By Bradley M. Sekedat, Brown University

This edited volume is about a lot of things; so many things, in fact, that creating a summary of its component parts proves somewhat difficult for a brief review. Based on the introductory chapter, however, this difficulty seems intentional or, at the very least, acknowledged by the editors, who develop the structure of the book around the recognition that the methodologies employed in ‘landscape archaeology’ are both diverse and situated. The result is a book with case studies from all over the world: Northern Ireland, the East African coast, Manhattan, Botswana, Central Europe, Atlantic Africa, Greece, Annapolis and the Caribbean. These case studies emphasize culturally specific perspectives and cover a range of important issues from power, perspective, imagined landscapes and time to political economy, vision, creation, interpretation, heritage, utility and more. This book succeeds in pulling together a diverse array of archaeological work pertaining to landscape in a single, manageable volume. The global scope of the book sets it apart from the majority of studies in landscape archaeology, which tend to be region specific. While notable exceptions include Bender (1993) and Ashmore and Knapp (1999), more typical of recent scholarship is a region-specific emphasis, such as the five POPULUS volumes on landscape archaeology in the Mediterranean, the publication of the Side-By-Side conference on the comparability of Mediterranean survey projects (Alcock and Cherry 2004), the Broadening Horizons (Ooghe and Verhoeven 2007) volume on multidisciplinary landscape practices in the Mediterranean and the Near East, or the Damaged Landscapes symposium at the 2008 meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America. Hicks et al., then, usefully force the reader to engage with the comparability of landscape studies on a global scale appropriate for a World Archaeology Congress (WAC) volume. On the other hand, the book suffers from a lack of specificity, struggling at times to justify its breadth. It almost completely misses an opportunity to push the discussion of ‘landscape’ and ‘landscape archaeology’ into new territory.

While opportunities were missed, individual chapters do offer interesting discussions that carry significance across borders. Indeed, many of the authors can be commended for critical reviews of landscape archaeology in their region of focus. Most of the authors articulate well the complexity of their defined region. In Chapter 2, McAtackney explores the simultaneous construction of competing dialogues surrounding the Long Kesh/Maize Prison in Ireland. These dialogues pertain most specifically to the formation of political and social identities that engage with visual and physical access to the prison. Croucher, in her contribution (chapter 3), explores how individuals with different personal and group identities would have experienced plantations in disparate ways: a plantation owner and a worker literally experience the ‘landscape’ differently. Next, Yamin and Schuldenrein advocate the joining of historical documents and archaeology into an investigation of how the meaning of a ‘landscape’ changes in conjunction with physical changes to that ‘landscape’. In this endeavor, they present documentation about the changing size and shape of the Collect Pond in lower Manhattan, which the authors link to public perception of contested areas such as the African Burial Ground. In chapter 5, Keitumetse, Matlapeng and Monamo express how communities in the present day form competing notions of how to deal with heritage sites in Botswana, raising questions of how to negotiate the significance and preservation of rock art sites while supporting local communities. Turner and Fairclough (chapter 6) raise the anti-positivist point that perception of the past in the present shapes how the landscapes of past peoples are interpreted and understood (and, they suggest, shapes the landscape itself). In the subsequent chapter, Kuna and Dreslerová attempt to include more fluid notions of place and meaning through a discussion of community areas. These areas, the authors suggest, facilitate a shared meaning of landscape without limiting that meaning to its functional attributes. Kelly and Norman, in chapter 8, focus on a continuous process of re-imagination of the built environment in establishing power relations.
In contrast to the preceding chapters, Witmore’s chapter 9 articulates an alternative view on both the social and on time in archaeological contexts, while still arguing for complexity. He emphasizes interactions and material relationships in Greece over perception and preexisting social structures, such that he does not privilege the social construction of landscape and meaning. Conversely, Matthews and Palus argue in chapter 10 that the landed elite in Annapolis purposefully manipulated sight lines in a period of rapid urban redefinition. Finally, Hauser and Hicks (chapter 11) explore discrepant experiences of landscape while trying to ground such experiences in the materiality of the land.
