Landscape As Theme

A review of Christopher Tilley's important recent book, "A Phenomenology of Landscape - Places, Paths and Monuments" by John Billingsley from Northern Earth 62

Archaeology has various possible avenues in which it can make progress. A subject unsure of its scientific status may work at the minutiae of excavated material, analysing soil and classifying potsherds, while one unsure of its relevance to the humanities may try, from the available material, to explain broad sweeps of historical process in what are the most likely probabilities under contemporary value systems. It is such approaches that have given archaeology a rather mixed reception over recent decades. The arrival of books like this serve to indicate that archaeology, or at least some archaeologists, is coalescing its broad experience of research into a newly confident appraisal not of ancient sites solely, but the whole ancient world in its broadest sense.

In so doing, archaeologists like Tilley have been listening to the geographers, and about time too. Philip Heselton way back in the early issues of Northern Earth Mysteries was urging us to do just the same, and it is an area we ignore to our loss. Geography itself has been going through a kind of revolution, which has now passed on to archaeology, and that revolution derives from landscape and perception. The emphasis is not now simply on how the ancients scraped together a lifestyle, what diseases they caught and what economic activities they pursued, it is as much about how they saw the world. Their world was the surrounding topography, and it directly informed their culture; this is the area that Tilley is addressing in this book, and it can instantly be seen how closely it ties in with the kind of interests that Northern Earth' and other earth mysteries magazines have been expressing, in our articles ol1 the need to see ancient sites as the sum of their surroundings and more specific symbolic landscapes as the saddle. Indeed, I would argue that this is the very heart of the matter towards which earth mysteries has been steadily progressing, and represents a very significant demonstration of how convergent our subject matter and that of the new generation of archaeologists has become. As such, the importance of this book merits a much fuller review than usual.

The investigation of patterns of perception would be nowhere without the ancient monuments left to us, and it is the monuments - and the paths between them - that represent a people's coming to terms with the world around them. A place is recognised - it is marked by a monument of some kind - it is joined to other monuments and settlements by a route of some kind; but of course this is not all there is to it. We cannot expect that people at a certain site restricted their vision to that site, nor that those travelling between places failed to see and make a culturally sensitive note of the changing landscape. What is now emerging is the realisation that the choice of a site for a particular habitual or ritual purpose and the act of journeying create a cultural dynamic that expresses itself in narrative, an oral tradition that unifies the people, the culture and the land, rather in the manner that native Australians constructed. It is just this charged landscape that Tilley sets out to explore and to fill a gap "between the site plan and the distribution map".

For most people, the first part, which deals with theoretical perspectives and necessarily encounters the difficulties of terminology with the convolutions of philosophy, will present a challenge, and it isn't easy going. Yet to see the beautiful view from the mountain you have to climb the thing, and the analogy is apt in this instance. Despite the slow progress through what for most of us is unfamiliar terrain, it is full of inspiring and gradually farther-reaching views, dealing with the effects of perception on a landscape through devices such as naming and the construction of social relationships based on the cultural interpretation of the land. The first involves the way perception and movement are linked, and it seems to me holds the seeds of the idea of the land itself as cultural exemplar, in contrast to the later social constructions of landscape, when the land receives cultural valency, is itself encultured; there is also within this another dynamic created in perception itself, and the ultimate expression of it, between the autonomous individual and the socially organised group. These issues raise so many possibilities for further discussion that at times I had to rest from reading not to give my brain a rest (though that happened too), but to deal with an overwhelming sense of a network of meanings with innumerable ramifications for our (ourselves and our ancestors) understanding of landscapes. Reaching the end of this section, the analogy of the mountain remains apt; I felt breathless, with my adrenaline racing and with my horizons definitely expanded! And from here on, the going got easier and no less interesting.

The theoretical preamble is put to work in a consideration of prehistoric landscapes, namely Mesolithic and Neolithic activity in South-west Wales, chambered tombs in the Black Moul1tains and the sacred landscape around the Dorset Cursus. We don't get any evidence of alignments in these analyses until we get to Dorset, but there is evidence that the builders of the various monuments deliberately planned and used their sites, perhaps as meeting-points on paths of movement in the Mesolithic and earlier Neolithic or as permanent ritual centres bespeaking a growth of hierarchical social organisation in the later Stone Age. Tilley suggests that in this way local societies were making explicit their relationship with the landscape, and that as cultural development proceeded an interaction with that landscape was developed that was transformative in function.

A variety of criteria employed in siting and building monuments puts paid to any 'grand unifying theory' behind ancient monuments, which many archaeologists, earth mysterians, New Agers and neo-pagans seem to secretly cherish. For example, the axis of a long barrow was significant in the Black Mountains- some were orientated parallel with the neighbouring major river, while others seem to have been directed at prominent spurs - while a number of different considerations were at work in the siting of tumuli in Dorset. Although to some this diversity may, by providing contrary data, devalue the evidence for an interpretation, it is a most important point. From our comfortable distance and era terminologies, we can tend to lump together as, say, 'neolithic' various monuments that were actually centuries apart. In such a gap in our era, we would expect cultural meaning to change; and in any case different monuments were probably intended to express different things. The implication is that even if this site appears to be related to lunar movements, or to a saddle in the surrounding landscape, it does not necessarily follow that every other similar site needs the same relationship for that relationship to be valid; decisions like orientation were localised decisions. Yet patterns will, of course, emerge, such as that which appears to indicate that the conical Carn Ingli was a sacred mountain to which surrounding cairns paid homage. I was also glad to note that Tilley extends the term 'megalith' to include apparently significant natural rock outcrops, an unfamiliar usage which I - a little nervously! - employed in an article for The Ley Hunter to describe some sites in Japan. Thus, at the same time is indicated both the cultural association and the distinction between such "non-cultural or non-domesticated megaliths'' and the very clearly acculturated megaliths of the chambered tombs, stone circles and so on.

The relationship to a specific place, for instance by the duplication of local topography in a monument or by the careful choice of a particular view when emerging from, say, a chambered tomb, places these sites in a liminal context between human society and their land. Tilley argues that the ritual landscape of Cranborne Chase in Dorset takes this understanding even further; barrows in the centre of the Chase relate to other sites in the centre, while barrows on the edge of the area appear to relate to topographical features, perhaps to tie in the central area with the world beyond. The primary relationship, however, is expressed in the Cursus. Tilley makes use of the internal topology of the Cursus - the way it crosses a stream, the fact that its baulks were originally so high as to hide the surrounding scenery from view except at a few arguably selected places, or the way a mound is positioned in the middle of the route between the banks, to make a case that it is not just a processional monument but a narrative one, and one can sense the excitement he felt both when he walked its length and when he wrote of the insights he gained. At times, it is true, this leads him into some excesses of enthusiasm, which disturb the coherent creation of reason from insight that marks the rest of the book, but these are relatively minor.

This view of our monuments is of far-reaching significance - instead of creating new myths around the ancient sites, as earlier generations of archaeologists and earth mysterians have tended to do, Tilley is attempting to remarry the myth and the land, using the inspiration of the land itself. This is not so far from what the cutting edge of earth mysteries is doing, for instance by Gerry Bracken at Croagh Patrick, Paul Devereux at Avebury and Michael Dames in various places, and it is an approach we can do more with.~

Berg Publishers, 1994. pbk. 221pp., fully ill.

John Billingsley

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