Since the 1960s, ‘landscape’ has been a key topic of archaeological research all over the world. Initially drawing on environmental archaeology, and using models from the earth sciences as well as cultural ecology, landscapes have been conceptualised predominantly as the natural environments determining human behaviour or as a backdrop to human action. In the New Archaeology of the 1960s, ecology and settlement patterns were studied together with anthropology, with the aim of piecing together information on past economic and social systems (Trigger 1989, 295). Lewis Binford argued that the goal of archaeology should be to understand the range of human behaviours and the differences in culture, based on a belief that cultures were adaptive responses to our environment (Binford 1962), and archaeologists at the time were optimistic that culture and culture change were rational and could be predicted based on archaeological assemblages and settlement patterns.

In the 1980s, a new theoretical perspective, post-processualism, rejected most of the tenets of processualism. Ian Hodder, a key proponent of the new thinking, argued that cultures are not predictable and that artefacts and symbols have different meanings depending on context and culture (Hodder 1986). Within this new school of research, it is not so much the mechanisms of human adaptation to changing natural circumstances that deserve attention, as the different ways in which people in the past perceived and ordered their environments according to space, time and culture. New diachronic approaches were developed that highlight the continuous reuse of monuments and the constant reordering of landscapes within subsequent societies with different social, ritual and mnemonic systems. A similar development took place in the field of Historical Geography from the 1980s, mainly based on the ideas of the New Cultural Geography, with Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels as its main exponents (Cosgrove & Daniels, 1984). Landscape Archaeology in the 21st century is divided between, on the one hand, various interdisciplinary approaches based on intensive fieldwork, aimed at mapping and documenting landscapes and using quantitative methods for predictive modelling (Verhagen, this volume), and on the other hand, post-processualist approaches which aim to understand landscapes as reflections of past societies (e.g. David & Thomas, 2008).

INTRODUCTION

The study of landscape archaeology has historically drawn on two different groups of definitions of the term ‘landscape’ (Olwig 1993, 1996). On the one hand, the original, medieval meaning of landscape is ‘territory’, including the institutions that govern and manage it. Landscapes according to this definition can be observed subjectively, but also objectively by research based on fieldwork and studies in archives and laboratories (cf. Renes 2011). The second definition developed when artists painted rural scenes and called them ‘landscapes’. In the latter, not only the paintings, but also their subjects became known as landscapes. Dutch painters re-introduced the word ‘landscape’ into the English language, and the word therefore gained a more visual meaning than it had on the Continent. The visual definition turns landscape into a composition that is made within the mind of the individual, so using this definition it could be argued that there is no landscape without an observer (Renes 2011).

While in the latter definition the term ‘landscape’ originates from the Dutch ‘landschap’ (Schama 1995; David & Thomas 2008), it is probably more accurate to state that the study of ‘territorial’ landscapes originated as the study of historical geography and physical geography. This can be traced back to the classical authors, with Strabo noting that ‘geography (…) regards knowledge both of the heavens and of things on land and sea, animals, plants, fruits, and everything else to be seen in various regions’ (Strabo 1.1.1.). Physical geography is by nature an interdisciplinary field (geology, botany, soil science etc.) and in the late 18th and early 19th centuries it continued to focus on the study of the physical environment, for example in the work of the German researcher Alexander Von Humboldt. During the 19th century, most geographers saw human activities in the landscape as strongly defined by the physical landscape (such as in ‘Anthropogeographie’ in Germany: Ratzel 1882).

This approach changed in the early 20th century, when the human element was introduced. During the early 20th century in France, a new generation of geographers defined a growing role for human societies (Vidal de la Blache 1922). Carl Sauer, an American geographer, argued in 1925 that geography cannot be simply the study of the natural environment, because people have effected major changes on the landscape.