Landscape: entering the place-world

Epigraphs

"In the beginning was the Topos. Before - long before - the advent of the Logos, in the chiaroscuro realm of primitive life, lived experience already possessed its internal rationality; this experience was producing long before thought space, and spatial thought, began reproducing the projection, explosion, image and the orientation of the body. Long before space, as perceived by and for the 'I', began to appear as split and divided, as a realm of merely virtual or deferred tensions and contacts. Long before space emerged as a medium of far-off possibilities, as the locus of potentiality. For, long before the analysing, separating intellect, long before formal knowledge, there was an intelligence of the body." Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space. 1991: 174.

"The lived body allows us to know what space, place and landscape are, because it is the author of them all." Christopher Tilley, The materiality of stone 2004: 3.

Some discussion points

I am interested in discussing some of the various definitions of landscape emerging from our readings, and peeling off some of the layers of meaning that this word has accumulated in the Western world, from European Weltlandschaft paintings and medieval mappa mundi, to Romantic travellers' writings and to today's GIS- technologies of representing the landscape, i.e. the "cartographic fictions". Departing from such a representationally oriented, visually conceived concept, how did we come to an understanding of landscape today as a complex environment of geological, vegetational, climatic, animal and human processes, affecting and intermingled with each other, creating a meshwork of relationships, particular materialities, temporalities and spatialities in the long-term?

Landscape as resource: A lot of the processual archaeology's interest in the landscape have focused on the question of "landscape as resource"- in other words, how and through what technologies did past societies made economic and technological uses of the landscape? Raising questions of land use, hunting and gathering, agricultural production and paturage, strategies of improving agricultural yield, forest management/deforestation, mining, use of quarries, clay and bitumen sources, springs, etc. Here landscape appears as an academic construct as a passive resource and the human engagement is limited to the exploitation of this "resourceful, natural" landscape. The human "dwelling" in the environment then is limited in such blindly positivistic approaches to subsistence and resource gathering in the most rational, thermodynamically efficient way. This modernist-totalitarian, colonialist and heavily and conservatively capitalist caricature view of the landscape has fundamentally collapsed in our postcolonial world. What are some of the possible criticisms of such a "landscape as resource" view? In what ways can a place-oriented landscape archaeology overcome the false assumptions, statistical acrobacies and landscape misrepresentations of such approaches?

Haptic way of knowing (the world): (or in other words- body and landscape): what do the phenomenologists mean by the idea of a local, bodily knowledge of landscape? To be unpacked here is the notion of the corpus of local knowledge about landscapes/places, and the human body's relationship to places and their making.

Is archaeological fieldwork a place-making practice? Doing landscape archaeology, how do we transform places (or do we?) if we accept Ingold's idea that the possibility of seeing the landscape as a by-stander is based on the Western illusion of disembodiment.

Commentaries

Archaeoplacemaking - James Doyle