Ideas of Landscape

Ideas of Landscape offers an engaging discussion of the theory and practice of landscape archaeology today. Drawing on his local experience, Matthew Johnson focuses on the so-called English landscape tradition and discusses why it 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, and argues that the strengths and weaknesses of landscape archaeology can be traced back to the underlying theoretical discontents of the Romantic movement. He offers an alternative agenda, which maps more closely on to the established empirical strengths of landscape study and is more relevant both to the thrust of interdisciplinary landscape studies and to 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.