LANDSCAPE ARCHAEOLOGY

L LANDSCAPE ARCHAEOLOGY Wendy Ashmore and Chelsea Blackmore, University of California, Riverside, CA, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary Annales School Approach to history (originally, French history) emphasizing among other things a blending of history with the social sciences, favoring comparison and structure over noncomparative narrative histories; took shape with establishment of the journal Annales, in 1929. axis mundi Literally, ‘axis of the world’; a centering place, offering passage from one cosmic realm to another and around which a properly ordered world is arranged. ethnoarchaeology The study of living people by archaeologists, usually with the goal of understanding how customs and behavior are expressed in material traces. ethnohistory Study of relatively recent societies through accounts of explorers, missionaries, native chroniclers, such archival resources as land titles and census documents; often focuses on situations of colonization. fengshui Literally, ‘wind and water’; Chinese art and science through which one’s life is placed in harmony with forces of the universe. historical ecology Study of past ecosystems by chronicling change in human–landscape relations over time. inhabitation Social practices by which people understand their own lives and landscapes, with reference to occupants and actions in the same locale, in other times (after Barrett). panopticon A space (originally a prison, as designed by Bentham) in which all areas can be observed from a single central position, usually without certainty, among those being observed, about whether surveillance is actually taking place. phenomenology Philosophical approach giving primacy to direct experience and encounter with the world, stemming from work by Husserl and later, Heidegger and others. settlement pattern Material traces of people’s presence on the land, usually highlighting buildings and other constructed features, and their distribution. worldview Comprehensive, culture-specific conception of the universe and humanity’s place therein.

‘Landscape archaeology’ has been defined in multiple ways, all of which involve archaeological study of people’s involvement with their surrounding environment. Differences arise from contrasting intellectual traditions, the theoretical stances in which the authors work. For some, the critical relations are

ecological, grading into environmental archaeology or geoarchaeology. For others, focus is on the sets of meanings derived from landscape experience. Still others recognize combinations of analytical and interpretive foci. Important to virtually all are reliance on multidisciplinary approaches, including more than archaeological data alone. Landscape archaeology attends both to sites and settlement remains and to spaces in between. As a consequence of the latter, landscape archaeology sometimes can be linked conceptually to distributional or nonsite archaeology, in which the subject matter is the discoverable array of material traces, commonly at the level of individual artifacts. The investigative scale of landscape archaeology is usually regional in scope, although US historical archaeologists use the term to refer to the study of formal gardens. At the wider scale, landscape archaeology facilitates recognition of extensive material remains, such as roads and agricultural fields, which do not fit comfortably in traditional notions of the archaeological site. Such wide scale also highlights the importance of people’s movements across the land, whether for economic, social, ritual, or other reasons. The more spatially expansive definitions consider landscape archaeology to deal with long-term, historically contingent cases, and the cumulative materialized relations between localized social groups and the settings in which they live and move. These relations are recursive between the landscape and the behaviors and beliefs of its human occupants. Despite the multiplicity of specific, contrasting definitions, landscape archaeology is widely viewed as potentially unifying across theoretical divides.

Theory in Landscape Archaeology Landscape has a long history in archaeology, although that history differs across intellectual traditions, especially in the English-speaking world. Many authors call attention to the etymology of the word, from the Dutch landschap, and its relation to a genre of painting in seventeenth-century Europe. For some, the distinctly Western ‘gaze’ involved, and the perspective views that simultaneously distance the scene

1570 LANDSCAPE ARCHAEOLOGY

and make possessions of its contents, are bound up with the patronage of wealthy landowners underlying the creation of the pictures. For other authors, landscape is more concerned with territory, and with economic or ecological dimensions of nature and environment. Not surprisingly, theoretical perspectives about landscape in archaeology have changed in tandem with wider intellectual, political, and economic currents, most consistently reflecting attitudes toward forms of human involvement with land. Sherratt discusses pertinent European trends within a wider set of fluctuations in European intellectual movements since the Renaissance. In his view, times of stability support considerations favoring comparison, determinism, order, and stages, a collectivity he glosses as an Enlightenment attitude, in which emphasis is given to evolution, and in spatial analyses, to settlements. He associates landscape studies with times of political and economic instability, in which Romantic attitudes favor contextual, relativist, and meaningoriented studies. To consider further how definitions and theory have shifted in intellectual time and space, the remainder of this section adapts from more extended discussion elsewhere, treating Anglophone traditions, primarily in Britain and North America. Turning first to late-nineteenth-century North America, Euro-Americans equated the notion of landscape with nature unspoiled by humans. Somewhat ironically, Yosemite, Niagara Falls, and other places modified by Olmstead for health or esthetic reasons quickly became naturalized in popular thought. Despite Sauer’s 1925 scholarly distinction between ‘cultural’ landscapes and ‘natural’ ones, the notion of landscapes as pristine nature remains frequent in the US, among scholars as well as the public. In Britain, by contrast, a deeper, long-standing interest in prehistoric and historical landscapes is tied in part to genealogical interest in local and regional traditions, and was given immense boost from availability of aerial photography and production of the Ordnance Maps after World War I. Americanist archaeological landscape studies of the late twentieth century derive most directly from cultural ecological studies of Steward and Willey’s settlement pattern research. Both were significant foundations for the positivist ideas dominating USbased archaeology in the late twentieth century, and both supported examination at a regional scale. Theoretical trends in the US New Archaeology broadly paralleled those in a New Geography at mid-century, and archaeologists cited widely from Chisholm, Chorley, Haggett, and (early) Harvey. In this time of economic and political optimism (despite the Cold War), landscapes and other kinds of space were

