As is clear from preceding sections, movement is a critical factor in landscape knowledge, and in endowing landscapes with meaning. Seasonal rounds among nonsedentary societies familiarize people with places to which they attach histories and legends, in which they gain economic resources, or from which they infer acts of supernatural creation. Darnell describes the caravan tracks inscribed by wear across economic, political, and ritual landscapes of pharaonic Egypt, while Snead details paths carved by centuries of repeatedly walking established routes in the Puebloan Southwest. In deep antiquity of markedly different cultural traditions, scholars such as Bradley, Bender, and Tilley suggest inference of long-past pathways by phenomenological re-enactment of plausible routes. In particular, they point to rock-art and visually striking changes in topography as likely signposts guiding such movement. Indeed, Thomas infers a rather intricate choreography of movement, guided by extant or reconstructed visual cues in the landscape, leading toward Neolithic Avebury, and into the carefully structured circular enclosure of ditch and megaliths.
Pilgrimage combines landscape movement with spiritual belief, as a formalized act of faith involving a destination, a journey, and experience of ambient geography. In ancient times as now, the process of pilgrimage itself is as much a physical undertaking as a spiritual one: the endurance of the pilgrim, the ruggedness of the landscape, and the remoteness of the destination enhances social and spiritual qualities of the journey. Spiritual magnetism, the hallmark of pilgrimage centers, is often associated with miraculous cures, supernatural beings, difficulty of access, and sacred geography.
Archaeological studies of pilgrimage have been largely the domain of classical and historical archaeologies. Ancient Greek women’s passages between rural and urban sanctuaries of Artemis have already been cited. For prehistoric times and nonliterate traditions as well, however, pilgrimage may offer an appropriate explanatory model for understanding sacred places and landscape crossings. According to Silverman, shrine mounds, well-swept open spaces, and an array of temporary buildings identify Cahuachi as a pilgrimage destination between AD 200 and 400 in the landscape of south coastal Peru. Sheets finds that well-worn tracks in Costa Rica lead consistently to (or from) pre-Columbian ceremonial sites. Parker Pearson and his colleagues contend that Stonehenge and the great earthen henge at Durrington Walls were end points for circuits through the encompassing ceremonial landscape, and that completion of the local pilgrimage in opposite directions at the two solstices commemorated complementary transitions between life and death in Neolithic Britain.
Cross-cultural evidence from caves, materializing day-to-day observances or more specialized rituals, suggest that pilgrimages to such portals cross landscapes of quite varied spatial scale. In Mesoamerican landscapes of ancient and modern times, caves and settlements sometimes have close spatial linkages, although even over that short distance, formal, paved roads often mark passage from the mundane world of daily life to the supernatural portal into the earth. In contrast, the cave of Naj Tunich, in Guatemala, is far from any substantial settlements, but the existence and contents of its mural drawings and Maya inscriptions, as well as physical modifications to its chambers, attest to visitors from afar over more than the last millennium, arguably as pilgrims. Archaeologically, it is the abundance of traces of reverential visits within the cave paired with the absence of nearby settlements that together point to acts of pilgrimage.
Pilgrimage stations and other sacred landmarks also prove powerful tools in political propaganda, particularly when those sites acted as intra-regional destinations. For example, Roman conquerors actively seized on such places to transform the landscapes of Celtic peoples under their dominion. At the same time as they rearranged human occupation of the Celtic landscape by settling people into the lowland valleys that were conducive to more intensive agricultural production, the Romans also erased markers of tradition Celtic religion. That is, to extinguish the continuation of pagan beliefs and practices, the Romans destroyed oak groves and other landscape features sacred in Celtic worldview. Destruction of sacred monuments alters landscapes of belief, and is known from both ancient and modern times, as conquering armies raze buildings and monuments that had been cues to belief and ritual - from temples that fell to the Spanish conquest of the New World, to destruction of mosques and churches in the interethnic wars of eastern Europe in the late twentieth century.
World History
