Tilley, C., 1994, A Phenomenology of Landscape, Berg, Oxford
- Author : Tilley, C.
- Year : 1994
- Title English : A Phenomenology of Landscape
- Publisher : Berg
- Publisher's Location : Oxford
- ISBN : 1-85973-076-0
- Pages : 221
- Edition : Paperback
- Comments : Introduction p.1. ...The key question addressed is deceptively simple: why were particular locations chosen for habitation and the erection of monuments as opposed to others? It is of central importance for the interpretive reconstruction of prehistoric lifeworlds. The standard approach to such a question within the archaeological literature has concentrated on factors of the environment such as relief, climate, soils, water supply and the seasonal availability of exploitable resources. These have been related to factors such as demographic patterns, technologies, transhumance systems, territoriality, and control over exchange networks and forms of social organisation facilitating environmental exploitation as a means of adaption. ... The location of sites thus becomes explained as a result of a mix of ‘rational’ decision making processes involving some or all of these factors. The statistical correlations and functional interdependencies arrived at are the function of contemporary myth-making in which an exclusively modernist Western logic has simply become superimposed on the past. In the process how people may have perceived the landscape in which they lived is either regarded as irrevocably lost, or irrelevant, or both. Cultural meanings are only unimportant for those who choose to make them so. Here I wish to stress two features in particular – the symbolics of landscape perception and the role of social memory in choice of site location. Ch.1, Space, place, landscape and perception p. 34 Conclusion "A landscape is a series of named locales, a set of relational places linked by paths, movements and narratives. It is a ‘natural’ topography perspectivally linked to the existential Being of the body in societal space. It is a cultural code for living, an anonymous ‘text’ to be read and interpreted, a writing pad for inscription, a scape of and for human praxis, a mode of dwelling and a mode of experiencing. It is invested with powers, capable of being organised and choreographed in relation to sectional interests, and is always sedimented with human significances. It is story and telling, temporality and remembrance. Landscape is a signifying system through which the social is reproduced, transformed, explored and structured – process organised. Landscape above all represents a means of conceptual ordering that stresses relations. The concept emphasises as conventional means of doing so, the stress is on similarity to control the undermining nature of difference, of multivocal code, found in the concepts of place or locale. A concept of place privileges difference and singularity; a concept of landscape is more holistic, acting as to encompass rather and exclude. It is to a discussion of the various ways in which landscape is organised that the next chapter turns."