The Archaeology and Anthropology of Landscape

Shaping Your Landscape

Robert Layton, Peter Ucko, Robert Layton, Peter Ucko

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134828340
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Archaeology and Anthropology of Landscape contributes to the development of theory in archaeology and anthropology, provides new and varied case studies of landscape and environment from five continents, and raises important policy issues concerning development and the management of heritage.

1
Introduction: gazing on the landscape and encountering the environment

ROBERT LAYTON AND PETER J.UCKO

Interest in landscape transcends many traditional academic divisions and disciplines. Use of the term is becoming wider and wider. Rowlands, for example, has recently entitled a discussion of modern economics in the Cameroon ‘Looking at financial landscapes’ (Rowlands 1996). In this Introduction we review recent ways in which archaeologists and anthropologists have made use of the concept of landscape and show how these uses relate to issues addressed by contributors to the volume.

Landscapes are particular ways of expressing conceptions of the world and they are also a means of referring to physical entities. The same physical landscape can be seen in many different ways by different people, often at the same time (as is shown by, e.g. Franklin and Bunte 1997; Pokotylo and Brass 1997). There is much recent writing on the subject of landscape which has established, in sensitive and wide-ranging discussions, that the term may refer both to an environment, generally one shaped by human action, and to a representation (particularly a painting) which signifies the meanings attributed to such a setting (Olwig 1993:307, 312; see also PenningRowsell and Lowenthal 1986; Bender 1993; Hirsch 1995). Even advertisers can wax lyrical on the subject. ESSO has recently endorsed the view that landscape is undoubtedly one of the most popular and universally loved themes in the history of Western art’. The matter is further complicated by the fact that, while landscape painting is clearly a mode of representation that signifies ideas and values about its subject matter, the construction of monuments, ornamental lakes and groves turns the land itself into a signifier, a process that Olwig calls ‘the colonisation of nature by landscape’ (Olwig 1993:332). These multiple senses give rise to what Gosden and Head call landscape’s ‘useful ambiguity’: ‘Landscape encompasses both the conceptual and the physical’ (Gosden and Head 1994:113). While such ambiguity may sometimes be useful, it can also obscure the different orientations that writers can draw upon when they use the term landscape. One approach equates landscape with an environment that has an existence independent of those who live in it, as the following definition illustrates: ‘In general, the physical environment describes the characteristics of a landscape (e.g. climate, geography) which have not been markedly changed by human impact’ (Crystal 1990:412). Another insists that ‘a landscape is a cultural image, a pictorial way of representing, structuring or symbolising surroundings’ (Daniels and Cosgrove 1988:1). While Ingold has argued for a single definition of landscape, Olwig shows that it is fruitless to argue over which of the two orientations cited above is correct; both are established usages (Ingold 1993: 153–7; Olwig 1993:339–40). In fact, while Ingold argues that ‘the landscape is the world as it is known to those who dwell therein’ (Ingold 1993:156), he also defines landscape as ‘a pattern of activities “collapsed” into an array of features’, an external form created by a pattern of human activities which remains visible to archaeologists after its creators have disappeared (Ingold 1993:162).

The two definitions correspond to two of the principal themes in this volume and can be characterised in terms of the Weberian distinction between explanation and understanding. According to Weber (1947:79ff), explanation depended on recording statistical regularities in human behaviour that could then be explained in terms of sociological laws, while understanding depended on observation of meaningful interaction, in order to discover the meanings specific to that time and place which actors attributed to their own and others’ behaviour. An ecological approach explains behaviour as a response to external causes, while a cultural approach aims to understand behaviour as meaningful. While contributors to this volume identify external causes of behaviour in both natural and social environments, the first approach treats landscape as an object external to perception but capable of description. The second approach regards landscape as the expression of an idea, which the analyst must try to understand and, as far as possible, translate into the terms of his or her own discourse (for a review of similar debates in psychology, see Stokols and Shumaker 1981).

