Landscape in Theory. The Unexpected Virtue of Archaeological Approach

Abstract

This contribution offers a perspective on the intimate link that is established between theory, practice and results in the field of contemporary Landscape Archeology. With particular reference to the Anglo-Saxon and Mediterranean academic tradition, the discourse aims to investigate the specific way in which the adoption of broad categories and methodological procedures is key to reading the real and ideal Landscape. This analysis highlights how the many different interpretations of the Landscape represent the reflection of the type of questions pertaining to the context of a specific cultural background. I will pay particular attention to the phenomenological approach that seems to cannibalize the debate. Ultimately, I argues for a vision of landscape as a place of asymmetrical relations between human and non-human that cannot be done justice from too strong a phenomenological or materialistic perspective. Even the neo-materialistic collapse of subject and object must be tempered by this idea of ‘asymmetry,’ in which a landscape beyond the human must be accounted for. It is in this framework that I must consider time and space not only as contextual coordinates but as articulations of one another, with time structuring to one and space giving form to the other. All of this is done ‘in/with/from the landscape’; the landscape is neither solely setting nor actor but can be thought of both as a language, a field in which all resides and of which all is composed, and the sign, the contextual manifestations of this field constantly invoking and at play with the whole, a whole that can never be disassociated from its concretization. A new heuristic tool for investigating landscapes will also be proposed.