Preface PrefaceIn this book, I bring together a series of published and unpublished interpretative essays on landscape and monuments written and researched at various times since 1994. This is the third in a trilogy of books, ‘Explorations in Landscape phenomenology’. The chapters in it also represent part of the wider development of a phenomenological approach to places and monuments in Britain and Europe undertaken in part, or in whole, in six other books: A Phenomenology of Landscape (Tilley 1994), An Ethnography of the Neolithic (Tilley 1996a), Metaphor and Material Culture (Tilley 1999a), The Materiality of Stone: Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology 1 (Tilley 2004a), Stone Worlds: Narrative and Reflexivity in Landscape Archaeology (Bender, Hamilton, and Tilley 2007), and Body and Image: Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology 2 (Tilley 2008).
The individual studies presented here have been included, because they are all variously concerned with the very different landscapes of southern Britain from the Mesolithic to the Iron Age and therefore may naturally give rise to some general comparative reflections with regard to both regional and temporal differences. Standard ways of writing the past have been concerned with particular periods—for example, studies of Neolithic or Bronze Age or Iron Age Britain. The past has also been written in terms of particular types of monuments—for instance, earthen long barrows, chambered tombs, stone circles or henges or hillforts. Another approach has been to discuss the past in terms of particular types of artefacts: stone axes, Grooved Ware or Beakers, their regional differences and affiliations. This book takes a new approach: I attempt to write the past in terms of its geology and topography, discussing landscapes of chalk and granite, sandstones and slates, and pebbles. I assert the fundamental significance of the bones of the land in relation to processes of human dwelling.
Part of Chapter 1 was first published in Bruno David and Julian Thomas (Eds. 2008) Handbook of Landscape Archaeology, Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Chapter 2 was first published in Alisdair Whittle and Vicki Cummings (Eds. 2007) Going Over: The Mesolithic-Neolithic Transition in North-West Europe, Oxford: Oxford University Press, Proceedings of the British Academy 144. These discussions in Part I, and the conclusions to the book in Chapter 10, contain the most general discussions.
Part II concerns chalk landscapes. Chapter 3 discusses the lowland chalk downland landscape of Salisbury Plain and its relationship to the construction of Stonehenge and the experience of its architecture in relation to the numerous Bronze Age barrow cemeteries that surround it. This research forms part of research collectively undertaken by the Stonehenge Riverside Project (Parker Pearson et al. 2006) of which I have been a co-director since 2004. The research discussed here forms a small part of a much wider excavation and survey project of the Stonehenge landscape and other Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments in it that will be published in the future. The fieldwork on which the discussion is based was undertaken by Wayne Bennett, David Field, Colin Richards, and me at various periods between 2004 and 2006. This chapter was first published in Mats Larsson and Mike Parker Pearson (Eds. 2007) From Stonehenge to the Baltic: Living with Cultural Diversity in the Third Millennium B.C., Oxford: Archeopress, BAR International Series 1692. I am most grateful to my co-directors, Joshua Pollard, Mike Parker-Pearson, Colin Richards, Julian Thomas, and Kate Welham, and co-authors, Colin Richards, Wayne Bennett, and David Field, to be able to republish this chapter here.
Chapter 4 considers another chalk landscape—the northern edge of Cranborne Chase in West Wiltshire and northeast Dorset—discussing relationships between Neolithic long barrows and Bronze Age round barrows, late Bronze Age and early Iron Age cross-ridge and spur dykes, hillforts and coombes (or dry valleys), and escarpment edges, spurs, and ridges. A small part of this study has previously been published in The Cambridge Archaeological Journal (2004). I undertook all the fieldwork for this study between 2002 and 2004 and was fortunate enough to be able to live in the landscape I was studying, an ideal situation from a phenomenological point of view. The house I lived in, Melbury Beacon, which was in a slightly elevated location to the north of Cranborne Chase, was named after a dramatic spur end visible from the living room and the garden. Out of various kitchen windows, I could see an entire palimpsest of prehistory: to the east a long barrow on Whitesheet Hill, to the southeast Winkelbury hillfort, to the south the highest point, Win Green with its dykes, to the southwest the escarpment edge with its round barrows. These features variously became visible or invisible to me according to the seasons and the conditions of the light. It was with much regret that I left that house and the window that quite literally framed the past for me in the summer of 2004.
Chapter 5 discusses a third chalk landscape: The South Dorset Ridgeway, and the Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments constructed along it, first appeared in my book Metaphor and Material Culture (Tilley 1999a), which for a number of years now has been out of print. The fieldwork for this study was also undertaken during a period of two years, between 1994 and 1995, when I was living in another house at the foot of Hambledon Hill and where I was also fortunate to be able to see both a long barrow and a hillfort from my bedroom/study window. Driving to this landscape took little more than an hour, enabling me to undertake repeated visits throughout the year, walking and re-walking the great ridge and its surroundings.
