Landscape Archaeology

People sometimes look at me funnily when I tell them that my archaeological specialty is landscape. Landscape is everywhere, but we rarely see it as anything but the background on which life takes place; or, in the archaeological sense, on which life took place.

I would like to spend some time here to introduce landscape as an active participant in the lives of people in the past. Specifically, my research involves landscape in prehistory, and even more specifically, in the Epipalaeolithic and Neolithic of the Near East. I’m interested in island colonisation and the often misunderstood sub-discipline of island archaeology; hunter-gatherer archaeology and anthropology; and archaeological theory pertaining in particular to the learning of landscape as a social activity through the ages.

~ by theraaa on December 4, 2007.