objects to be measured and compared, analyzed, and interpreted via powerful statistical models. The land remained a neutral and passive object, used by people but otherwise relatively detached from them. In Britain as well, scientific approaches prevailed in archaeology amid the economic and ecological perspectives of the 1960s and 1970s, and a similar array of positivist geographers was influential. Whether emphasizing a functional view to reconstructing ancient land use, or focusing on social and economic systems at varied spatial scales, landscape archaeology at this time was broadly consistent on both sides of the Atlantic. Already in the 1970s, however, positivist stances increasingly were challenged in both the US and UK, by post-positivist philosophies, humanist concerns, and calls for social relevance – and social justice – in uncertain times of economic flux and the Vietnam War. Space (including landscapes) and human action were recast as matched participants in perpetually recursive mutual constitution. Existentialism, feminism, idealism, phenomenology, and interactionism proved to be important philosophical influences. Despite these challenges, positivist archaeology remains strong in the US, if with widening exploration of post-positivist stances. In landscape research, theory from economic geography, ecology, and anthropology continues to support inferences about social and economic dimensions of land use. Some landscape analysts focus more closely on physical terrain, with theory drawn at least as often from the physical and natural sciences as from the social. In all of the foregoing, location and distribution of material resources figure importantly, if with growing attention as well to monuments and rock-art or other material inscriptions of social meaning. Historical archaeologists in the US tend more toward humanistic perspectives, writing of landscapes most often in terms of colonial gardens. Although reference remains relatively sparse regarding existentialism, feminism, idealism, phenomenology, and other strands of social theory sparking recent social geography, growing attention turns to the potentials in practice theory, structuration, and Marxist thought. In the UK, landscape research is generally more humanistic and post-positivist, and archaeologists invoke social theory from a range of sources, especially structural Marxism, phenomenology, various forms of practice theory, and occasionally, feminist thought. Most practitioners stress the idea of landscape as socially constructed, emphasizing that the same piece of ground holds different social attachments and contrasting symbolic meanings for different people and groups, at any one time and through time as well. Attachments and meanings may be attested materially,

LANDSCAPE ARCHAEOLOGY 1571

inscribed on the land in architecture, rock-art, or other media; additionally, or alternatively – and more challenging for archaeologists – the attachments and meanings may reside in memories, shared orally, if at all. Location and distribution of material markings figure significantly as subjects of inquiry, especially stone monuments, construction, and rock-art, and objects or settings commonly thought to materialize performance of ritual. Materially unmarked landscape elements gain increasing importance as well, as inferred cues in orienting and organizing human activity. Whether expressed materially or not, however, attachments and meanings are commonly considered fundamental for orienting individuals and societies, integral to social identities and often, to moral grounding.

Landscape and Ecology Landscape as ecological study commonly emphasizes long-term interaction between humans and the terrain on and in which they live. A principal advantage of such a perspective is the enhanced potential for recognizing climatic, geomorphic, economic, ideational, and/or political change in a single defined setting. This combined temporal and environmental focus relates to the long-dure´e of Braudel and the Annales School of history. Although landscapes are often described as comprising palimpsests of cumulative change, archaeologists focus alternately on identifying either episodes within the sequence or their cumulative effects. Geomorphic changes in the landscape include localized human and geological effects, as well as more widely experienced effects from climate shifts. Fluvial hydrology, for example, reveals alterations wrought by natural forces of alluviation and erosion, and also recognizes human intervention. The degraded modern landscape of Greece has long been attributed to combined effects of farming and climate change; working in the Argolid specifically, van Andel and Runnels attribute the situation more specifically to Bronze Age and Byzantine episodes of major soil erosion, involving archaeological and geomorphic evidence of rapid forest clearing for agriculture with no substantial soil conservation measures. In Oaxaca, Mexico, of the late first millennium BC, Joyce and Mueller document that intensification of agriculture in the highlands around Monte Alba´n immediately preceded an increased sediment load in the rivers draining the watershed. The result transformed hydrology and boosted agricultural potentials far downstream, in the broad Rı´o Verde Valley at the Pacific coast. The ramifications of geomorphic and anthropogenic changes to the landscape can have dramatic and long-lasting impact on human and other life.

