ABSTRACT
Landscape archaeology is very well-placed to combine evidence from the geosciences with social, cultural and historical perspectives. This chapter outlines some of the principal developments in landscape archaeology. In the 1950s-1970s, landscape archaeologists were either writing in rather a romantic mode, without much theoretical self-criticism, or turning to scientific analytical methods that focused on economic and environmental drivers but seemed to neglect the relationships between people. Many of the methods employed for spatial statistics in archaeology were originally developed in geography and ecology. As in geography and many other social science and humanities disciplines, archaeological theory also went through a period of post-modern revision in the 1980s and 1990s. Influenced by social theorists like P. Bourdieu and A. Giddens, they highlighted how people shaped social life by developing archaeologies that interpreted practice, agency and structure. Environmental archaeology has seen increasingly multidisciplinary approaches which bring together different types of material evidence and methodologies.
