The Temporality of the Landscape revisited

Journal article

This is an essay about the connections between the passage of time and the condition of archaeological knowledge. It revisits Tim Ingold’s 1993 paper The Temporality of the Landscape, considering its relationship with the phenomenological and interpretive archaeologies of the 1990s and what we learn from it today. Engaged not so much in an ‘ontological turn’ as in a kind of archival return, the essay compares Ingold’s discussion of Breugel’s painting The Harvesters (1565) with an archaeological photograph from 1993. A discussion of the after-effects of performance follows, and four theses about temporality, landscape, modernity and revisiting are put forward: i) The passage of time transforms archaeological knowledge; ii) Archaeological knowledge transforms the passage of time; iii) An archaeological landscape is an object that is known through remapping; iv) Archaeological knowledge is what we leave behind. The essay concludes that that archaeology is not the study of the temporality of the landscape, as Ingold had argued, but the study of the temporality of the landscape revisited

Authors: Hicks, D

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Routledge
• Journal: Norwegian Archaeological Review
• Volume: 49
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 5-22
• Publication date: 2016-06-16
• DOI: 10.1080/00293652.2016.1151458
• EISSN: 1502-7678
• ISSN: 0029-3652
• Keywords: revisitation; taskscape; ontological turn; landscape; modernity; temporality; dwelling