Ideas of Landscape [Paperback]

Ideas of Landscape discusses the current theory and practice of landscape archaeology and offers an alternative agenda for landscape archaeology that maps more closely onto the established empirical strengths of landscape study and has more contemporary relevance.

• The first historical assessment of a critical period in archaeology
• Takes as its focus the so-called English landscape tradition -- the ideological underpinnings of which come from English Romanticism, via the influence of the father of landscape history: W. G. Hoskins
• Argues that the strengths and weaknesses of landscape archaeology can be traced back to the underlying theoretical discontents of Romanticism
• Offers an alternative agenda for landscape archaeology that maps more closely onto the established empirical strengths of landscape study and has more contemporary relevance

List of Figures viii

Acknowledgements x

The Argument xii

Preface: Thinking About Swaledale xiii

1. Introduction 1

2. Lonely as a Cloud 18

3. A Good Pair of Boots 34

4. The Loss of Innocence 70

5. Landscape Archaeology Today 119

6. The Politics of Landscape 162

7. Conclusion 193

Glossary 203

References 206

Index 233

I read Matthew Johnson's Ideas of Landscape (Blackwell) with intense interest. It discusses the theory and practice of landscape archaeology and the Romantic English landscape tradition, boldly taking on received opinion about figures such as Wordsworth and WG Hoskins, and making us think hard about what we can know about the past, why we want to know it, and how we may be misledlSÑ