Many ecological studies are more directly economic in focus, examining evidence of human land use and ecological potentials. In the 1960s, Vita-Finzi and Higgs were influential in examining foraging and farming landscapes in the Levant, developing retrodictive models of what economic strategies were plausible in light of inferred technologies, demography, and landforms of Paleolithic and Neolithic times. More than two decades later, Kirch extended social inference of such study, in Polynesia contexts. After he had assessed the differential resources and subsistence capacities of varied islands, as well as their archaeological records of human occupation, landscape archaeology allowed him to link contrasts between trajectories of demographic prosperity and ecological disaster to degrees of cooperation-based social organization, as well as in subsistence strategies per se. These and related inquiries for some define historical ecology, a pursuit intersecting with landscape archaeology, in which analysts highlight the cumulative political and economic relations between people and the land, over hundreds and often thousands of years, frequently with implications for the present day. In Burgundy, for example, Crumley and Marquardt’s research has documented the impact of factors as diverse as the Roman conquest and climate change on the lives of the Celtic populace of the region from the Late Iron Age through the Middle Ages. Landscape approaches are crucial for inquiries about large-scale land management strategies, the transformation of extensive tracts, and the social order responsible for these actions. As Erickson’s work documents, the extent of artificial terracing in pre-Columbian Andean landscapes attests to labor investment in antiquity on a collective, cumulative scale even larger than that involved in construction of civic buildings, and at least several hundred years before imperial Inka labor tribute levies. Although features of agricultural intensification are massive in aggregate, however, Erickson’s ethnoarchaeological studies reveal that the labor involved did not always or necessarily require oversight by authority more centralized than a network of kin groups. This Andean research has had clear, constructive implications for agricultural development programs today. Many ancient peoples have modified surface hydrology, as well as topography. In the Maya lowlands, for example, extensive, if often subtle alteration began as early as 400 BC, in Preclassic times, directing water to plaster-lined reservoirs instead of letting it escape through porous karst limestone bedrock, where it thereby would have eluded reach of humans. In this case, and in contrast to at least parts of the Andean terracing just cited, the concentration of water resources, their eventual focus on providing

1572 LANDSCAPE ARCHAEOLOGY

water to urban centers, and the magnitude of modification over hundreds of square kilometers are thought ultimately to imply centralized direction and control. Indeed, landscape inquiry has confirmed extensive and long-standing ecological management around the globe, by societies with quite varied characteristics of size and internal organization. Because of that, the idea of pristine landscapes, unmodified by humans, has become untenable virtually anywhere. Through landscape inquiry, the vast expanse of Amazonia has yielded evidence for millenia of human intervention, in earthworks as well as indications of repeated forest cutting. Inference that Australia’s outback was ‘untouched’ any time recently is similarly misleading, on the basis of geographic and archaeological findings, as well as resounding testimony in Aboriginal narratives.

Landscape, Cosmology, and Worldview People experience landscapes as land, water, and sky. They also learn well the seasonal temperatures, changeable winds, and sensory events, from storms on the ground to eclipses in the heavens. Prominent features of topography or constellations come to signify locations, episodes, or supernatural actors in creation narratives. Sun and moon are among the most commonly deified forces, whose actions take place eternally in the landscape embracing sky, horizons, and unseen netherworld. The passage of the seasons, as well as predictability of rain, temperature, and other weather conditions are all read from movements of those and other celestial bodies. In parallel ways, the contours of visible terrain come to embody cosmology and mythic history. These collectively are fundamental aspects of worldview, the principles by which the world is properly constituted. Multiple scholars have noted that, in the worldview of local occupants, visually dramatic places in the landscape, especially involving abrupt transitions in elevation, landform, waterfalls, and other such features, tend to be treated as places where components of the universe join. Analysts frequently call such a location an axis mundi, following influential writings by Eliade and Tuan. These kinds of places are prime spots for attachment of cosmogonic and migration narratives, and for marking materially, by rock-art and other means. Repeated movement across the landscape, over the span of days, seasons, years, and lifetimes, situates the oral texts as social memory of inalienable landscape knowledge. Increasingly, archaeologists collaborate with indigenous peoples in acknowledging and seeking to understand meaningful landmarks of these narratives, as in recent studies by Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Ferguson, or by Zeden˜o, in different portions of what is now the US Southwest.

