Ideas of Landscape

Ideas of Landscapeoffers an engaging discussion on the theory and practice of landscape archaeology today. Drawing on his local experience of landscape, author Matthew Johnson focuses on the so-called English landscape tradition and discusses why this tradition is so distinctive: it stands at some distance from North American and other approaches in which "theory" plays a more prominent role. Johnson identifies the origins of this tradition in English Romanticism, through the influence of the "father of landscape history," W. G. Hoskins, among others. The strengths and weaknesses of landscape archaeology can be traced back to the underlying theoretical discontents of Romanticism. Johnson offers an alternative agenda for landscape archaeology which maps more closely onto the established empirical strengths of landscape study and is more relevant both to the thrust of interdisciplinary landscape studies and contemporary social concerns. Passionately and accessibly written, this engaging book takes up a crucial strand in archaeological thinking and examines it critically for the first time.

Matthew Johnson is Professor of Archaeology, University of Southampton, and author of Behind the Castle Gate (2002), Archaeological Theory: An Introduction (Blackwell, 1999), An Archaeology of Capitalism (Blackwell, 1996), and Housing Culture (1993).