Explanation

Several contributors to this volume explain patterns of social behaviour in terms of adaptations to the natural environment. Abeyaratne (Chapter 10) argues that the ecology of Sri Lanka’s Dry Zone constrains levels of productivity; Smith, Strang, Layton, and Fullagar and Head all explore aspects of Australian Aboriginal social behaviour as adaptations to the savannah zone of northern Australia (Chapters 14, 15, 16 and 22), and Kharyuchi and Lipatova (Chapter 20) describe how the Nenets have adapted to the Gydan Peninsula of Siberia. Widgren, Abeyaratne and Chadha explain how relations of power in the social environment constrain or enable social strategies (Chapters 7, 10 and 11).

Understanding

The idea of landscape as an ideologically motivated representation of the world is particularly associated with the work of Cosgrove and Olwig (e.g. Cosgrove 1984; Olwig 1993, 1996). They trace the origin of the modern concept of landscape to a genre of painting patronised by a new mercantile class. Anthropologists and archaeologists have developed this approach by arguing that other cultural traditions have also constructed ‘landscapes’, expressed in oral tradition and in the construction of monuments, that reveal other assertions of power or right to the land (Bender 1993; Hirsch and O’Hanlon 1995). In the contributions by Evans and Hernando (Chapters 28 and 18), the study of landscape is seen to require learning to read landscapes constructed in the idiom of another culture and translating those readings for an academic audience. The problem of rereading landscapes created in prehistoric times poses particular problems that are discussed later in this Introduction.

The impact of postmodernism

Postmodernism challenges the neat distinction between explanation and understanding, and it is questionable whether either archaeology or anthropology has fully come to terms with the challenge. It has become impossible to deny that our own explanations are culturally constructed; even if they refer to an independent reality, they enable knowledge of the world not as it is, but merely as we represent it to ourselves. From the thoroughgoing postmodernist perspective, there is no environment, only landscape (see Table 1.1). Thus Bender and Hirsch, following Cosgrove, have pointed out that the current western notion of landscape draws upon an Enlightenment notion of the land viewed by a seemingly disengaged observer (Bender 1993:1; Hirsch 1995: 2), originally the landlord of the age of enclosures (Cosgrove 1984) but sometimes today the academic researcher (Thomas 1993a:25). Any view may be contested and ‘even in the most scientific of Western worlds, past and future will be mythologised’ (Bender 1993:2). Mulk and Bayliss-Smith’s contribution to this volume shows how interpretations of archaeological material may be politically motivated (Chapter 24).

Table 1.1 Landscape and environment: the modernist and post-modernist positions

The argument that the Enlightenment’s ‘objectivity’ was compromised from the start by its implication in methods of social control was memorably expressed in Foucault’s discussion of Bentham’s Panopticon (Foucault 1977: 195ff). Foucault associates the Enlightenment with the transition of methods of social control from the public display of punishment to more insidious control, from torture to discipline. Excruciating public execution was the tool of kings, used to punish the disloyalty of lawbreakers. Surveillance and discipline are the tools of the modern state first developed in the Prussian army, to straighten those who deviate from the common good. The chilling rationalism of the Panopticon placed prisoners (or factory employees, or hospital patients) in cells around a central tower, from which they could be subjected to surveillance by an unseen warden (Foucault 1977: Plates 3 and 6). Implicitly, the Cartesian ‘I’ which exists separately from its sensory experiences is not a disinterested observer but a political agent who gazes on those under his surveillance. The Renaissance technique for plotting a three-dimensional landscape, transforming and framing it into a two-dimensional painting available for inspection, invites the inference that landscape painting also had a political dimension. This inference is supported when we learn that those who promoted the enclosures also strove to erase the peasant society of the dispossessed by replacing it with a romantic image of wild, untouched nature, while those who opposed enclosure contrasted the benign, ‘unimproved’ landscape of the past with the regimented and fenced landscape that had replaced it (Daniels 1988:70–2; Olwig 1993:322, 333; Prince 1988; compare Bender 1993:2, 10 and Barrett this volume Chapter 2). Maps can also be said to order and control the landscape (Harley 1988:279; Bender this volume Chapter 3, and see Tanner in press for the way in which maps differ from landscapes).