Human-made marks on the landscape, as rock-art or standing monuments of some other sort, may become naturalized over time, as primordial. Ancient architecture, especially as ruin mounds, may be attributed as readily to supernatural forebears as to human ancestors. Recorded accounts of the building of Stonehenge, by Merlin of Arthurian legend, or by supernatural giants, dramatize this tendency. While these monuments may cease to be occupied in their original ways, they almost surely retain some meaning as visible parts of the landscape. Richards argues that the megalithic stones, earthen mounds, and ditch rings of Neolithic Orkney embodied and replicated the surrounding expanses of earth, stone, and water, which modern observers see more clinically as simply glaciated terrain. The caveat about persistence of meaning stems from reminders, such as the Orkney instance, or Blake’s reminder of naturalized archaeological Nuraghi tower monuments of Bronze Age Sardinia; features that today seem close to neutral or empty of reported local meaning. Analysts often take implications of cosmological meaning to define ‘sacred’ landscapes. As useful as this term can be, it also begs a definition for what constitutes sacrality, and for what the limits of sacred and mundane are in particular cases, especially in societies less secularized than the modern Western world. Especially when treating of ancient societies who have left no written accounts, archaeologists are severely challenged to determine what, if any, significance modern distinctions between sacred and nonsacred might have had in antiquity. Frequently, cosmology and worldview also inform inscription of social and political order in the landscape, at multiple scales. Site choice for building a house, shrine, field, or settlement is affected not only by physical terrain and economic resources, but also by beliefs about proper disposition of humans on the land. In China, the ideas that underlie the principles of fengshui and its goals of maximized auspiciousness for inhabitants apparently guided placement of houses or settlements from the prehistoric period. Parallel kinds of principles, based on such notions as cardinal orientations of world quarters, or importance of sighting alignments with particular astronomical phenomena, provide directives in other societies, states, and otherwise. Wheatley’s writings about Chinese cities influenced much subsequent thinking on the matter. Often conceptions of the cosmos are mapped onto the earth, as in building positions and alignments in urban landscapes of New Kingdom Egypt, at Teotihuacan in Mexico, or among the Classic Maya. Beyond a single town or city, landscapes are similarly shaped by worldview. In the Southwest, ancestral Keres landscapes achieved this mapping in the

LANDSCAPE ARCHAEOLOGY 1573

distribution of shrines extending in cardinal directions from the cosmologically organized town plans, often with orienting reference to prominent mountains or other ‘natural’ landmarks. Far to the south, in the landscape around Cuzco, Peru, ritual circuits of the Inca were mapped along sight lines extending radially, to varied distances from the capital. Within this sacred landscape, the radiating lines, or ceques, were marked at irregular distances by huacas, sacred places or objects imbued with supernatural force, which recalled cosmic or legendary events in the Inca past. Lamentably for archaeologists, the huacas themselves are not always visually distinguished from other natural features, in predictable location or form, and this makes their identification dependent on oral tradition and written accounts. The strong benefit of ethnohistory available for interpreting Inca belief is what is so prominently lacking for societies in many locales, especially deep in prehistory. Nevertheless, painstaking landscape studies in those situations, such as research by Bradley, Richards, and other scholars of Neolithic Britain, are testimony to the productivity of proposing working understandings of those sacred landscapes. In each of the foregoing instances and many others, landscape is often central to interpreting ancient cosmology and worldview.

Landscape, Identity, and History Whether referring to sacred or mundane characteristics, the foregoing sections illustrate that people engage landscapes in long-term reflexive exchange, establishing both possible and proper ways of living in the world. In the process, individuals and groups come to identify with the landscapes they inhabit. With establishment of identity in this sense, landscapes also become repositories of social memory and history. Landscapes as identity materialize the reciprocal and always fluid relationship between the physical terrain, language, history, and cultural ideologies. That is, as people live within and move among arenas that shape their worldview, they simultaneously reinvest and modify meanings of the land. As Basso describes among the modern Western Apache, for example, conversations and stories are punctuated with place names that spatially situate actions of known, legendary, or deeply ancient others. By such narratives, landscapes are socialized and history is emplaced. The places named also come to carry moral values associated with cited actions and their consequences. Landscapes thereby become conceptual tools as much as they are physical arenas, and in so doing, comprise conceptual frameworks to guide people in their daily actions and interactions with others.

As with language, understanding of a landscape is built on social memory and the experiences tied to it, serving as a form of cultural logic. From his studies in prehistoric contexts of Iron Age and earlier contexts in Britain, Barrett writes of parallel kinds of identification, memory, and history. He adopts the term ‘inhabitation’ to describe the social practices through which direct experience, shared memories, and operative modes of understanding (such as concepts of time) make a landscape and its monuments meaningful for its current set of occupants. In Britain, he argues that Iron Age people transformed experience of the landscape and monuments inherited from earlier times, replacing rituals that were millennia old with new, more pragmatic practices of land-use and living in the present. What archaeologists encounter today is a landscape that has visually collapsed distinct identities and histories from the past, but which inquiry reveals to be convergent in location only, and substantially divergent in meaning. Mnemonic landmarks of identity take many forms. Among the most common are mortuary sites. Building from arguments by Saxe, Goldstein, Renfrew, and Charles, archaeologists frequently draw on grave or mortuary monument distributions to map social territories. Most commonly, clusters of interments are inferred to denote either central places or boundaries of the land identified with the group in question. At the same time, Buikstra (writing about the lower Illinois valley) and Sharples (writing about Neolithic Orkney) caution that different portions of a kingroup or community may be buried in multiple, distinct locations. From these combined perspectives, tracking the places and forms of mortuary practices, especially over multiple centuries or millennia, can yield provocative insights about changing social identities within a regional landscape. In the lower Illinois valley, for example, Buikstra and Charles detect not only significant changes over time in form and topographic location of burials and cemeteries, but also concomitant shifts in emphasis on mortuary ritual versus ancestor cult, and from these observations, propose sequential transformations in social identities, among those who were burying their dead. Identification with specific landscape features may affect social standing, whether by design, or as unintended consequence. For instance, otherwise socially subordinate groups sometimes benefit from access to economic and symbolic resources, such as water, when they are rare or patchy in distribution. Among many cultural groups, not only is water essential for survival but also it carries symbolic connotations connected to the supernatural. According to Scarborough, Fash, Lucero, and other archaeologists, leadership authority in pre-Columbian lowland Maya

