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Yes, you can access Interpreting Landscapes by Christopher Tilley in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Archaeology. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Chapter 1 provides a brief and general account of the phenomenological approach to the interpretation of landscape undertaken in this book. It also discusses the major themes that are addressed in the different parts of the book: geologies, topographies, and their relationship to social identities.
Chapter 2 approaches the Neolithic as a matter of mind, a triumph of the will, a new set of ideas, over matter and circumstances, a new way of organising social labour and expressing relationships to others through, for example, monument construction. My view is that the Mesolithic adoption of Neolithic elements was a highly localised selective, differential, and indigenous development.
Chapter One Outline of a Phenomenological Perspective
From a phenomenological perspective, knowledge of landscapes, either past or present, is gained through perceptual experience of them from the point of view of the subject. (For some general theoretical and philosophical discussions, see Thomas 2006; Tilley 1994, 2004b, 2005a, 2008.) A phenomenologist attempts to describe these experiences as fully as possible. The objective is to provide a rich or ‘thick’ description, allowing others to comprehend these landscapes in their nuanced diversity and complexity and to enter into these experiences through their metaphorical textual mediation.
Embodiment is a central term. A phenomenologist’s experience of landscape is one that takes place through the medium of his or her sensing and sensed carnal body. It involves participant observation, which means being a part of what one is attempting to describe and to understand. A phenomenologist works and studies landscapes from the ‘inside.’ This may be contrasted with mediated or abstracted ‘outside’ experiences of landscapes such as those that might be gained from texts, maps, photographs, paintings, or any computer-aided technologies, simulations, or statistical analyses. The claim is that studying landscapes through such representations can provide only a relatively superficial and abstracted knowledge. There is no substitute for personal experience, for being there.
It follows that for the phenomenologist his or her body is the primary research tool. He or she experiences and observes the landscape through the body. As far as is possible, landscapes are studied without ‘prejudice’. In other words, the phenomenologist does not start out with a list of hypotheses to be ‘tested’ or a set of prior assumptions about what may, or may not, be significant or important. Rather he or she enters into the landscape and allows it to have its own effect on his or her perceptive understandings. This approach means accepting that there is a dialogic relationship between person and landscape. Experiencing the landscape allows insights to be gained through the subject-observer’s immersion in that landscape—which is to claim that landscapes have agency in relation to persons.
Landscapes have a profound effect on our thoughts and interpretations because of the manner in which they are perceived and sensed through our bodies. We cannot therefore either represent or understand them in any way we might like. This approach stresses the materiality of landscapes: landscapes as real and physical rather than as simply cognised or imagined or represented. The physicality of landscapes acts as a ground for all thought and social interaction. It profoundly affects the way we think, feel, move, and act. The phenomenologist is a figure immersed within the ground of landscape. Landscape is fundamental for human existence, because it provides both a medium for and an outcome of individual and social practices. The physicality of landscapes grounds and orientates people and places within them; it is a physical and sensory resource for living and the social and symbolic construction of life-worlds.
A phenomenological study takes time. In principal, the longer one experiences a landscape the more that will be understood—first of all, because only familiarity can produce a structure of feeling for the landscape that a phenomenological account attempts to evoke. Second, landscapes, unlike their representations, are constituted in space-time. They are always changing, in the process of being and becoming, never exactly the same twice over. Places alter according to natural rhythms such as the progression of the seasons, time of day, qualities of light and shade, and so on. The weather, for which an entire archaeology might be developed, is a fundamental medium surrounding and affecting both people and their landscapes (see the discussion in Ingold 2007). Temporality is thus at the heart of a phenomenological study, in which we must learn how to see and how to experience and try to learn about the experiences of others (Bradley 2002; Jones 2007; Thomas 1996).
At their simplest and most abstract conceptualisation, human, and humanised, landscapes consist of two elements: places and their properties and paths or routes of movement between these places and their properties (Tilley 1994). There can be no non-contextual definition of either landscape or place. All depends on the scale of analysis. A place might be a rock outcrop, a hill, the point at which two streams converge, a field, a dwelling, or a settlement. A phenonmenologist attempts to describe both the individual experiences of different kinds of places and the paths or routes between them. The concern is with both stasis and movement. He or she recognises that there are multiple understandings of both. Places alter with regard to how they are experienced, as do the paths or routes of movement within or between them. So, according to the manner in which one senses and experiences landscapes, one ends up with differing descriptive understandings of them.