Part III provides a very different geological basis for the discussions. Chapter 6 considers a landscape of East Devon, the East Devon Pebblebed heathlands, made up entirely of pebbles, which has no equivalent anywhere in Britain. The fieldwork was undertaken and written up between the autumn of 2004 and the summer of 2007 and has not previously been published. This was a landscape previously unknown to me. In terms of archaeological research, it was also pretty much a black hole. No systematic work had been undertaken for more sixty years. Again, I was fortunate to be living in the landscape I was studying—at the bottom of a valley with a stream at the end of the garden flowing over a bed of pebbles to meet the river Otter. To the east High Peak, the most significant hill in East Devon is visible from beside the stream. To the west, I can glimpse the Pebblebed heathlands on the horizon. Near to the heathland sources of the stream, there are a series of pebble cairns. The stream is an umbilical link between the place where I dwell and the cairns, between my present and the past they represent. I have followed the flow of the waters many times, moving upward to their sources and the high cairns. Subsequently, the initial field research discussed here has given rise to a new long-term research project on the Pebblebed heathlands, co-directed by Andy Jones, in which we are excavating several of these cairns (see www.pebblebedsproject.org.uk).
Chapter 7 discusses the sandstone and slate landscape of Exmoor in North Devon and northwest Somerset in relation to the enigmatic and almost invisible stone monuments, stone rows, stone circles, and stone settings. The fieldwork was undertaken intermittently between 2004 and 2008, and this study has not previously been published. I familarised myself with this landscape during a long period, on repeated visits during 2004–2006, walking the footpaths and visiting most of the recorded monuments that I could find, eventually undertaking systematic survey work with the help of Wayne Bennett during the spring and autumn of 2007 and the spring of 2008. Mark Gillings was undertaking excavations in September 2007 at the Lancombe III stone setting and was kind enough to show me the site and send me copies of unpublished reports of other field research and fieldwork undertaken with Josh Pollard and Jeremy Taylor.
In Part IV, I discuss the granite landscapes of Bodmin Moor and West Penwith in Cornwall. The Bodmin Moor fieldwork was undertaken in the summer of 1993 and the spring of 1994. At that time, this was a landscape completely unfamiliar to me, and I initially found the terrain both difficult and daunting. This is the earliest fieldwork I undertook, published in this book, and it took place directly after I had completed the manuscript of A Phenomenology of Landscape (Tilley 1994). This study can be considered to be very much an extension of the general perspective presented with regard to the landscapes of southwest Wales and the Black Mountains and central Cranborne Chase, to another and very different landscape. This chapter was first published in Cornish Archaeology (1995) with a very abbreviated, but unfortunately in some respects far more frequently cited, version of it in World Archaeology (Tilley 1996b). The fieldwork largely undertaken in relation to Neolithic and Bronze Age ceremonial monuments gave rise to a major collaborative project centring on the Bronze Age settlement of Leskernick in northwest Bodmin Moor (Bender, Hamilton, and Tilley 2007). Earlier, in 1992, I had undertaken fieldwork in West Penwith but had never written up that research. This provided a preliminary basis for further field research undertaken in the spring of 2000, with Wayne Bennett, forming the basis for Chapter 9, which was first published in The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (Tilley and Bennett 2001).
All the previously published chapters have been revised for this book, and I am grateful to the various editors and journals for giving me permission to use this material here. An alternative way of reading the case studies in this book is to read them in the order of in which they were researched and written (from earliest to latest: Chapters 8, 5, 9, 4, 3, 6, 2, 7); thus the reader may be able to discern an increasingly wider approach, bringing in different aspects of the sensory landscapes from an earlier emphasis that was primarily visual, to an attempt to consider other aspects of landscapes as soundscapes and smellscapes and touchscapes, to discussions of their colours and the weather. Also, these studies attempt to go beyond primarily place-based ones, as the result of my visiting and walking between known monuments and locations and areas where nothing has been documented and to consider the former in relation to the latter. But what is more important is the manner in which different landscapes make their own demands on a participant observer, because each landscape has its own particular identity and characteristics that affect experience and perception, prompting different kinds of narratives. In some cases, new photographs have been substituted for older ones, and all the line drawings have been standardised and re-drawn by Wayne Bennett. In some of the chapters, where subsequent research has been undertaken relevant to the account, this new research has been noted or otherwise cited in the discussions in the conclusions.
Mark Dover kindly initially prepared the figures for Chapter 3 and carried out the GIS analysis. Barbara Bender, Alan Abramson, and most especially Peter Herring made very helpful criticisms of Chapter 8. I am most grateful to Frances Griffith and Wayne Bennett for the very useful comments made on an earlier draft of Chapter 6, which helped me to improve it. The field research undertaken for Chapters 4, 5, 6, and 8 was very much a solitary affair: one man and his dog). I am indebted to Wayne Bennett (Figure P2) for undertaking much of the field research discussed in Chapter 3, together with David Field and Colin Richards, and for that forming the basis of Chapters 7 and 9, with me, at various times, contributing to, constructively challenging, and modifying many of the observations and interpretations. My thanks also to Barbara Bender for critical comments on a draft of Chapter 10 that helped me improve it.
The author and Tor working in the Stonehenge landscape.
I am truly indebted to all my colleagues in the Department of Anthropology, University College London, for generating an immensely stimulating academic environment in which to work and facilitating the time for me to be able to complete this book. In particular, I thank the members of the Material Culture Group: Victor Buchli, Paolo Favero, Suzanne Küchler, Danny Miller, Chris Pinney, and Mike Rowlands. Last, but not least, I most grateful to Mitch Allen and the production team at Left Coast Press for their help and support for the book.
Christopher Tilley
London 2010