1574 LANDSCAPE ARCHAEOLOGY

society relied in large measure on control of water sources, often along with their augmentation, as with reservoir catchments. The landscape of water resources thereby mapped the bases of social power, its establishment and maintenance, and the varied degrees of its centralization. In other circumstances, however, special or unique landscape resources can foster resistance to authority. By the fourteenth century, the Hauz-i Rani, or ‘Queen’s reservoir’ near Delhi, had become known as the site of a miracle involving a sufi Islamic saint. Beyond its economic importance, the water of this hauz held an unusual degree of sacred significance. Otherwise politically and economically disadvantaged residents in the vicinity came to be considered special disciples, and the association allowed them a degree of autonomy relative to the Delhi Sultanate. As Kumar writes, the beneficial distinction depended on the historical conjunction of the capital’s location in Delhi, and on political and economic prosperity at that hub. When the imperial capital changed location, economics declined, and homage to the sufi saint shifted to a different locale; the sacrality and special standing of the hauz and its village dissolved. The changing fortunes of the Hauz-i Rani village have material history in the elaborate medieval architecture at the shrine, and the sequence of its ruination in subsequent centuries.

Landscape, Gender, and Sex Many authors have called attention to the notion of landscape as a product of the rise of capitalism and its attendant social inequities, especially in class and gender. Through the advent of landscape painting, and the linear perspective that permitted such imagery, wealthy landowners could commission portraits of their holdings. Not only did this distinctly Western gaze objectify the surrounding world, distancing and removing it from direct experience, the vantage also marked possession and feminization of landscape by the men who contracted for the works. In other words, the mere concept of landscape is loaded with connotations both of control and of hierarchical gender relations. Just as landscape embodies cosmology, history, and social identity, it can also materialize gender. Specific features of earth or sky may be identified as female, male, or other genders, often with implications of primordial (and perpetual) acts of sexual reproduction. Recognition of gender attribution in antiquity commonly depends on availability of ancient texts, depictions, or strong cultural continuities from the past. Earth and sky are frequently creator deities, but neither partner is universally male or female. While the

idea of Mother Earth is acknowledged as widespread across time and cultures, in ancient Egypt, texts and images distinguish earth, along with nourishing floodwaters of the Nile, as male. In other cases, gender identities are attributed to portions of the land, or to individual celestial bodies. Of the latter, sun and moon are regularly, though not universally, recognized as male and female, respectively, while individual stars or planets are more varied. Among the Maya, for example, Venus was and is emphatically male, the younger brother of the Sun, one of the earliest and most influential deities in creation. Within the earthly plane of ancient Greece, a gendered landscape materially unified rural and urban worlds. According to Cole, the most important sanctuaries of Artemis, goddess of wilderness and fertility, were located in the countryside, with replicas within city limits. While the shrines themselves expressed societal unity implicitly, ritual processions of women between the two enacted it explicitly, because women’s unprotected movements were behavioral if not material testaments to the security and stability across society’s spatial expanse. In a complementary vein, customary gendering of activities may attach gender identities to the specific spaces where those activities are carried out. Seclusion and gendered exclusion in nunneries and monastic landscapes are among the most striking examples, well attested with material evidence. At the other end of a continuum of exclusivity, some gender-specific activities – often for performance of ritual – may keep one or another gender off-limits only for the duration of the event. The latter sort of instance leaves little or no material trace for archaeologists to discern. In between those extremes of archaeological visibility one can cite instances from gendered landscapes as mutually contrastive as the arctic north and equatorial Africa. In the Arctic, structuralist analysis of Inuit worldview links women with winter, the sea, and marine life, while men are associated with summer, land, and terrestrial animals. McGhee’s examination of Thule artifacts, their inferred uses, and the sources of raw materials suggests that a similar gendered distinction of time and space ordered the Thule world a millennium ago and more. Linkage of women with ivory from sea mammals and men with hunting gear made from terrestrial materials is one part of the conclusions reached. According to Bodenhorn’s recent ethnographic work in northern Alaska, a similar worldview may lie today behind men’s valuation of their wives’ abilities to ‘call’ to sea mammals, and bring them close for the men to hunt. In this account, men may do the physical work of the hunt, but they do it in a

LANDSCAPE ARCHAEOLOGY 1575

female landscape realm and rely on women’s skills to complete the act. This collaborative partitioning of a gendered Arctic landscape contrasts with the findings of historical archaeology, ethnohistory, and ethnoarchaeology in iron smelting of Tanzania. There, place names are glosses of words for men’s and women’s genitalia, and for actions in sexual intercourse, such that an ancient smelting furnace tower is a phallus, a nearby river is named for vaginal fluid, and other localities constitute steps in coition, especially men’s actions. From Schmidt’s combined analytic perspectives, the material landmarks complement verbal labels, the whole conveying a complex but unified message of social and sexual hierarchy and male prowess, and equating the process of iron smelting with reproduction. More to the point, customs regarding women’s exclusion from the smelting process confirm the visual message of the landscape, linking success in metallurgical production with success in procreation, and by extension with societal prosperity.