I and you encounter places and paths from a point of view, in both the literal and the metaphorical sense of this term, through the medium of our bodies, and the character of this experience changes in relation to both the directionality of our movement and the postures of our bodies. The manner in which we understand places differs inevitably according to how we encounter them from within and the routes we take to reach places and the sequences of other places we experience along the way. These factors structure our perceptive experience.
My, and your, experience is ‘coloured’ by the manner in which we encounter landscapes, and how. Memory is thus fundamental to the nature of our experience, which is simply to accept our own embodied humanity. There can be no ‘objective’ (in the sense of impersonal) experience of landscape. We are infallible humans and can never aspire to the status of gods who might comprehend and understand everything from every possible point of view. In our common humanity, we share biologically similar perceptive bodies with others in both the past and the present. We also significantly differ in relation to the cross-cutting divisions of gender, age, class, ethnicity, culture, knowledges. These characteristics together with the physicality of our bodies provide both essential resources, and limitations, for our understanding of landscapes. This being the case, our interpretations must at every stage be in a very real sense both contingent and provisional.
To understand landscapes phenomenologically requires the art of walking in and through them, to touch and be touched by them. An experience of landscape mediated by trains or cars or aeroplanes is always partial or distanciated. The view from the aeroplane is, of course, inhuman. We do not normally see or experience landscapes in this manner. The view from the car or train window is sensorily deprived: experience is reduced to vision. The phenomenologist acknowledges the multisensorial qualities of our human experiences of landscape, that a landscape is simultaneously a visionscape, a touchscape, a soundscape, a smellscape, and a tastescape. These different perceptive experiences occur all at once. Thus our experience is always synaesthetic, (a mingling or blending of the senses), whether we realise or acknowledge this. Landscapes reside as much in the tastes of their wines, or the odours of their flowers, as in their visual experiences. Such a multisensory approach in archaeology, in which discussions of the visual in relation to landscape has always been dominant (Hamilakis 2001), is only just beginning to be developed (for example, Bradley 2000b; Cummings 2002b; Fowler and Cummings 2003; Goldhahn 2002; Jones 2006; Jones and MacGregor 2002; Rainbird 2008; Skeates 2008; Tilley 2004a, 2008; Watson and Keating 1999).
The phenomenologist undertakes a task that is simultaneously very simple and incredibly difficult. He or she ‘resides’ in places and walks between them. This is a humble, potentially subversive, and democratic project open to student or teacher alike, requiring no fancy technical equipment or expertise in using it, or money beyond that required for subsistence. Archaeological excavations, by contrast, are fertile breeding grounds for institutionalised power and the egos of their directors (Bender, Hamilton, and Tilley 2007). For the phenomenologist, technical equipment, as often as not, gets in the way, because it always mediates and limits experience. Beyond a notebook and a pencil, a still or video camera may be useful in capturing some aspects of visual experience, but little else is usually required.
A phenomenological study is always limited, and the limits are essentially the limits of your own body. Landscape studies conducted in this manner are inevitably small-scale. It would not be possible to conduct such a study of the world or even of a nation such as France. This is beyond human possibility, but we could build up a comparative global phenomenological study through comparing and contrasting the accounts of different social scientists. Phenomenological landscape studies are inevitably particularistic rather than generalist. They attempt to capture the poetics and politics of paths and places (Bender 1998; Cummings and Whittle 2004; Edmonds 2006; Edmonds and Seaborne 2001; Scarre 2002; Tilley 1996a, 1999a).
The human perceptive experience of landscape is inevitably structured in relation to basic bodily dyads: things that are to the front or the back of an observer; those that are above or below, to the left or right of the body, near or far away. These dualisms are directly related to basic body symmetries. Therefore, experiential qualities of landscape should be described and discussed in these terms. In relation to the body, vision is the most distanciated of the senses: We can often see much further than we can hear or smell landscapes. For us to touch things, they must be in reach; taste (apart from sticking out the tongue) requires taking things into our bodies and is thus the most intimate of the senses.
