Ideas of Landscape: An Introduction

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

Matthew Johnson is Professor of Archaeology, University of Southampton, and author of Behind the Castle Gate (2002), Archaeological Theory: An Introduction (Blackwell, 1999), An Archaeology of Capitalism (Blackwell, 1996), and Housing Culture (1993).