People experience landscapes as land, water, and sky. They also learn well the seasonal temperatures, changeable winds, and sensory events, from storms on the ground to eclipses in the heavens. Prominent features of topography or constellations come to signify locations, episodes, or supernatural actors in creation narratives. Sun and moon are among the most commonly deified forces, whose actions take place eternally in the landscape embracing sky, horizons, and unseen netherworld. The passage of the seasons, as well as predictability of rain, temperature, and other weather conditions are all read from movements of those and other celestial bodies.
In parallel ways, the contours of visible terrain come to embody cosmology and mythic history. These collectively are fundamental aspects of worldview, the principles by which the world is properly constituted. Multiple scholars have noted that, in the worldview of local occupants, visually dramatic places in the landscape, especially involving abrupt transitions in elevation, landform, waterfalls, and other such features, tend to be treated as places where components of the universe join. Analysts frequently call such a location an axis mundi, following influential writings by Eliade and Tuan. These kinds of places are prime spots for attachment of cosmogonic and migration narratives, and for marking materially, by rock-art and other means. Repeated movement across the landscape, over the span of days, seasons, years, and lifetimes, situates the oral texts as social memory of inalienable landscape knowledge. Increasingly, archaeologists collaborate with indigenous peoples in acknowledging and seeking to understand meaningful landmarks of these narratives, as in recent studies by Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Ferguson, or by Zedefio, in different portions of what is now the US Southwest.
Human-made marks on the landscape, as rock-art or standing monuments of some other sort, may become naturalized over time, as primordial. Ancient architecture, especially as ruin mounds, may be attributed as readily to supernatural forebears as to human ancestors. Recorded accounts of the building of Stonehenge, by Merlin of Arthurian legend, or by supernatural giants, dramatize this tendency. While these monuments may cease to be occupied in their original ways, they almost surely retain some meaning as visible parts of the landscape. Richards argues that the megalithic stones, earthen mounds, and ditch rings of Neolithic Orkney embodied and replicated the surrounding expanses of earth, stone, and water, which modern observers see more clinically as simply glaciated terrain. The caveat about persistence of meaning stems from reminders, such as the Orkney instance, or Blake’s reminder of naturalized archaeological Nuraghi tower monuments of Bronze Age Sardinia; features that today seem close to neutral or empty of reported local meaning.
Analysts often take implications of cosmological meaning to define ‘sacred’ landscapes. As useful as this term can be, it also begs a definition for what constitutes sacrality, and for what the limits of sacred and mundane are in particular cases, especially in societies less secularized than the modern Western world. Especially when treating of ancient societies who have left no written accounts, archaeologists are severely challenged to determine what, if any, significance modern distinctions between sacred and nonsacred might have had in antiquity.
Frequently, cosmology and worldview also inform inscription of social and political order in the landscape, at multiple scales. Site choice for building a house, shrine, field, or settlement is affected not only by physical terrain and economic resources, but also by beliefs about proper disposition of humans on the land. In China, the ideas that underlie the principles of fengshui and its goals of maximized auspiciousness for inhabitants apparently guided placement of houses or settlements from the prehistoric period. Parallel kinds of principles, based on such notions as cardinal orientations of world quarters, or importance of sighting alignments with particular astronomical phenomena, provide directives in other societies, states, and otherwise. Wheatley’s writings about Chinese cities influenced much subsequent thinking on the matter. Often conceptions of the cosmos are mapped onto the earth, as in building positions and alignments in urban landscapes of New Kingdom Egypt, at Teotihuacan in Mexico, or among the Classic Maya.
Beyond a single town or city, landscapes are similarly shaped by worldview. In the Southwest, ancestral Keres landscapes achieved this mapping in the distribution of shrines extending in cardinal directions from the cosmologically organized town plans, often with orienting reference to prominent mountains or other ‘natural’ landmarks. Far to the south, in the landscape around Cuzco, Peru, ritual circuits of the Inca were mapped along sight lines extending radially, to varied distances from the capital. Within this sacred landscape, the radiating lines, or ceques, were marked at irregular distances by huacas, sacred places or objects imbued with supernatural force, which recalled cosmic or legendary events in the Inca past. Lamentably for archaeologists, the huacas themselves are not always visually distinguished from other natural features, in predictable location or form, and this makes their identification dependent on oral tradition and written accounts. The strong benefit of ethnohistory available for interpreting Inca belief is what is so prominently lacking for societies in many locales, especially deep in prehistory. Nevertheless, painstaking landscape studies in those situations, such as research by Bradley, Richards, and other scholars of Neolithic Britain, are testimony to the productivity of proposing working understandings of those sacred landscapes. In each of the foregoing instances and many others, landscape is often central to interpreting ancient cosmology and worldview.
World History
