ABSTRACT

This overview of landscape archaeology/landscape history (LAH) is presented in the form of a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats). LAH is no longer just an array of field skills and methods, however holistically deployed. The discipline has had to respond to postmodernism and to embrace cognitive approaches, and it now needs to become more richly theorised, building on its reconstructive potential to develop an archaeology of landscape. Strengths discussed here include the flexibility of landscape archaeology, and its capacity to operate at different scales; it is suggested that LAH's ultimate importance may lie in its potential contribution to human historical ecology. Under ‘weaknesses’, the dangers of localism are considered. It is argued that the success of the ‘Annales’ school has shown how the microcosm may encapsulate the macrocosm. As the author's own work on medieval roads demonstrates, a focus on apparently local matters may engender trains of thought which open up much wider issues (the dividend of empiricism). In considering ‘threats’, this paper argues that the postmodern challenge has introduced an unhelpful and unnecessarily polarised debate. It is important to acknowledge the potential of the ‘digital revolution’, although computer-driven methodologies cannot be expected to supplant more traditional insights and ways of working.

KEYWORDS

landscape archaeology, postmodernism, SWOT analysis, human ecology

INTRODUCTION

It would be a brave, not to say foolhardy person who would venture to predict how landscape archaeology will have developed in ten or twenty years’ time; in the words of the old joke, I had to tell my Amsterdam audience that owing to unforeseen circumstances, the clairvoyant would not be making an appearance. In any case, these days, people in England who wish to be taken seriously never say ‘in future’; instead, Margaret Thatcher's children say ‘going forward’, to indicate how focused and businesslike they are. And of course there are no ‘problems’ anymore, just ‘challenges’. Approaches and buzzwords fashionable in the world of business studies have spread into our universities; for instance, in recent years some British academics have found themselves under instructions to carry out a SWOT analysis. SWOT is an acronym, meaning Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.