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Academic Landscape: Theory in Archaeology and Geography

Landscape has to be contextualised. The way in which people—anywhere, everywhere—understand and engage with their worlds will depend upon the specific time and place and historical conditions. It will depend on their gender, age, class, caste, and on their social and economic situation. . . . They will operate on very different temporal scales, engaging with the past and with the future in many different ways.¹

—Barbara Bender (1995)

I t is generally accepted that the term ‘landscape’ originated in sixteenth-century Germanic and Romance languages as a word to describe paintings of natural scenery—landskip. The painters of romanticized landscapes of the Renaissance Period were inspired by the pastoral genre of the Classical poets, including Homer, Virgil, and Ovid, and influenced by the increasing availability of the printed Bible and exposure to the strange and foreign landscapes described in it.² The notion of the wild, untamed, and beautiful landscape became a key theme of the Romantic poets of the nineteenth century, with William Wordsworth being the most influential proponent. This was in part a reaction to the rapid industrialization of Britain, and also stimulated by a growing interest in Classical authors. In England it coincided with the wars with France, the decline of the Ottoman Empire, the beginning of the industrial revolution, and the rise of the British Empire. All these factors contributed to advances in science and travel. As a result of discomfort with the perceived destruction of their ideal landscapes, the Romantic poets looked backward in time and ‘temporalized’ the landscape. They romanticized the antiquity of the land and any monuments within it, as if they wanted to freeze the landscape in a past time.³

In the mid-twentieth century a series of publications discussing the English landscape and the relationships between humans and land had a great influence on geographers, historians, and archaeologists. Renowned British archaeologists such as Sir Cyril Fox (author of Personality of Britain (1932)), Jacquetta Hawkes (author of A Land (1951)), and English landscape historian William George Hoskins (author of The Making of the English Landscape (1955)), became fascinated with the ways in which different landscapes had been created by people and how those landscapes themselves affected the lives of the people living in them. Hoskins was a major advocate of having an active engagement with the landscape in order to fully appreciate the fact that landscape was a palimpsest of history shaped by mankind (terminology he borrowed from Ordnance Survey archaeologist and early exponent of the use of aerial photography in archaeology O.G.S. Crawford). Hoskins is (wrongly or rightly) seen to be the ‘father’ of landscape history, and the popularity of his television series (Horizon: The Making of the English Landscape (1972) and Landscapes of England: An Exploration (1978)) and accompanying books (English Landscapes (1973) and One Man’s England (1978)) had a major impact on how geographers, historians, and archaeologists thought about the landscape. Hoskins undoubtedly romanticized the landscape. He was deeply disturbed by the wave of post-war industrialization and had a great love of the Romantic poets, particularly Wordsworth. As a result he looked into the landscape seeking a time in which his notion of the ideal English landscape existed—populated by the humble rural working-class, devoid of urban and industrial expansions.⁴

In the United States, influential geographer Carl Ortwin Sauer (professor of geography at the University of California, 1923–57) also turned to the past to find what he perceived to be the purity of the wilderness. He had been deeply affected by the industrialization of his ‘home’ landscape (in California) and, like Hoskins, believed that the landscape was the result of the interventions of men. For him landforms were both the object of cultural expression and the medium through which culture was expressed. Sauer’s students at the Berkeley School of Cultural Geography had a major influence on thinking about landscapes for most of the second half of the twentieth century. For both Sauer and Hoskins the landscape was objective, external, and material. It could be seen and assessed. They advocated the idea that observations of landscapes, and representations of them in maps and photographs, were the (only) empirical facts that were required in order to understand the history of the human–landscape relationship.⁵

From the 1960s onward, stimulated by the many new exciting computing technologies becoming available, there was a growing focus on scientific methodologies in geography and archaeology. Classification, quantification, and mathematical spatial analyses became increasingly popular. This highly abstracted way of thinking did not last long, however, and during the 1980s archaeological scholars began to focus on self-reflection, placing emphasis on elucidating the influences responsible for shaping the way we think. They now posed questions such as: What has affected our perception? How is our perception formed? This school of thought was led by British archaeologist Ian Hodder⁶ (former professor of archaeology at Cambridge University, currently professor of anthropology at Stanford University, California) and was termed ‘post-processual.’ Several of Hodder’s students at Cambridge University (1977–99) were equally influential and contributed a great deal to debates on method and theory in archaeology. Examples include Canadian archaeologist–anthropologist Bruce Trigger,⁷ who examines how contemporary society and politics affect archaeological interpretations, and British classical archaeologist Michael Shanks, co-author of several key archaeological theory works with another of Hodder’s students, Christopher Tilley.⁸ Tilley was a major advocate of phenomenology in archaeological interpretation of landscapes, focusing on intuitive thinking rather than reliance on scientific ‘people-less’ interpretations.

