ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the landscapes of a particular hill in north-east Scotland. There, community-based archaeological research does not just inform a reconstruction of the past but is a site of active social relations between generations of inhabitants and various landowners. The archaeological imaginations start from an involvement in the world as landscape rather than from a discrete cognitive process. Imagining is not a purely cognitive activity that is separate from a person's involvement in the world around them. Connections between past and present life at Bennachie are partly imaginative, based on the symbolism of the hard work and down-to-earth existence of people in the colony as authentic dwellers in the landscape. John Wylie recognises a strand in recent research in geography and anthropology concerned with the interplay of absence and presence in landscape. Archaeologists, unlike anthropologists, have long maintained drawing at the heart of their discipline.
