Landscape Archaeology Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Landscape Archaeology - Essay Example in God, landscape painting, cartography and human enterprise, among others, to illustrate how humans have usurped nature, superimposed sophisticated concepts over it, and bent it to their own purposes. Using concepts fleshed out by such philosophers of science as Heidegger, Thomas moves on to explain human concepts of place and how ‘purpose’ is always superimposed thereon. ‘A place is always the place of something.’ (pp173) He also shows how landscapes seem to be contained within a frame: visual or conceptual, and of course monetary or pecuniary. Humans attach value to place, whether or not it is land, developed or otherwise. They also impose meanings of time, as evidence by the article itself; the value placed on findings from the past; as well as practical present-time use. In addition, Thomas shows a connection between land and the cosmos, seen as early as Neolithic times. Tombs, houses and henges not only formed part of the land form, but had some sort of attachment or reference to the skies and astral bodies; so that the passing of time and seasons were understood to affect the land and places where people lived and died, even from such an early time. We are deluding ourselves, Thomas suggests, if we try and interpret archaeological findings within the landscape using our modern mindsets. (pp 180) We would always fail if we superimposed our way of seeing things over whatever remnant of early undertakings we find. We cannot ultimately gain access to the meanings given to, and the uses of, the environment by early civilisations. He gives the examples of evidence of large gatherings in long houses, discoveries of human remains, patterns of movements between and around monuments, and other details studied through visions and understandings that are necessarily limited (or overly expanded) by modern knowledge. Thomas uses the literature, citing Gow, Frazer and Berger among many others, to extrapolate a theory of anthro-centrism: a superimposition (and