This trend in archaeological thinking draws heavily on theories and approaches borrowed from geography, most particularly the newly emerging field of cultural geography. The development of cultural geography was driven by Barbara Bender (professor emeritus of heritage anthropology at University College London),⁹ Denis Cosgrove (professor of geography at University of California Los Angeles), and Stephen Daniels (professor emeritus of cultural geography, University of Nottingham).¹⁰ They advocate the idea that landscape is a way of seeing, a Western and elite construction deriving from Renaissance ideas, and that the word ‘landscape’ represents a way of thinking and, as such, is an expression of cultural, political, and economic power.¹¹ Cosgrove was interested not only in examining the material remains in order to gain an understanding of how humans shaped the landscape, but also in investigating how that landscape shaped the people who lived in it, and then how they reacted to it. He seeks to move away from conclusions based on merely viewing the landscape, and toward conclusions based on living within it—how it affected people, not what they saw.¹²

One of the few examples of an overtly theoretical approach to landscape in Egyptology is the work of leading British Egyptologist/archaeologist David Jeffreys (director of the Memphis Survey Project and until recently based at the Institute of Archaeology at University College London), who looks at the cognitive aspects of the geographical relationships between two major cult sites—Memphis and Heliopolis.¹³ Janet Richards (director of excavations in Old Kingdom cemeteries at Abydos and curator of Egyptian collections in the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, University of Michigan Ann Arbor) approaches the study of Egyptian temples as manifestations of sacred landscapes with a very explicitly theoretical approach.¹⁴ Jeffreys and Richards look at the ways in which monuments can be seen to reflect ancient Egyptian ideas about sacred landscapes. Richards shows that the temples are essentially ‘models’ of the sacred aspects of the Egyptian landscape, with various elements of the temple representing different parts of the landscape, for example the floodplain or the desert. Jeffreys takes a broader perspective, looking at the placement of monuments in the landscape and the importance of views across landscapes between major sacred sites.

The research that gave rise to this book was not conducted in chronological order, in fact almost the exact reverse, and that approach undoubtedly shaped my way of thinking about the Fayum landscape. The first set of materials I examined was European travel writing and early Egyptological works, in the hope that they would yield snippets of information about fragments of monuments found by those travelers in the Fayum, which had subsequently been forgotten. I was hoping to make new ‘discoveries.’ Reading these materials revealed that Classical Greek and Latin historical and geographical writing played a dominant role in the formation of European ideas about the Fayum, especially Herodotus. People were almost obsessed with Herodotus and his description of the Fayum. Those Classical works essentially shaped early, idealized images of landscape, and so, in order to understand the roots of the sixteenth- to twenty-first-century ideas, Herodotus’s Histories and later works by authors such as Pliny and Strabo needed to be examined.

In an attempt to balance a Eurocentric approach and the potential for revealing ‘other’ (non-European) notions of landscape, as well as investigating some of the influences on early orientalist Egyptological scholars such as Edward William Lane, I studied medieval Islamic geographical and historical works. My awareness of the value of medieval Islamic writing to the study of the history of Egyptology was without doubt a result of classes I attended with Okasha El Daly at University College London while he was in the middle of research for The Missing Millennium: Ancient Egypt in Medieval Arabic Writings (2005). These sources have long been overlooked as sources of information in Egyptology. They did not play a role in early Egyptology for the simple fact that they were relatively inaccessible and only became widely available and published in European languages (usually French) in the mid- to late nineteenth century—after Egyptology became established. To be blunt, the fact that archaeology as a discipline was founded at a time when non-Western scholarship was deemed to have little or no value also played a major role in Egyptologists’ ignorance of Arab and Persian scholars. I am not suggesting that the material is valid as a tool for understanding ancient Egypt (for that topic see El Daly (2005)), but rather aim to highlight the fact that those works are just as valuable to the history of Egyptology as the regularly studied and quoted works of Classical scholars such as Herodotus. Islamic historical and geographical works provide a valuable non-Western source for perception of the landscape, and reveal a very different image of the Fayum.