Landscape, Movement, and Pilgrimage As is clear from preceding sections, movement is a critical factor in landscape knowledge, and in endowing landscapes with meaning. Seasonal rounds among nonsedentary societies familiarize people with places to which they attach histories and legends, in which they gain economic resources, or from which they infer acts of supernatural creation. Darnell describes the caravan tracks inscribed by wear across economic, political, and ritual landscapes of pharaonic Egypt, while Snead details paths carved by centuries of repeatedly walking established routes in the Puebloan Southwest. In deep antiquity of markedly different cultural traditions, scholars such as Bradley, Bender, and Tilley suggest inference of long-past pathways by phenomenological re-enactment of plausible routes. In particular, they point to rock-art and visually striking changes in topography as likely signposts guiding such movement. Indeed, Thomas infers a rather intricate choreography of movement, guided by extant or reconstructed visual cues in the landscape, leading toward Neolithic Avebury, and into the carefully structured circular enclosure of ditch and megaliths. Pilgrimage combines landscape movement with spiritual belief, as a formalized act of faith involving a destination, a journey, and experience of ambient geography. In ancient times as now, the process of pilgrimage itself is as much a physical undertaking as a spiritual one: the endurance of the pilgrim, the ruggedness of the landscape, and the remoteness of

the destination enhances social and spiritual qualities of the journey. Spiritual magnetism, the hallmark of pilgrimage centers, is often associated with miraculous cures, supernatural beings, difficulty of access, and sacred geography. Archaeological studies of pilgrimage have been largely the domain of classical and historical archaeologies. Ancient Greek women’s passages between rural and urban sanctuaries of Artemis have already been cited. For prehistoric times and nonliterate traditions as well, however, pilgrimage may offer an appropriate explanatory model for understanding sacred places and landscape crossings. According to Silverman, shrine mounds, well-swept open spaces, and an array of temporary buildings identify Cahuachi as a pilgrimage destination between AD 200 and 400 in the landscape of south coastal Peru. Sheets finds that well-worn tracks in Costa Rica lead consistently to (or from) pre-Columbian ceremonial sites. Parker Pearson and his colleagues contend that Stonehenge and the great earthen henge at Durrington Walls were end points for circuits through the encompassing ceremonial landscape, and that completion of the local pilgrimage in opposite directions at the two solstices commemorated complementary transitions between life and death in Neolithic Britain. Cross-cultural evidence from caves, materializing day-to-day observances or more specialized rituals, suggest that pilgrimages to such portals cross landscapes of quite varied spatial scale. In Mesoamerican landscapes of ancient and modern times, caves and settlements sometimes have close spatial linkages, although even over that short distance, formal, paved roads often mark passage from the mundane world of daily life to the supernatural portal into the earth. In contrast, the cave of Naj Tunich, in Guatemala, is far from any substantial settlements, but the existence and contents of its mural drawings and Maya inscriptions, as well as physical modifications to its chambers, attest to visitors from afar over more than the last millennium, arguably as pilgrims. Archaeologically, it is the abundance of traces of reverential visits within the cave paired with the absence of nearby settlements that together point to acts of pilgrimage. Pilgrimage stations and other sacred landmarks also prove powerful tools in political propaganda, particularly when those sites acted as intra-regional destinations. For example, Roman conquerors actively seized on such places to transform the landscapes of Celtic peoples under their dominion. At the same time as they rearranged human occupation of the Celtic landscape by settling people into the lowland valleys that were conducive to more intensive agricultural production, the Romans also erased

1576 LANDSCAPE ARCHAEOLOGY

markers of tradition Celtic religion. That is, to extinguish the continuation of pagan beliefs and practices, the Romans destroyed oak groves and other landscape features sacred in Celtic worldview. Destruction of sacred monuments alters landscapes of belief, and is known from both ancient and modern times, as conquering armies raze buildings and monuments that had been cues to belief and ritual – from temples that fell to the Spanish conquest of the New World, to destruction of mosques and churches in the interethnic wars of eastern Europe in the late twentieth century.

Landscape and Gardens Among other contributions, landscape archaeology has helped redirect archaeological focus to the ideological, physical, and cultural importance of some in-between spaces that had been traditionally ignored. In addition to reporting on roads, water bodies, and other features already cited, garden studies offer notable illustration of this point. Although traditionally associated with historical archaeology and art history, such studies provide a unique means with which to explore materialized discourse on social hierarchy. Appreciation of formal gardens as archaeological landscapes has grown as preservationists have enlisted archaeologists’ aid, to understand and conserve historical settings of recent centuries. Except in the Classical world, application of garden archaeology to societies deeper in antiquity is still underdeveloped, although important studies are underway at places such as Petra and have been part of the understanding of space and social identity of ancient life in Egypt. More than any other kinds of landscape, gardens are purely human constructions, bounded and cultivated. While garden studies include barnyards, social forecourts, pathways, kitchen gardens, and work-yards, the majority of research has focused on formal ‘pleasure’ gardens. These are typically much more than an array of plants, trees, and flowers. Rather, their spatial organization depends on the intimate relationship between the house and the garden, linked by proximity, design, proportions, and access. During the Renaissance, gardens were a means to display social status and a resource for enhancing social mobility. By the mid-seventeenth century, manufactured pastoral landscapes also provided respite from stresses of urban life for many among the bourgeoisie. Nobles, on the other hand, viewed emulation of their gardens, dress, or custom as conspicuous and ostentatious consumption, a display of poor taste by men aspiring above their station.

