ABSTRACT
Over the past two decades, there has been a movement away from considering past landscapes simply as economic resources that were exploited by human groups and which worked to shape and constrain their development. Such limited functionalist approaches have been replaced by an increasing concern with attempting to identify wider social, ideological and symbolic aspects of landscape and how particular landscapes may have been viewed by past communities. Although there has been no consensus on what landscape is, or at least what the archaeological definition of landscape should be, most approaches view landscape as something that is culturally constructed by the people who lived and worked in it.The acknowledgement of an ideational aspect to landscape forms an important underlying principle in this book which is concerned with the impact of the Atlantic landscape in the formation and expression of community identities.
