ABSTRACT
In his introduction to A Phenomenology of Landscape, Tilley (1994) contrasted two traditions in the archaeological study of the relationship between people and land. The first treated the relationship as one structured according to a timeless rationale, implying that a standard set of analytical tools could be applied to any landscape to reveal the spatial logic that determined how human activities had been distributed across its surface. On this basis it was assumed that human activity was organised spatially in ways that were driven by such variables as the land’s carrying capacity, population size and the available technologies. The second tradition treated land as a medium of activity. In this case, the land gained its specific character as a product of the way the physical resource was employed by people, whose actions created their own identities: space was no longer the standard measure across which the distribution of activities could be mapped but had to be treated as the expression of the ways humans perceived their relationships with the conditions of their own existence. Consequently, Tilley claimed, “there is no space, only spaces” (Tilley 1994: 10).