Florescence of formal gardens reflected upper-class interests in classical history: Greek and Roman art, science, and esthetics became the ultimate expressions of refinement and taste. Expressed materially by inclusion of urns, statues, and terraces, garden spaces became overt commentaries on morality and social legitimization. For example, construction of terraces and creation of visual focal points used geometry and principles of optics to manipulate perceived space, exaggerating the grandeur and scale of gardens in relation to adjoining homes. As public vistas to be awed and admired, formal gardens created spaces of exclusion and inclusion. These contrived idyllic scenes also blurred distinctions between artifice and nature, thereby naturalizing (and legitimating) the authority of landowners – while simultaneously rendering invisible those responsible for the physical acts of landscape construction. Application of Renaissance principles and artistic styles also associated the landowners with a revered past, using innuendo to strengthen claims of property and social rights. Royalty was not immune from such declarative ostentation, as in the seventeenth-century garden landscape of Versailles. Leone’s work reveals similar principles – and goals – in action at the eighteenth-century William Paca Garden and others in Annapolis. Within colonial America, work gardens and vegetable patches also became a common feature of the urban and domestic landscape, across social classes. While relatively small in scale and hidden from view, these gardens, too, reflected particular worldviews. Just as formal gardens were the ultimate expression of polite society and social virtue, so too did kitchen gardens symbolize the importance of family life and domesticity. Kitchen gardens were also integral to the economic success of urban families. In Lexington, Virginia, for example, the lack of commercial markets made families dependent on the productivity of these small plots of land. The vegetables and goods produced sustained the family and any excess was used in trade for goods and services needed in town. The creation and success of the domestic garden was not simply economic or utilitarian in plan and effect, but was also seen as a way to attract men to their homes and make them content within the domestic realm. Indeed, Kealhofer identifies spatially nested landscapes of seventeenth- and early eighteenthcentury tidewater Virginia that collectively solidified colonial landowners’ identities, both in contrast to Native American neighbors and along rungs of a social ladder within the colonist community. While some formal gardens were focal points of social knowledge within communities, direct experience of the gardens themselves was commonly

LANDSCAPE ARCHAEOLOGY 1577

restricted. Archaeological evidence restores the shade trees and fencerows that once shielded gardens from prying eyes, limiting access to a privileged few. On slave-holding plantations of eighteenth-century America, the house yard, work gardens, and common grounds of enslaved and free laborers were pointedly excluded from the more luxuriant spaces. This allowed planters to hide slaves from sight, establishing instead an atmosphere of ‘natural’ tranquility. At the same time, however, slaves could develop a landscape of resistance effectively hidden from the eyes of the overseers and owners. Slave-held houseyard gardens thus embodied independence, control, and pride of ownership, materializing resistance within the spatial confines of the plantation. Many slaves also planted gardens removed from plantation space and control, embodying freedom within a remote landscape that excluded whites.

Landscape, Legitimization, and Conflict If landscapes create a particular way of understanding the world, then they are also important vehicles for naturalization of social and political agendas, particularly those involving social and economic disparity. As already discussed, formal gardens and plantations are prominent illustrations of such agendas, as are pilgrimage destinations. By materializing a hegemonic social memory, landscapes legitimate positions of authority and privilege. Alternative viewpoints, however, instantiate resistance and reshape the landscape. Both social control and rejection of landscape form shape the way in which the world is perceived, engaged, and constructed. First is the construction of authority. Particularly in state societies, those in power shape landscapes to validate and reinforce their own authority. Discussions of city planning in antiquity demonstrate repeatedly that those who commissioned the constructions invoked spatial principles, grounded in culturespecific worldviews, that would situate the activities of religious and political leaders in the most respected positions, those most imbued with sanctified power. Wheatley’s compelling writings established the relation between worldview and city plan, in ancient China and elsewhere, and especially since his work at mid-century, others have written of how aspects of worldview were manipulated to enhance the authority of those in charge. Steinhardt writes of city plans in a succession of Chinese capital cities as calling on worldview and the authority of the past in this regard, and especially in the time of Khubilai Khan. In his new-built capital, deliberate recreation of a revered ancient urban landscape helped legitimize the political claims of the new Mongol dynasty.