Finally, based on the overwhelming preponderance of nostalgic, temporalized, imagined perceptions of the ancient Fayum landscape, it was obvious that ancient Egyptian archaeology and textual material had to be included in my study. This opened up the possibility to examine ways in which ancient Egyptians perceived their landscape, and this revealed the origins of later perceptions. The ‘Chinese whisper’ effect became apparent. It was only by studying the biographies of the later European writers and the sociocultural environment in which they worked that influences on how older ideas about the landscape were transmitted could be unraveled. As a result, it is now possible to show that the ancient perceptions of the landscape have in many ways actually persisted to this day.

How Is Our Perception of Landscape Formed?

The ideas about landscape held by Hoskins typify European, and most especially English, reactions to natural landforms. The notion that the land(scape) embodies beauty and fertility is apparent in some of the earliest Western written accounts of landscapes of Egypt. Classical poets idealized nature, fertile landscapes, and a pastoral way of life, while Romantic poets extolled the beauties of the unadulterated, unmodernized, feminine landscape and the vestiges of antiquity held within it. Orientalists introduced notions of the beauty of the wild, untamed, masculine desert and mountain landscapes. The intellectualizing of the landscape undertaken by cultural geographers and landscape archaeologists of the late twentieth century—the belief that the landscape is an expression of cultural values, a view or perspective that can be held only by educated scholars—cannot alter history. It cannot be denied that the way in which historians and archaeologists think about certain areas of land or certain regions of the earth has been shaped, or at least heavily influenced, by the ideas of our predecessors. If we are to be fully self-reflective, the influence of the intellectual heritage of thinking about landscape must be acknowledged in our own thinking about past landscapes. As archaeologists, our approach to investigations is unavoidably bound up in our notions of what ancient people might have perceived—notions that are formed by contemporary theoretical approaches. Unless we are fully aware of the influences on our own perceptions, we cannot begin to challenge our preconceptions.

One major issue in landscape archaeology has been the problem of implanting modern conceptions of value and meaning into interpretations of ancient landscapes based on archaeological research alone. By examining written evidence of perceptions of the landscape from different points in history, it is possible to illustrate the very different and simultaneously very similar ways in which different groups of people perceive the same landscape. The sets of materials examined in this book derive from different contexts. The pharaonic material illustrates the perception of people who inhabited their own landscape, and their interaction with that landscape. The Greco–Roman and Islamic materials illustrate the perceptions of people for whom this landscape was alien and unfamiliar, even though they ‘owned’ it and utterly transformed it—the Greeks much more so than the Arab–Islamic inhabitants, as the Fayum was a major center of Greek occupation. The European writers approached the landscape with well-formed perceptions prior to arriving there. Their writing illustrates the contrast between premodern and modern conceptions of landscapes. Unlike any earlier writers, they knew about ancient Egypt; Egyptology was an emerging discipline in its own right, their perception was shaped by an increasing understanding of ancient Egypt, and thus, inevitably, their perceptions shaped those of modern Egyptologists.

How we can approach an understanding of the heritage behind perceptions of a landscape was outlined in Bender’s introduction to Landscape: Politics and Perspectives , as quoted at the head of this chapter.

The idea that social and cultural status as well as the specific time and place of engagement with a landscape have an effect on a person’s perception of that landscape is fundamental to this book. For that reason, each source is placed into historical and sociocultural context and the contemporary landscape of the Fayum (irrigation, temples, settlements) is presented. By examining (where possible) the authors’ biographies, it is possible to gain a better insight into their accounts, and a better understanding of how their perception of the landscape was constructed, what affected it, and how those influences are reflected in their accounts—thus also revealing what affected later accounts and perceptions. For example, how does a person’s background, nationality, or place in history affect their perception of a landscape? What effect do their religious beliefs, their social status, or their own reading and research have? In what way has the general perception of the landscape over time affected the way in which archaeologists approach the landscape and the interpretation of the ancient landscape?

