eTheses Repository - University of Birmingham

sense has been informed by this way of understanding the world and how we create the past
(Thomas 1993a, p.22; Moser 2001).
This has not meant that all views on landscape have been homogenous or static within the
‘modern western world’, and as the majority of, if not all, phenomenological thinkers and
post-processual archaeologists are part of this world, their views could be claimed to be as
modern and as western as the rest. For instance, as part of this ‘modern’ approach to
landscape, nineteenth century travellers such as Dodwell (1819) Leake (1830) Cockerell
(1830) and Puillon de Boblaye (1835) who visited Arkadia, had an inspirational, romantic,
and aesthetic view of landscape. It was a personal relationship with the places under
exploration, but one comparable to appreciating a landscape painting. Likewise, culture-
historic archaeologists often viewed the world with an uncritical eye, and indeed archaeology
was considered as losing its innocence when the New Archaeology of the 1970s and 1980s
insisted on rigorous scientific method (see Piggott 1976; and Bradley 2000, ch.2 commenting
on Arthur Evans; Clarke 1973). These were outsiders looking in. Although still the
‘observer’, this kind of sentimentality and subjectivity was discouraged by the New
Archaeology, which sought to view landscape in a more objective way (e.g. Binford 1983).
Only the measurable, quantifiable aspects were of importance. These ‘things’ could be
understood on the same level by everyone, the natural and the physical and what people then
did to or with them. The environment or landscape as a resource, which is possible to own
and consume, has been at the root of environmental determinism that has been particularly
associated with New Archaeology or Processualism.
3.2.2: Objective Landscapes
Although such projects began to investigate ‘whole’ landscapes, they have been heavily
influenced by processualist methodologies and positivist principles: landscapes are explained
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