The Enlightenment provided the grounds for treating western knowledge as globally valid, opposing it to the local knowledge of indigenous cultures. This tendency is graphically conveyed in Adam’s breathtaking claim that ‘a good test case of art for art’s sake is landscape painting. Generally speaking it is very rare in primitive art’ (Adam 1963:48). The same tendency can be seen in some contributions to the present volume, such as Hernando, and Arango and Andoque (Chapters 18 and 17). In the latter case, however, it is the indigenous author Fisi Andoque who writes ‘we, the Andoque people, think that the world is limited to only what is directly known to us’. Fisi Andoque’s remark recalls the Inuit witness’s refusal to take the oath during the hearings into the James Bay hydroelectric scheme on the grounds that he could not tell ‘the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth’, he could only say what he knew (Clifford 1988:8). Among contributors to this volume, Barrett (Chapter 2) writes of the way in which legitimacy was denied to local knowledge in England during the eighteenth century, while Chadha (Chapter 11) describes how the local knowledge of Indian ‘tribals’ has been marginalised in the name of ‘progress’. McGlade (Chapter 29) reviews ways of integrating local and scientific knowledge in the management of cultural landscapes. The error lies in claiming that our elaborate techniques of investigation and wider experience render our knowledge transparent and universal, as opposed to accepting, like the Inuit and Andoque, that it is mediated and limited. Barrett writes in this volume of the archaeologist’s tendency to privilege the moment of creation as the ‘date’ for a reused and reinterpreted artefact, while Fairclough (Chapter 9) criticises the ‘time-sliced’ approach to repair and reconstruction. Both are consequences of a conceptual ‘lens’ in archaeology which represents the world as a linear chronology and explains phenomena with reference to their origins. Allison and McGlade both highlight the political dimension of ‘heritage management’ in the United States and Europe respectively (Chapters 19 and 29). Fleming (Chapter 5) considers how changes in the English landscape of Swaledale can be differently represented when observed from different political perspectives.

Writing as oppression

During Lévi-Strauss’s fieldwork among the Nambikwara of Brazil, the leader of the band with whom he was travelling realised that note-taking gave the anthropologist an important source of power. Wanting to impress the other members of the band, the leader pretended to be able to read and write. Lévi-Strauss was prompted to speculate about what it was that writing had made possible, developing as it did after such important events as the origin of farming. He concludes that writing was invented to facilitate slavery in early empires; the ‘disinterested’ writing of intellectuals was a secondary development (Lévi-Strauss 1973:296–9). Derrida took issue with the claim that any writing could be disinterested. The very act of characterising the Nambikwara as different to Europeans was a form of oppression. The violence of anthropology occurs at ‘the moment when the [cultural] space is shaped and reoriented by the gaze of the foreigner’ (Derrida 1976:113). The colonial act of ‘discovering’ and renaming places is an example of such oppression. So too is the rereading as wild or barren of a landscape that, to its indigenous inhabitants, is filled with tradition. This is exemplified by Cooney, Strang, and Allison in their respective contributions (Chapters 4, 15, and 19) and, perhaps most explicitly, by Mulk and Bayliss-Smith in Chapter 24, where it is shown how Scandinavian colonialism continues in its attempt to freeze the indigenous people into a single, unchanging pattern of nomadic reindeerherding. Competing readings may put the researcher at odds with the local inhabitants. Sim and West (Chapter 27) describe a case where such opposition was transformed into co-operation. Evans (Chapter 28) records the negotiation of interpretations that took place between shamans and archaeologists among the ruins of former settlements in the Himalayas, while Fullagar and Head (Chapter 22) discuss ways in which archaeological and indigenous interpretations can be reconciled. Ayres and Mauricio (Chapter 21) look at the additional problems that arise where the control of indigenous knowledge confers power, while Bender (Chapter 3) documents ways in which indigenous people have subverted the ‘Western gaze’.

