyzed or aestheticized, and landscape as a context of dwelling or inhabitation is one that has haunted landscape studies, and that was bequeathed to archaeology once it began to be concerned with the concept, much later on. (2008a:27)
It was, therefore, a challenge to arrive a definition of “landscape archaeology” with which to structure the handbook. David and Thomas settle on a series of broad
descriptions of post-1970s landscape archaeology that do not impede the epistemological variation characteristic of this endeavor. For example:
… a conceptual framework that enables us to address human pasts in all their contexts and that goes beyond a purely environmental archaeology. In this sense, and along with other developments, it enables us to go forward from our own disciplinary pasts. (38) And immediately thereafter:
… it concerns not only the physical environment onto which people live out their lives but also the meaningful location in which lives are lived. This includes the trees and the rocks and the stars, not as abstract objects but as meaningful things that are located ontologically and experientially in people’s lives and social practices (praxis). People lie at the core of a landscape archaeology and, befitting the general
purpose of all archaeologies (in contrast to ethnology, geology, botany, zoology, and the like), it is those past human dimensions that a
landscape archaeology targets. (38, emphasis in original)
David and Thomas recognize three themes that recur throughout the contributions to their handbook, likely marking three broad understandings of the term landscape. One of these involves reflection “on representations of landscapes, such as in landscape art, or
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the identification of colonial tropes in landscape archaeological literature, or the analysis of textual preconceptions” (20, emphasis in original). A second theme presents
“landscapes as physical environmental contexts of human behavior (such as investigations of tree cover or topography of site environments)” (20, emphasis in original).
This second theme seems the most likely to include interpretations that see landscape as a collection of relatively passive elements, whose spatial organization precipitates out of human activity. It might also include Marquardt and Crumley’s relatively simple and eloquent definition of landscape as “the spatial manifestation of the relations between humans and their environment” (Marquardt and Crumley 1987b:1), where the latter is not seen as passive but the temporal scale of human-environment relations remains unclear (or intentionally undefined except in discussions of specific phenomena)15. On the whole, given that it presents the archaeological record — and, thus, the landscape — as a series of discrete, superimposed and differentially disturbed layers, the palimpsest concept is most appropriate to these understandings of landscape.
Inadequacies of the Palimpsest Concept
Looked at more closely, however, the palimpsest metaphor starts to break down even if one understands landscape to mean “physical-environmental context.” As the opening pages of Umberto Eco’s Baudolino (2002) demonstrate in minute comic detail, the act of creating a palimpsest is predominantly one of erasure (i.e., of destruction) and re-
inscription. Anything that remains of the initial text does so by accident, not because it was intentionally left behind and reincorporated into the new text. This would seem to account for the “inertia of prior investment” noted by Stoddart and Zubrow in their
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observation about palimpsest landscapes, but not the processes of “re-interpretation” and “reworking” (Stoddart and Zubrow 1999:686). In a much-quoted passage, geographers Stephen Daniels and Denis Cosgrove comment that
landscape seems less like a palimpsest whose “real” or “authentic” meanings can somehow be recovered with the correct techniques, theories or ideologies, than a flickering text displayed on the word- processor screen whose meaning can be created, extended, altered, elaborated and finally obliterated by the merest touch of a button. (1988:8)
This word-processor metaphor allows for much wider variation in landscape practice, expanding beyond simple erasure and re-inscription. Not only is the full range of such practices important to understanding people’s actions on (or in) the landscape; it is fundamental to understanding relations between humans and their environment (following Marquardt and Crumley above).
Beyond this, the palimpsest concept breaks down because, like the behavioral archaeology I discuss above — including Heilen, Schiffer, and Reid’s (2008)
contribution to the Handbook of Landscape Archaeology — it draws relatively arbitrary temporal, spatial, and/or socio-practical boundaries around complex phenomena that are in a state of constant flux. As a result, to paraphrase Binford’s (1981) earlier critique of behavioral archaeology, the palimpsest concept is yet another example of archaeologists’ confusion about the relationship between statics and dynamics. The distortion implied by the palimpsest metaphor is first and foremost the distortion of the archaeologist’s a priori research interests, as when a late Iron Age burial is said to “intrude” upon a site’s
Paleolithic levels. While some may find the palimpsest concept useful to describe the overall “feel” and/or “challenge” of the archaeological record, this metaphor is not up to
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the task of describing the dynamic (i.e., evolving16) social, ecological, and socio- ecological relationships that constitute landscapes over time.
These relationships lie at the heart of perspectives that view
landscapes as fields of human engagement, as in Heidegger’s notion of dwelling. These include both explorations on [sic] conceptual ways of approaching, and experiences of, landscapes as fields of engagement, as the “in” of “being-in-the-world”. (David and Thomas 2008b:20, emphasis in original)
Such perspectives represent the third major theme in the Handbook of Landscape Archaeology. More broadly, they underlie efforts to establish a “phenomenological archaeology” especially focused on monuments and landscapes, particularly within British landscape archaeology (see, for example, Gosden 1994, 1996; Thomas 1993; Tilley 1994, 1996, 2004a, 2004b, 2005). But phenomenological approaches in archaeology have been subject to a great deal of critique, facing questions of rigor (Fleming 1999, 2005) and generating concern about the degree to which archaeologists’ embodied interactions with landscapes in the present can inform our understandings of life in the past (for a review of these critiques, see Brück 2005). In a recent article, John Barrett and Ilhong Ko (2009) observe that although many of these criticisms are valid, they have not been well-addressed by the main proponents of phenomenology in (British) archaeology. To do so would strengthen the scientific potential of this approach
considerably, a potential that Barrett and Ko summarize in their closing paragraph: The human subject must enter the world to find its place and handle the material available to find the categories of semblance out of which an order might be perceived. But the architectures and technologies of life change over time, and with them the possibilities of being in that
particular world must also change. These are the dynamic and historical conditions of material existence which we believe a phenomenological approach to landscape can begin to reveal. (290)
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A “Dwelling Perspective”
A more helpful use of phenomenology — perhaps because it focuses on the
experience of landscape without necessarily trying to understand the lifeways of the past — can be found in the work of cultural ecologist Tim Ingold (see, for example, Ingold 2000). Ingold sets out what he refers to as a “dwelling perspective,” which — like
Tilley’s A Phenomenology of Landscape (1994) — draws heavily on Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology, most especially on the essay “Building dwelling thinking” (1977). Ingold posits this dwelling perspective in opposition to what he calls the “building
perspective” characteristic of much mainstream anthropology. The building perspective is the foundation for such distinctions as that made between the “real” environment that exists independent of the senses, and that which is “perceived” by the mind of the person (or people) moving through it.