Physical Landscape and Perceived Landscape

One theme that became apparent as I reviewed the material was a clear division between two aspects of the landscape: the ‘real’ and the ‘imagined.’ This, to some extent, could be seen to mirror the two sides of the landscape debate—landscape as a physical object shaped by people, and landscape as a subjective notion or idea. Bender summarizes a concept that is applicable to many landscapes: “Landscapes are both spatial and temporal, . . . they serve as palimpsests of past activity, . . . are half imagined or something held in memory.”¹⁵ There are two concepts to explain subjectively held ideas of landscape: that landscapes can be temporal, and that they can be imagined. The ideas about how imagined temporalized landscapes are formed derive, in the main, from Said’s Orientalism (2003[1978]).¹⁶ The notion that imaginative geography and history help people intensify their sense of identity by heightening the differences between ‘there’ and ‘here’ and between ‘then’ and ‘now’ (and ultimately, for Said, between ‘them’ and ‘us’) is most overtly apparent in the genre of materials utilized by Said: Western travel accounts of Egypt. However, it can be traced to the earliest sources consulted here. The pharaonic concepts of there/here and then/now are demonstrated via religious beliefs, with deities and the afterlife being them, there, and then, while daily life is us, here, and now. The knowledge held of the geographical reality of the ‘here and now’ does not necessarily affect the historical/geographical ideas of the ‘there and then.’

In this book, these ideas are translated into the concept of the imagined landscape and the experienced landscape. The imagined landscape is a construction based on a subjective notion of the landscape derived from external influences, including what a person has read in earlier travel accounts and literature, what the person has been told, and long-standing well-established, communally-held religious ideas. It could be called the ‘sacred landscape,’ although that term is more often used to refer to physical manifestations of religious ideas in the form of temples. The imagined landscape is imbued with meaning; the landscape itself and the sensations and emotions it evokes are the subject of interest, and take many forms. The experienced landscape (contra Cosgrove’s use of the term ‘experienced’) is the perception derived from an objective interaction with the landscape. This perception of the landscape is based on the here and now, generally unaffected by any preconceived ideas about the meaning of the landscape but rather formed based on a direct interaction with the land. As Julian Thomas notes in Landscape: Politics and Perspectives , “an objective and distance perspective view on landscape has much in common with strategies of monitoring and surveillance. ”¹⁷ In some instances the perception of the experienced landscape is actually a direct reaction to the perception of the imagined landscape: the landscape is not what it was expected to be, and thus is reevaluated on the basis of ‘real’ experience.

The experienced landscape is the objectified, ‘viewed’ landscape, the perception of the physical nature of the landscape. The imagined landscape is the subjectified, idealized, temporalized landscape, usually an idea of an ancient ‘pure’ version of the landscape.

Whose Landscape Is Being Perceived by Whom?

The Role of Folklore and Tradition

In the late 1990s there was a general movement in many branches of academia and popular culture that reflected a growing sense of discomfort with the history of western attitudes toward Asia and Africa—so-called ‘colonial guilt.’ Landscape historians, anthropologists, and geographers started to employ more ethnographic methods and investigate indigenous notions of landscape. The idea that landscape is a Western construction was seen to be reflected in the large-scale mapping programs undertaken by European powers in their Eastern empires, for example by Britain in India or Australia. ‘Accurate’ and scientific mapping and the recording of physical landscapes came to be seen as symbols of power, often imposed on indigenous populations. The cognitive maps created in some cultures came to be seen as unscientific but nonetheless highly valuable reflections of a deep and more meaningful engagement with the landscape. In many instances this was tied up with contemporary reclamation of land by native populations.¹⁸

One source of indigenous perceptions of landscape is myths and legends—traditions not regularly recorded in written form by those inhabitants. These traditions are, however, often recorded by travelers. Folklore could be seen as one of the primary ways in which we can understand the perceptions of landscapes held by people removed physically, culturally, or temporally from ourselves. This is expressed best by Tilley:

