ABSTRACT
Small wonder that archaeologists regularly develop a special affection for the sites they excavate and record. Working in a particular landscape engenders a feeling of intense familiarity, even identification, with a setting replete with names, memories, and historical associations. What is surprising is to find that within much academic discourse this sense of place, encounter, and experience is usually ignored in the final publications. As Bradley argues, ‘the demands of academic writing set us on another course and we suppress our subjective response in favour of description and documentation’ (Bradley 1995: 38). It has been convincingly argued – in other chapters in this book and elsewhere – that archaeology can never be a self-contained objective activity because it can never be divorced from the values, judgments, motives, and beliefs of those involved (Shanks and Tilley 1987). If this is so, the time is right to explore the complex and meaningful relationships that archaeologists create with the landscapes that they excavate, survey, and record.
