Whether referring to sacred or mundane characteristics, the foregoing sections illustrate that people engage landscapes in long-term reflexive exchange, establishing both possible and proper ways of living in the world. In the process, individuals and groups come to identify with the landscapes they inhabit. With establishment of identity in this sense, landscapes also become repositories of social memory and history.
Landscapes as identity materialize the reciprocal and always fluid relationship between the physical terrain, language, history, and cultural ideologies. That is, as people live within and move among arenas that shape their worldview, they simultaneously reinvest and modify meanings of the land. As Basso describes among the modern Western Apache, for example, conversations and stories are punctuated with place names that spatially situate actions of known, legendary, or deeply ancient others. By such narratives, landscapes are socialized and history is emplaced. The places named also come to carry moral values associated with cited actions and their consequences. Landscapes thereby become conceptual tools as much as they are physical arenas, and in so doing, comprise conceptual frameworks to guide people in their daily actions and interactions with others.
As with language, understanding of a landscape is built on social memory and the experiences tied to it, serving as a form of cultural logic. From his studies in prehistoric contexts of Iron Age and earlier contexts in Britain, Barrett writes of parallel kinds of identification, memory, and history. He adopts the term ‘inhabitation’ to describe the social practices through which direct experience, shared memories, and operative modes of understanding (such as concepts of time) make a landscape and its monuments meaningful for its current set of occupants. In Britain, he argues that Iron Age people transformed experience of the landscape and monuments inherited from earlier times, replacing rituals that were millennia old with new, more pragmatic practices of land-use and living in the present. What archaeologists encounter today is a landscape that has visually collapsed distinct identities and histories from the past, but which inquiry reveals to be convergent in location only, and substantially divergent in meaning.
Mnemonic landmarks of identity take many forms. Among the most common are mortuary sites. Building from arguments by Saxe, Goldstein, Renfrew, and Charles, archaeologists frequently draw on grave or mortuary monument distributions to map social territories. Most commonly, clusters of interments are inferred to denote either central places or boundaries of the land identified with the group in question. At the same time, Buikstra (writing about the lower Illinois valley) and Sharples (writing about Neolithic Orkney) caution that different portions of a kin-group or community may be buried in multiple, distinct locations. From these combined perspectives, tracking the places and forms of mortuary practices, especially over multiple centuries or millennia, can yield provocative insights about changing social identities within a regional landscape. In the lower Illinois valley, for example, Buikstra and Charles detect not only significant changes over time in form and topographic location of burials and cemeteries, but also concomitant shifts in emphasis on mortuary ritual versus ancestor cult, and from these observations, propose sequential transformations in social identities, among those who were burying their dead.
Identification with specific landscape features may affect social standing, whether by design, or as unintended consequence. For instance, otherwise socially subordinate groups sometimes benefit from access to economic and symbolic resources, such as water, when they are rare or patchy in distribution. Among many cultural groups, not only is water essential for survival but also it carries symbolic connotations connected to the supernatural. According to Scarborough, Fash, Lucero, and other archaeologists, leadership authority in pre-Columbian lowland Maya society relied in large measure on control of water sources, often along with their augmentation, as with reservoir catchments. The landscape of water resources thereby mapped the bases of social power, its establishment and maintenance, and the varied degrees of its centralization. In other circumstances, however, special or unique landscape resources can foster resistance to authority. By the fourteenth century, the Hauz-i Rani, or ‘Queen’s reservoir’ near Delhi, had become known as the site of a miracle involving a sufi Islamic saint. Beyond its economic importance, the water of this hauz held an unusual degree of sacred significance. Otherwise politically and economically disadvantaged residents in the vicinity came to be considered special disciples, and the association allowed them a degree of autonomy relative to the Delhi Sultanate. As Kumar writes, the beneficial distinction depended on the historical conjunction of the capital’s location in Delhi, and on political and economic prosperity at that hub. When the imperial capital changed location, economics declined, and homage to the sufi saint shifted to a different locale; the sacrality and special standing of the hauz and its village dissolved. The changing fortunes of the Hauz-i Rani village have material history in the elaborate medieval architecture at the shrine, and the sequence of its ruination in subsequent centuries.
World History