The starting point in all such accounts is an imagined separation between the perceiver and the world, such that the perceiver has to reconstruct the world, in the mind, prior to any meaningful engagement with it…. that worlds are made before they are lived in; or in other words, that acts of dwelling are preceded by acts of worldmaking. (Ingold 2000:178-179)
A dwelling perspective, by contrast, attempts to tear down the epistemological walls that separate a perceiving human-organism from the environment within which she lives.
… The forms people build, whether in the imagination or on the
ground, arise within the current of their involved activity, in the specific relational contexts of their practical engagement with their
surroundings. Building, then, cannot be understood as a simple process of transcription, [sic] of a pre-existing design of the final product onto a raw material substrate. It is true that human beings — perhaps uniquely among animals — have the capacity to envision forms in advance of their implementation, but this envisioning is itself an activity carried on by real people in a real-world environment, rather than by a
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represented the problems it seeks to solve…. In short, people do not import their ideas, plans or mental representations into the world, since that very world, to borrow a phrase from Merleau-Ponty (1962:24), is the homeland of their thoughts. Only because they already dwell therein can they think the thoughts they do. (Ingold 2000: 186, emphasis mine)
The meaning of a landscape is, thus, not given in advance; rather, it (1) emerges out of direct interactions between perceiving human actors and the elements of that landscape, and (2) changes over time. For Ingold, this dwelling perspective calls on us to think of landscape not as a thing per se, but as a process.
Hugh Raffles takes this landscape-as-process approach in his brilliant “natural history” of the Amazon, noting that “places are never still, and they are never finished. Instead, like people, they are always in process, always in ‘the flow of becoming,’ always on the move” (2002:47). With this nod to Walter Benjamin (1963), Raffles carries us well beyond the philosophical capacities of simple taphonomic models or the palimpsest concept. This is precisely the direction in which we must move if we wish to better understand the reuse of landscapes as a socio-ecological phenomenon.
“Swimming in an Ocean of Materials”
If Ingold’s dwelling perspective removes the separation between the “real” world and the “perceiving” mind, it necessitates certain shifts in the long-held “ontological politics” of mainstream Western philosophy. I would suggest that, among the most important of these shifts, the adoption of a dwelling perspective demands serious recognition of the complex relationships that exist between humans and the non-human entities with which we share the world17. Social theorists have long explored such relationships (see, for example, Durkheim 1995[1912]; Marx 1978[1852][1852]; Mauss
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1990[1922]), but a growing concern with them has characterized Western social science over the past 30 years. This interest in the nature of interactions between humans and non-humans may be related to a revival in thinking about agency, largely in response to the work of practice theorists Pierre Bourdieu (1977) and Anthony Giddens (1979, 1984). But while these authors focus primarily on human agency, much recent scholarship explores the possibility that non-humans might also exercise agency.
Bruno Latour, for example, describes human society as a complex, interactive, and iterative “collective” (1999, 2004) of human and myriad non-human actors that are animate and inanimate, material and conceptual. According to Latour, human action is never undertaken in isolation. Rather, it is always “mediated” — structured, motivated, discouraged, assisted, and resisted — by the actions of non-humans. Such mediation often takes forms that humans might not intend or expect.
John Law, one of Latour’s colleagues in developing what has come to be known as Actor-Network Theory (ANT), explains the intricate connections that exist between human and non-human actors in collectives, or networks, in terms of a “radical relationality”:
… ANT is a semiotics. That is, it is a method (or better, a sensibility) that has to do with and explores relations, relationality. In de Saussure’s synchronic linguistics (which is where it started) terms achieved their significance in relation to contrasts with other terms: man, women; father, son, daughter, grandparent, and so on. ANT (and other post- structuralist semiotics of materiality such as that developed by Michel Foucault) extends this beyond language to all entities. All entities, it says, achieve their significance by being in relation to other entities. This means that in ANT entities, things, people, are not fixed. Nothing that enters into relations has fixed significance or attributes in and of itself. Instead, the attributes of any particular element in the system, any particular node in the network, are entirely defined in relation to other elements in the system, to other nodes in the network. And it is
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the analyst’s job, at least in part, to explore how those relations – and so the entities that they constitute – are brought into being.
The implication of this apparently simple move, a move to what we might call radical relationality, is that we arrive at a logic which dissolves fixed categories. Elements have no significance except in relation to their neighbours, or the structure of the system as a whole. . . . All that is solid does indeed melt into air. Humans and non-humans, technical and social, all the rest. If differences exist it is because they