It has become increasingly common in anthropology to try to overcome the oppression created by academic writing by dispelling the illusion of objective observation. Anthropologists describe their anxieties in the field and their struggles with informants. Discussions with members of the community are presented in the text, so that the people with whom one worked are transformed from objects of research into active subjects participating in an intercultural discourse. In this volume, several chapters are jointly authored by a member of the community studied (Arango and Andoque, Ayres and Mauricio, Mulk and Bayliss-Smith, Parker Pearson, Ramilisonina and Retsihisatse, Roe and Taki).

Is there a world out there?

There is an unfortunate tendency in some postmodernist literature to confuse the proposition that we can never know the world as it is but only through our representations of it (Thomas 1993a:23, 28) with either or both of the claims that there is no (meaningful) world external to consciousness, or that meaning can make no reference to the world, since the meaning of words is defined only in relation to other words. These other claims originate in the work of Derrida. Saussure had argued that the association of sound and meaning was created entirely by cultural convention. The meaning of each linguistic sign is determined by its position in the total language, in opposition to other signs. Language, for Saussure, was a property of what Durkheim called the ‘collective consciousness’, which outlived and...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• One World Archaeology
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Preface
• 1: Introduction: gazing on the landscape and encountering the environment
• 2: Chronologies of landscape
• 3: Subverting the Western Gaze: mapping alternative worlds
• 4: Social landscapes in Irish prehistory
• 5: Small-scale communities and the landscape of Swaledale (North Yorkshire, UK)
• 6: A historical interactive landscape in the heart of Europe: the case of Bohemia
• 7: Is landscape history possible? or, how can we study the desertion of farms?
• 8: The historic environment, historic landscapes, and space-time-action models in landscape archaeology
• 9: Protecting time and space: understanding historic landscape for conservation in England
• 10: The role of caste hierarchy in the spatial organisation of a village landscape in the Dry Zone of Sri Lanka
• 11: The anatomy of dispossession: a study in the displacement of the tribals from their traditional landscape in the Narmada Valley due to the Sardar Sarovar Project
• 12: Perceiving ‘your’ land: neighbourhood settlements and the Hauz-i Rani
• 13: In the shadow of New Delhi: understanding the landscape through village eyes
• 14: Ancestors, place and people: social landscapes in Aboriginal Australia
• 15: Competing perceptions of landscape in Kowanyama, North Queensland
• 16: The Alawa totemic landscape: ecology, religion and politics
• 17: Managing the world: territorial negotiations among the Andoque people of the Colombian Amazon
• 18: The perception of landscape amongst the Q’eqchi’, a group of slash-and-burn farmers in the Alta Verapaz (Guatemala)
• 19: Self-determination in cultural resource management: indigenous peoples’ interpretation of history and of places and landscapes
• 20: Traditional beliefs, sacred sites and rituals of sacrifice of the Nenets of the GydanPeninsula in the modern context1
• 21: Definition, ownership and conservation of indigenous landscapes at Salapwuk, Pohnpei, Micronesia
• 22: Exploring the prehistory of hunter-gatherer attachments to place: an example from the Keep River area, Northern Territory, Australia
• 23: Towards an archaeology of mimesis and rainmaking in Namibian rock art
• 24: The representation of Sámi cultural identity in the cultural landscapes of northern Sweden: the use and misuse of archaeological knowledge
• 25: Ancestors, forests and ancient settlements: Tandroy readings of the archaeological past
• 26: Living with stones: people and the landscape in Erromango, Vanuatu
• 27: Prehistoric human occupation in the Bass Strait region, southeast Australia: an Aboriginal and an archaeological perspective
• 28: Cognitive maps and narrative trails: fieldwork with the Tamu-mai (Gurung) of Nepal
• 29: Archaeology and the evolution of cultural landscapes: towards an interdisciplinary research agenda