All of these studies, though from many and varied locations in the world, argue against simplicity on the grounds that ‘landscapes’ are not endowed with universally understood meanings, but are products of particular social and temporal constructions (with the exception of Witmore, who does not see landscapes as products of other structures). In other words, these chapters attribute the meaning of different landscapes to the prevailing and competing social conditions of different time periods, while recognizing that no time period is characterized by a single, uniform, social group. This is presented in several ways, ranging from those that emphasize perception and historically situated social groups to an approach that regards landscapes as integrating a complex array of different pasts, influencing as much as they are influenced (i.e. Witmore).
Yet, while the individual chapters are independently engaging, the compilation of chapters seems to lack a cohesiveness that is consistent with the message presented in the introductory chapter. Two prevailing themes emerge from the introduction: diversity and situatedness. Following scholars such as Barbara Bender, diversity is seen in the difficulty of formulating a coherent definition of landscapes. This is, in fact, the justification for a book about diverse methodologies in diverse places (the mandate of a WAC volume). Furthermore, they argue that the diversity of case studies shows that different places and temporalities require “stand points,” or highly specific sets of situated practices that recognize the social, historical and political currents of a given time. This is certainly a popular sentiment in archaeology today, but it is one that does not do justice to the entirety of practices around landscape that currently exist (or even what is included in the book). This ranges from non-traditional forms of engagement with ‘landscapes’ to studies that conceive of stand points in different ways than outlined by the editors. Indeed, the incorporation of new media (certainly sound is involved in how landscapes are perceived as acoustic/auditory archaeology suggests (e.g. Mills 2005)), art, and material studies would help to bolster the claim that landscape studies truly are diverse in scope and methodology.
Ultimately the introduction argues for the book’s layout in an unsatisfying way: landscape defies definition; because it cannot be defined singularly, it is appropriately regarded as diverse; this diversity is attributed to different social perspectives; the social perspective, then, becomes the “stand point”; stand points create landscape(s). The problem here is that the argument assumes from the onset that the ‘social’ drives meaning, subjecting the physical environment to the whim of human imagination rather than inserting it as a key component in the determination of what landscapes are. Landscapes are not diverse if they are only social; what are diverse are the social perspectives (on the problem with the ‘social’ see Latour (2005); in archaeology see Webmoor and Witmore (2008)). Landscapes are not, for instance, severed from past actions in favor of entirely new historically situated social groups. Instead, landscapes bring past actions together in interactions with people and other things, with the situatedness of a group being the outcome rather than the determinant of meaning formation.
Finally, the emphasis on methodology and location-specific practices has resulted in a book about a topic that never fully gets defined. While the introduction aptly suggests that ‘landscape’ defies a unitary explanation, the subsequent chapters sometimes appear to take for granted what landscapes are. Landscape eludes case-specific definitions because landscapes are what people make of them – a vague definition that borders too much on the idea that landscapes are anything and everything (with some notable exceptions). An exploration of how different scholars have approached the ‘notion’ of landscape in more current ways would have been a useful exercise and would have bound a volume of this nature together more concretely. Landscape is clearly a compelling topic that offers each of the authors in this book a strong basis for understanding their particular regions. Still, opening up landscape archaeology to complexity should entail some engagement with what those complexities are for the very notion of a landscape. Failing that, this compilation reads as a showcase for archaeologies of landscape in different locations without due consideration for what this means to the discipline as a whole.
By way of conclusion, it is worth reiterating that the volume contains many good chapters that engage with interesting cases. The book’s primary shortcoming is with the organization of these chapters, as it leaves the reader without a clear sense of what strain actually holds the volume together.
References
Alcock, S. E. and Cherry, J. F. (eds.) 2004. Side-By-Side Survey: Comparative Regional Studies in the Mediterranean World. Oxford: Oxbow.
Ashmore, W. and Knapp, A. B. (eds.) 1999. Archaeologies of Landscape: Contemporary Perspectives. Malden MA; Oxford: Blackwell.
Bender, B. (ed.) 1993. Landscape: Politics and Perspectives. Providence: Berg.
Latour, B. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.
Mills, S. 2005. Sensing the place: sounds and landscape archaeology. In D. Bailey, A. Whittle and V. Cummings (eds.), Unsettling the Neolithic, 79-89. Oxford: Oxbow.
Ooghe, B. and Verhoeven, G. (eds.) 2007. Broadening Horizons: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Landscape Study. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press.
Webmoor, T. and Witmore, C. 2008. Things are us! A commentary on human/things relations under the banner of a ‘social’ archaeology. Norwegian Archaeological Review 41(1): 53-70.