Introduction: gazing on the landscape and encountering the environment

Interest in landscape transcends many traditional academic divisions and disciplines. Use of the term is becoming wider and wider. Rowlands, for example, has recently entitled a discussion of modern economics in the Cameroon ‘Looking at financial landscapes’ (Rowlands 1996). In this Introduction we review recent ways in which archaeologists and anthropologists have made use of the concept of landscape and show how these uses relate to issues addressed by contributors to the volume.