Cultural Geography

easily be ‘decoded’ as there is no code that it can

be reduced to. Instead landscape is brought into

being through social praxis as an objectified

form.

Material culture is an objectification of social being,

a literal reification of that social being in the co-

presences and absences embodied in the material form.

(1992: 130)

Landscape seen this way is a practised landscape.

Practices over time become embedded in the

world and leave ‘traces of varying degrees of

solidity, opacity or permanence’ (1992: 131).

These traces are ‘material culture’. Landscape as

material culture is thus implicated in the process

of social reproduction which involves the inter-

connection between materiality, consciousness,

action and thought.

Julian Thomas develops this in his analysis of

the landscape surrounding Avebury. Thomas

applies the kinds of ideas about material culture

developed by Shanks and Tilley to landscape.

Landscape in the western tradition, he argues, is

a product of distance and position which con-

struct ‘a particular impression of the world, but

are at the same time denied and the view is taken

as universal, taking in everything’ (1993: 22).

The landscape thus becomes a passive object

constructed through a process that is denied in

the process of construction. Rather than thinking

of archaeological landscapes as a distanced

‘impression of the world’, Thomas sets out to

think through how views of landscape would

change if they were instead thought of as bound

together by the continuous flow of human con-

duct. Utilizing a phenomenological approach it

becomes possible to think of landscapes not as

external objects but as sites of dwelling. Thomas

reiterates a point made by Ted Relph that ‘To

think about the world or the entities within it as

abstract things is to render them subject to obser-

vation, to make them the object of casual curio-

sity and distance oneself from them’ (Thomas,

1993, citing Relph, 1985: 27). Rather than make

landscape into an object marked by its existence

at a distance, a phenomenological approach

focuses on the experiential nature of the world

around us. Heidegger’s concept of ‘dwelling’ is

the key here:

Dwelling involves a lack of distance between people

and things, a lack of casual curiosity, an engagement

which is neither conceptual nor articulated, and which

arises through usingthe world rather than through

scrutiny. (1993: 28)

Thomas’s agenda, in short, is to transform the

archaeological landscape from a product of dis-

tanced vision to an arena marked by its ‘not-to-

be-looked-at-ness’ (1993: 28). Avebury, then, is

understood quite differently when praxis is taken

seriously. Thomas thinks through the processes

of walking up to the ring of stones: his analysis

is less about looking and more about doing,

‘How was Avebury used?’ not ‘What did

Avebury look like?’

More recently this idea has been developed on

the interface between performance studies and

archaeology by Michael Shanks and Mike Pearson

(2000). Landscape is at the heart of their concerns.

They build on the insights of Merleau-Ponty,

focusing on the bodily experience of the land:

We begin to walk. We feel the ground beneath our feet,

the wind in our face. And as we do we leave traces. We

are involvedin the landscape ... We leave the prints of

our body, the touch of flesh on metal and stone. We

constantly wear things out, with our hands, our feet, our

backs, our lips. And we leave the traces of singular

actions: the unintentional, the random, the intimate,

unplanned touch of history’s passing: we break twigs,

move pebbles, crush ants ... all the signs that trackers

learn to read. (2000: 135)

Landscape becomes a palimpsest – a stratigraphy

of practices and texts. In a performance piece

called ‘The first five miles’ Pearson began a walk

across Mynedd Bach near the village of Trefanter,

south of Aberystwyth, wearing leather boots and

gaiters, embroidered waistcoat, frock coat, top

hat and lilac gloves and equipped with radio

microphone, battery unit, earpiece, receiver and

halogen lamp. He was accompanied by an assis-

tant who carried a radio transmitter. As they

walked they talked and the transmissions were

sent to Aberystwyth and broadcast on Radio

Ceredigion. These messages would interrupt a

documentary about an attempt to enclose the peat

bogs in the area in the 1820s by Augustus Brack-

enbury and the various attempts to stop him

made by local inhabitants in ‘The War of the

Little Englishman’. Some text was in English

and some in Welsh and these were transmitted in

stereo to the right and left respectively. As the

walk progressed, accompanied by a fractured

soundtrack, local memories intervened, telling

stories of ‘all those things which we might never

regard as authentic history but which go to

make up the deep mapof the locale’ (Shanks and

Pearson, 2000: 144). The point of the perfor-

mance was to illuminate a particular landscape –

to create a work which:

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