When Studying Landscapes . . . What Actually Does “-scape” Mean?

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Developments and Challenges in Landscape Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This paper is an appeal for a structural archaeology, analogous to what used to be called structural anthropology. Or at least an appeal for a structural archaeology of landscape. Landscapes are active, performative, changing, temporal, moving, contingent, situated . . . but they are also the result of a design, whether intentional or embedded, from above or from below. They embody a pattern. The pattern becomes regular. Regularity becomes structure. The structure points to an inner model. The inner model is realized in the landscape. Landscape archaeology is an inverse engineering of all these processes. The sociocultural processes behind the landscape can be deconstructed if, among other things, it is accepted that there is structure in the landscape shape. As far as we are talking about the 5Es+A model of the mind (the paper will also deal with this conceptualization), we can talk about the 5Es+A landscape. This paper is part of the ERC Synergy XSCAPE project on Material Minds. Enactive, engaged, embedded, embodied, extended + affects and emotions.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Developments and Challenges in Landscape Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 40239.0