Landscape Archaeology

Landscape archaeology is the study of how people interacted with their surroundings, as evidenced by the archaeological record. This may appear to be an all-encompassing remit, but not all archaeology is “landscape archaeology.” Rather, landscape archaeology involves those dimensions of archaeology that relate to place and may imbue many different archaeology projects. The notion of “landscape archaeology” became popular among archaeologists in the 1980s and has remained so ever since. This popularity came about as a result of a number of converging factors. In the 1960s and 1970s, the New Archaeology that revolutionized practice in much Anglophone archaeology brought with it a focus on environments as habitats and resource zones. The archaeology of cultural practices often became synonymous with, and reduced to, investigations of habitat and economy as adaptive practices. Yet cultures, and life—all the things that people do that leave archaeological traces—involve more than resources for survival. The notion of “landscape,” originating from the tradition of 16th–17th-century Dutch art, brought with it the idea that people, values, and representations are more than the environment as a source of material sustenance. “Social landscapes” and “social archaeology” became catchphrases that signaled this change in approach. A second factor that affected this changing attitude in the 1980s was the explosion of cultural heritage management projects that was taking place in light of industrial developments and the increasingly legislated government protection of archaeological sites. This necessitated a broader approach to archaeological landscapes beyond spatially isolated dots on maps, one that increasingly took into account the extensive terrains that contained the threatened sites. Third, the 1980s also saw an increased general awareness of the calls of First Nations peoples whose landscapes were being targeted for research as well as for destruction through developments. The individual sites that archaeologists often focused on were, and are, interconnected nodes in First Nations landscapes. In a supposedly postcolonial world—or at least one striving beyond colonialism—ethical behavior required a more considerate approach to “archaeological” (read “living First Nations”) landscapes. Landscape archaeology thus quickly emerged as a social archaeology that approached places as connected across space and through time, reaching into the present. Landscape archaeology continues to contribute to contemporary issues through engagement with questions of human adaptation to changing climates and sustainable development. Landscape archaeology takes place at nested spatial scales and considers the dimensions of life’s activities and perspectives across space. Such a broad remit is best approached through transdisciplinary research across multiple spatial scales. In this context, “landscape” has also served as a privileged shorthand for seascapes, riverscapes, skyscapes, and spiritscapes as well as the land. Two likely, connected reasons for this are that most people largely reside on the land, and archaeologists mainly look at things from fixed positions on the land, even if those things relate to the sky, waterways, and cosmologies. But in recent years, such a terrestrial perspective has been questioned by many researchers whose gaze has shifted toward the sea, sky, and other scapes.