Abstract and Keywords
Landscape and environment have long been regarded as separate objects of enquiry around which distinct subdisciplines have coalesced. In such formulations environment has been treated as synonymous with the natural world, whereas landscape has been treated as a more complex entity arising from people’s engagement with that world. Landscape has, accordingly, found itself at the heart of considerable theoretical debate that has stressed its inherent slipperiness and multi-faceted character. Environment, in comparison, has escaped such scrutiny, with the idea that it corresponds to a natural substrate that can profitably be dissolved into distinct categories such as flora, fauna, and soils, pervasive and ubiquitous. Through a focus upon environmental archaeology and landscape archaeology as distinct practices, this chapter argues that neither environment nor landscape can exist separate from the social activities that define them, and it is to these activities and relationships that archaeologists should be turning their attention.
Keywords: ecology, culture, nature, landscape, dwelling, inhabitation, environment, practice
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