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Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology

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“The notion of a ‘toposemantic’ process of investment of locations with cultural meanings gives rise not only to an archaeology of landscape, but to an archaeology of the imagination, insofar as places are in part constructed from and attached to biophysical reality, material culture, and embodied practices and social interactions, and in part constituted within the imagination and endowed with a semiotic omnipotence that defies location, scale and time.” – Whitridge, 228.

Whitridge’s article and this passage in particular, connecting place to the people and actions that inhabit it, emphasizing the embodiment of landscape, raises the question of the relationship among memory, ritual and place. If ritual is an element of cultures’ “tangled networks of meanings, practices, and things that interpenetrate at significant sites,” then how can ritual action be imprinted on the landscape itself? Does the repetition of action and motion physically map itself onto a place? What is the material imprint of ritual on a landscape? If a place is embedded with some sort of religious “personal and collective significance” how does that relationship physically manifest itself?

These are all questions that I am struggling with in my own research and unfortunately can’t answer. The connection between landscape and culture, between a place and the actions associated with it, between repetition, memory and a site, all are intrinsic elements to ritual performance. As much as a place is inseparable from the action that occurs there, an action or set of actions are specific to a place. A ritual acquires significance and importance through the very place in which it is enacted: place becomes the agent that lends meaning to ritual.