To understand a landscape truly it must be felt, but to convey some of this feeling to others it has to be talked about, recounted, written or depicted. . . . If stories are linked with regularly repeated spatial practices they become mutually supportive, and when a story becomes sedimented into the landscape, the story and the places dialectically help to construct and reproduce each other. . . . Narrative is a means of understanding and describing the world in relation to agency. It is a means of linking locales, landscapes, actions, events and experiences together. . . . In its simplest form it involves a story and a story-teller. . . . A narrative must of necessity always be written from a certain point of view. In relation to the past and written from the standpoint of the present, narrative structures play a similar role to metaphor—they describe the world in fresh ways, bringing new meanings and new senses. . . . Every story involves a temporal movement in addition to the spatial one—they describe the world in fresh ways, bringing new meanings and new senses.¹⁹

In essence, stories help create landscapes. They help secure the significance of, and the meanings held by, a place in a landscape—to anyone who hears the story. The transmission of the story perpetuates the perception of the landscape held by a specific person or group of people, and can shape the perceptions of anyone who hears or reads the story.

What I aim to do in this book is to unravel the palimpsest of perceptions of a region. While I am not in any way attempting to propose a new approach to landscape, I illustrate that it is only possible to have an appreciation of changing perceptions of a landscape by incorporating material from a very wide date range (here, almost ten millennia, from c.7500 bc to ad 1900) and embracing methods developed in a number of different disciplines. Landscape studies appear in many different subject areas, and I have borrowed ideas from geography, cartography, Classical studies, archaeology, art history, literary studies, philosophy, ethnography, and anthropology.

In this book the focus is on the way people perceive the landscape of the Fayum. Rather than adopting the ideas posed by Bender, Cosgrove, and Daniels that the concept of landscape implies a way of seeing,²⁰ I adopt the more traditional approach of taking landscape to mean the physical environment and the ways people have interacted with it and thought about it, and why. I combine approaches advocated by Hoskins and Hodder. The chapters in this book evaluate the ways in which people viewed a particular area of land that, in their minds, was a clearly defined and unique landscape. It is not simply their perception of the region, but also more specifically their perception of the physical landscape forming the region that is of interest here. What qualities did they perceive the land to be imbued with? The key distinction is between the ‘experienced’ and the ‘imagined.’ The perceptions of each writer were based on their experience of the landscape either directly or through having read about it, and often took the format of a descriptive account of the physical form of the landscape, the crops, towns, and monuments. But in many instances this description is not as straightforward as it might appear. The influences on the writer, both physical and psychological, have to be considered. What expectations did they have before they arrived in the landscape, and what were those expectations based on? In what circumstances were they experiencing the landscape: as a merchant, a tourist, an antiquities dealer? Where were they from? What were they comparing this landscape to? All these factors have a significant impact on the perceptions of the writers and their accounts.

The imagined landscape is a landscape that has not been physically experienced, not visited. The writer is imagining what the landscape is (or was) like at a certain point in time, based on what they had read or heard. Importantly this term also applies to the landscape that cannot be experienced because it is mythological, the landscape as it appears in creation legends and in stories about past times. The imaginary landscape is frequently the landscape imbued with the most meaning. It is often the description of the creation of the landscape—an event that is clearly not possible to experience but that results in a perception of the landscape that is heavy with religious meaning and often temporalized and idealized. Perceptions of this landscape are, naturally, significantly affected by the writer’s beliefs.

The experienced landscape is the landscape of ‘reality.’ It is the physical form of the landscape, and perceptions of that landscape which are based on more purely rational thinking. This landscape can be (and usually was) measured, recorded, mapped, and managed. This is the landscape that appears in administrative documents. It is the landscape exploited by humans for the resources, and in most cases that exploitation was ‘state’-run and thus had a great deal of bureaucracy associated with it. This landscape is devoid of any meaning; people had no real emotional attachment to this landscape.

How are these two different ways of perceiving the landscape related? Is it possible for the writer to describe both their perception of their experience of the landscape and their perception of the imagined landscape? In many instances the writers do incorporate the imagined landscape into the real/experienced landscape. Particularly for the earlier writers, this is not a problem at all—the two perceptions coexist. The landscape becomes a palimpsest of intertwined ideas, beliefs, traditions, and remains of human interventions and interactions.