It has been claimed that different hierarchies of the senses exist in different cultures—vision most important in Western modernity, smell or sound in other cultures. However, the very attempt to single out any particular sensory dimension and suggest that it has all-pervasive significance in one culture rather than another is an unhelpful simplification. Which of the senses is most significant depends both on context and the practices being undertaken; smells may be relatively more important in one context, sounds or sight or touch in another, and analysis needs to be sensitive to these variations rather than the scenario of one culture and one dominant sense (Tilley 2006c). For example, in Chapter 2 I argue that, in many areas of prehistoric lowland Europe, the advent of the Neolithic ushered in a sensory revolution in relation to the perception of landscape. The removal of forest cover allowed vision for the first time to become a distant and dominant sense in relation to the landscape. Without the trees, the contours and shapes of the land could be seen in a completely different manner, as could people, monuments, and places within the land. By contrast, in a densely forested Mesolithic landscape, smell and sound might be far more important in relation to orientation and resource exploitation, with sight being a far more intimate bodily sense.
Landscapes themselves influence forms of perception and activity, but they do not determine thought and action, and not anything can be made of them. They offer a series of affordances for living and acting in the world, and a series of constraints. We cannot determine in advance what may be of particular significance in any specific case. In one landscape, rock outcrops may be the most significant reference points; in another, river valleys and so on. One of our most common prejudices in landscape archaeology is to assume that the most important places in the landscape are those that have been humanly created, such as settlement sites and monuments. One of the most obvious phenomenological questions we try and answer is this: Why was this place chosen rather than another? However, such a question cannot be answered in isolation. We need to consider the monument or the settlement in relation to others, (searching for locational patterns) and with respect to its landscape context, which requires analysing its sensory affordances or constraints and the ways in which it might be experienced differently if approached from one direction rather than another. We cannot assume that the places for which we have no evidence of human presence were not important (Bradley 2000a). The peculiar hill or ridge without a monument may be of equal significance. A ‘natural’ stone may be as, if not more, significant than those deliberately erected, and there may exist both mimetic and contrastive relationships between humanly created and unaltered places (Rowlands and Tilley 2006; Tilley 1996a; Tilley et al. 2000). A phenomenological study of landscape thus requires a holistic approach in which we pay as much attention to the ‘natural’ as the ‘cultural’, to places with and without evidence of human alteration or activity.
Our experience of any unfamiliar landscape is like that of a child. Gradually we need to explore, to learn how to look, to hear, to smell, to touch, and to taste. We need to open out our bodies to all these sensory dimensions as much as is possible, to try and experience landscapes from within. In relation to past as opposed to contemporary landscapes, the task is inevitably difficult, since so much has irrevocably altered. But much also remains in the form of the geological and topographic ‘bones’ of the land: the character of the rocks, the mountains and hills, the valleys and the river courses, sometimes the coastline. The deafening sound of the waterfall (Goldhahn 2002) or the smell of rotting seaweed or meadowsweet, the sight of the conical hill, the way in which a stone feels to touch it and its colour, experiences of light and darkness within monuments, or the taste of honey may remain almost the same now as then: We do, in this limited sense still have a direct bodily connection with the past.
There can be no rulebook method to undertaking ‘good’ phenomenological research. Following is an outline of the basic stages involved in my own style of phenomenological research.
Familiarising oneself with the landscape through walking within and around it, developing a feeling for it, and opening up oneself to it.
Visiting known places of prehistoric significance and recording the sensory affordances and constraints they provide. This requires writing and then visually recording, through still or video photography, these experiences in the place, creating a written and visual text (rather than a series of abbreviated notes), because the very process of writing is a primary aid and stimulus to perception.
Revisiting the same places during different seasons or times of the day as far as is possible, experiencing them in and through the weather.
Approaching these places from different directions and recording the manner in which their character alters as a result.
Following paths of movement through the landscape and recording the manner in which this activity may change the manner in which places within it are perceived in relation to one another. Paths of movement will usually be suggested by features of the landscape itself, for example, following the lines of ridges or the courses of valleys or prehistoric monuments within it—for instance, walking along the line of a stone row, a Cursus monument, a cross-ridge dyke, a Roman road, or between nearby groups of barrows or settlements (Barclay and Harding 1999; Bradley 2002; Parker-Pearson et al. 2006; Tilley 1994, 1999a, 2004c; Witcher 1998).
Visiting and exploring and recording ‘natural’ places within the landscape for which there is little or no archaeological evidence of human activity (Bradley 2000a; Tilley et al. 2000; Tilley and Bennett 2001).
Drawing together all these observations and experiences in the form of a synthetic text and imaginatively interpreting them in terms of possible prehistoric life-worlds: how people in the past made sense of, lived in, and understood their landscapes (Bender, Hamilton...
