Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Debating landscape archaeology

Debating landscape archaeology landscapes (2008), 1, pp. 74 –76 © Andrew Fleming Debating landscape archaeology Andrew Fleming In the first part of Landscapes volume 8, I published a piece entitled ‘Don’t bin your boots!’ – a response to Matthew Johnson’s recent book, Ideas of Landscape. I read the book as a plea for fresh thinking – but I also confronted its fashionable disparagement of ‘traditional’ landscape archaeology. In re-cycling or extending 1990s rhetoric on this subject, post-modern commentators are implicitly assuming that, back in those days, some kind of argument was won. I don’t believe it was; nor, I suggest, is the debate concluded by Johnson’s spirited response (2007) to my defence of the discipline. In choosing a light-hearted title for my piece, I certainly didn’t intend to imply that Johnson wants us to abandon fieldwork (or ‘empirical method’) – nor did I say that. But was I entirely mistaken in reading his message as ‘traditional fieldwork hasn’t got us very far’? What is Johnson saying, if not ‘the trouble with conventional landscape archaeology is its empiricism, legitimated by those iconic, intransigent “muddy boots”’? In putting ‘boots’ into my title, I was simply echoing Johnson’s perceptive reading of the significance of those http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Landscapes Taylor & Francis

Debating landscape archaeology

Fleming, Andrew
Landscapes , Volume 9 (1): 3 – Jan 1, 2008
Download PDF
3 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/taylor-francis/debating-landscape-archaeology-cpws30XQzw

References (14)

Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Copyright
© 2008 Maney Publishing
ISSN
2040-8153
eISSN
1466-2035
DOI
10.1179/lan.2008.9.1.74
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

landscapes (2008), 1, pp. 74 –76 © Andrew Fleming Debating landscape archaeology Andrew Fleming In the first part of Landscapes volume 8, I published a piece entitled ‘Don’t bin your boots!’ – a response to Matthew Johnson’s recent book, Ideas of Landscape. I read the book as a plea for fresh thinking – but I also confronted its fashionable disparagement of ‘traditional’ landscape archaeology. In re-cycling or extending 1990s rhetoric on this subject, post-modern commentators are implicitly assuming that, back in those days, some kind of argument was won. I don’t believe it was; nor, I suggest, is the debate concluded by Johnson’s spirited response (2007) to my defence of the discipline. In choosing a light-hearted title for my piece, I certainly didn’t intend to imply that Johnson wants us to abandon fieldwork (or ‘empirical method’) – nor did I say that. But was I entirely mistaken in reading his message as ‘traditional fieldwork hasn’t got us very far’? What is Johnson saying, if not ‘the trouble with conventional landscape archaeology is its empiricism, legitimated by those iconic, intransigent “muddy boots”’? In putting ‘boots’ into my title, I was simply echoing Johnson’s perceptive reading of the significance of those

Journal

Landscapes – Taylor & Francis

Published: Jan 1, 2008

There are no references for this article.