Landscape in Theory.The unexpected virtue of archaeological approach

This contribution offers a perspective on the intimate link that is established betweentheory, practice and results in the field of contemporary Landscape Archeology. Withparticular reference to the Anglo-Saxon and Mediterranean academic tradition, thediscourse aims to investigate the specific way in which the adoption of broad categoriesand methodological procedures is key to reading the real and ideal Landscape.This analysis highlights how the many different interpretations of the Landscaperepresent the reflection of the type of questions pertaining to the context of a specificcultural background. I will pay particular attention to the phenomenological approachthat seems to cannibalize the debate. Ultimately, I argues for a vision of landscapeas a place of asymmetrical relations between human and non-human that cannot bedone justice from too strong a phenomenological or materialistic perspective. Eventhe neo-materialistic collapse of subject and object must be tempered by this idea of‘asymmetry,’ in which a landscape beyond the human must be accounted for. It is inthis framework that I must consider time and space not only as contextual coordinatesbut as articulations of one another, with time structuring to one and space giving formto the other. All of this is done ‘in/with/from the landscape’; the landscape is neithersolely setting nor actor but can be thought of both as a language, a field in which allresides and of which all is composed, and the sign, the contextual manifestations ofthis field constantly invoking and at play with the whole, a whole that can never bedisassociated from its concretization. A new heuristic tool for investigating landscapeswill also be proposed.