Elsewhere, Maya kings supported their own claims by invoking principles of cardinal directionality of the Maya cosmos, and the symbolic auspiciousness of each of the cardinal quarters for situating ruler’s palaces, arenas for public spectacles, and mortuary monuments. As in China, Maya cityscapes were landscapes of power. In medieval South India, Fritz shows that the idea was literally extended into the landscape beyond the political capital at Vijayanagara. There the king reinforced his authority not only within the urban precincts, but also by regular circuits to a series of hinterland stations where he could be re-identified ritually as the human avatar of divinity. This was indeed an extensive landscape of power, legitimization, and authority, if one without overt evidence of contest or resistance. Historical archaeology in the US has yielded numerous examples of landscape manipulation in the production and codification of ideology, and in some cases, the resistance such manipulation inspired. Under the antebellum plantation system in the American South, slaves were considered personal possessions and sources of surplus production, and as such were kept under direct surveillance to ensure productivity and efficiency. Beyond the gardens described earlier, the landscape of plantation space was tightly regulated, tracing a physical map of domination and subordination. Overseer and plantation houses were often centrally located in relation to the fields and slave cabins, providing optimum conditions for surveillance by those in authority. The landscape was in many ways reshaped as panopticon. Throughout the world, colonization and westernization have reinvented landscapes by physical reorganization. As with imperial Romans in Celtic lands, policies of colonization have sought to restructure indigenous landscapes into patterns suiting the colonizers, and often reflecting principles of private property and marked social hierarchy characteristic of states and empires. The landscape policies used to promote hierarchical differences, however, also create space for resistance. An example is the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, in what is now New Mexico. After initial Spanish attempts to quell the rebellion, multiple Puebloan communities expressed their resistance by relocating to defensive hilltops locations, where they established whole new settlements according to staunchly guarded principles of spatial and social order, with material orientation to established indigenous landscape referents. Indeed, fortification and defensive settlement systems emphatically mark contested landscapes, whether involving colonization or competition, and from cases relatively small in scale to those as expansive as the Great Wall of China.

1578 LANDSCAPE ARCHAEOLOGY

In a different landscape of containment, women’s prisons in nineteenth-century Australia illustrate practices of resistance, attested archaeologically but absent or obscured in written records. Casella writes of a holding facility in Tasmania in which walls, fences, and rules rigidly structured movement and activities, of both staff and inmates. Despite these barriers, however, such barred goods as liquor and tobacco reached inmates in solitary confinement in surprising quantities, and Casella suggests that some of the buttons unearthed might even have been secret currency for the prohibited transactions. Exclusionist in different and broader ways is colonization and other forms of culture contact that deny the prior and continued presence of indigenous peoples on the landscape. Much of European expansion in North America was dismissive in this way, colonists seeing as ‘vacant’ and unused the landscapes that, in fact, were already long and extensively occupied, and that their residents had imbued richly with economic worth, identity, and spiritual meaning. This kind of contest over landscape continues to this day in many parts of the postcolonial world, involving litigation and attempts at diplomacy, and at times violence. If far from unique, a particularly well-documented instance of such landscape contest is the War of the Little Big Horn, multiple perspectives on which are attested both historically and archaeologically. It is also possible for competing views of landscape to coexist, with or without overt conflict. Contrasting worldviews, or economic strategies, or political histories may coincide in filling the same landscape with multiple uses and multiple, disparate meanings. One thinks readily of modern cases, as in Israeli and Palestinian occupation of the same land, Mongols and Chinese in Inner Mongolia, or Hopi and Navajo

Language

See: Writing Systems.

(and non-Native Americans) in what is now the US Southwest. Archaeological examples are sometimes recognized, if infrequently, in mutually proximate populations with distinct architecture and other material forms of culture. See also: Cognitive Archaeology; Cultural Ecology; Explanation in Archaeology, Overview; Geoarchaeology; Human–Landscape Interactions; Postprocessual Archaeology; Processual Archaeology; Rock Art; Settlement Pattern Analysis.

Further Reading Anschuetz KF, Wilshusen RH, and Scheick CL (2001) An archaeology of landscapes: Perspectives and directions. Journal of Archaeological Research 9: 157–211. Ashmore W (2004) Social archaeologies of landscape. In: Meskell L and Preucel RW (eds.) A Companion to Social Archaeology, pp. 255–271. Oxford: Blackwell. Ashmore W and Knapp AB (eds.) (1999) Archaeologies of Landscape: Contemporary Perspectives. Oxford: Blackwell. Bender B (ed.) (1993) Landscape: Politics and Perspectives. Oxford: Berg. Bender B and Winer M (eds.) (2001) Contested Landscapes: Movement, Exile, and Place. Oxford: Berg. Crumley CL (ed.) (1994) Historical Ecology: Cultural Knowledge and Changing Landscapes. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. David B and Thomas J (eds.) (2007) Handbook of Landscape Archaeology. World Archaeological Congress (WAC) Handbook Series. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Rossignol J and Wandsnider L (eds.) (1992) Space, Time, and Archaeological Landscapes. New York: Plenum Press. Tilley C (1994) A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths, and Monuments. Oxford: Berg. Ucko PJ and Layton R (eds.) (1999) The Anthropology and Archaeology of Landscapes: Shaping Your Landscape. London: Routledge.