In
archaeology
Archaeology or archeology is the scientific study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, sites, and cultural landscap ...
, phenomenology is the application of sensory experiences to view and interpret an archaeological site or
cultural landscape
Cultural landscape is a term used in the fields of geography, ecology, and heritage studies, to describe a symbiosis of human activity and environment. As defined by the World Heritage Committee, it is the "cultural properties hatrepresent the co ...
in the past. It views space as socially produced and is concerned with the ways people experience and understand spaces, places and
Landscape
A landscape is the visible features of an area of land, its landforms, and how they integrate with natural or man-made features, often considered in terms of their aesthetic appeal.''New Oxford American Dictionary''. A landscape includes the ...
s. Phenomenology became a part of the
Post-processual archaeology
Post-processual archaeology, which is sometimes alternately referred to as the interpretative archaeologies by its adherents, is a movement in archaeological theory that emphasizes the subjectivity of archaeological interpretations. Despite having ...
movement in the early 1990s and was a reaction to
Processual archaeology's proposed 'scientific' treatment of space as an abstract and empty locus for action.
In contrast, phenomenology proposes a 'humanized' space which is embedded with meaning and is created through
praxis
Praxis may refer to:
Philosophy and religion
* Praxis (process), the process by which a theory, lesson, or skill is enacted, practised, embodied, or realised
* Praxis model, a way of doing theology
* Praxis (Byzantine Rite), the practice of fai ...
(actions, rituals, social events, and relationships between people and places).
Phenomenology therefore treats the landscape as a network of places, each of which bears meaning and is connected through movements and narratives.
Phenomenological approaches have been the subject of much debate within archaeology
with critics saying the methods are unscientific, subjective, and require an assumption that modern human experiences of a landscape approximate the experiences those of people in the past. Others however, have found the framework useful in analyses using Geographical Information Systems and Virtual Reality Modeling, despite early phenomenologists in archaeology rejecting these representations in favor of embodied experiences.
Overview
Phenomenological approaches in archaeology first came to widespread attention among archaeologists with the publication of
Christopher Tilley's ''A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments'' (1994),
in which he proposed phenomenology as a technique to discover more about historical peoples and how they interacted with the landscapes in which they lived. Drawing on ethnographic examples from around the world, Tilley proposed that physical connections to the landscape were especially a part of the lives of non-industrial societies and that land “becomes humanized” as specific myths and stories get tied to places in the landscape. Therefore, “Spatial experience is not innocent and neutral, but invested with power relating to age, gender, social position, and relationships with others.”
Phenomenological techniques seek to understand this humanized space to gain further insight to how peoples living in hunter-gatherer and agricultural societies related to those landscapes.
In ''Time, Culture and Identity : An Interpretative Archaeology'' Julian Thomas proposed phenomenology as a way of overcoming a
Cartesian Cartesian means of or relating to the French philosopher René Descartes—from his Latinized name ''Cartesius''. It may refer to:
Mathematics
*Cartesian closed category, a closed category in category theory
*Cartesian coordinate system, modern ...
view of the world which separates mind and body, and nature and culture.
Thomas says that this split is a cultural product of
Modernity
Modernity, a topic in the humanities and social sciences, is both a historical period (the modern era) and the ensemble of particular socio-cultural norm (social), norms, attitudes and practices that arose in the wake of the Renaissancein the " ...
which structured
Culture-historical archaeology
Culture-historical archaeology is an archaeological theory that emphasises defining historical societies into distinct ethnic and cultural groupings according to their material culture.
It originated in the late nineteenth century as cultural ev ...
and
Processual archaeology
Processual archaeology (formerly, the New Archaeology) is a form of archaeological theory that had its beginnings in 1958 with the work of Gordon Willey and Philip Phillips, ''Method and Theory in American Archaeology,'' in which the pair stated ...
, but limits the ways these approaches handle material culture. By enforcing the nature/culture divide, Thomas says culture-historical approaches tend to treat the material as mostly unimportant, focusing on the mental and cultural aspects material culture, while processual archaeology treats culture as not in mind or body, but rather the interaction between people and their environments.
As such, Thomas says neither approach allowed archaeologists to study culture directly. Thomas says phenomenology, in contrast, understands material culture in its relationship to a "Being-in-the-world" and therefore culture is not embedded in any one entity but rather the relationships between entities across time.
This interpretation of phenomenological approaches prefigures
Ian Hodder's theorization of Human-thing-entanglement.
Methodology
In ''The Materiality of Stone: Explorations in Landscape Archaeology (2004)'',
Christopher Tilley
__NOTOC__
Chris Tilley is a British archaeologist known for his contributions to postprocessualist archaeological theory. He is currently a Professor of Anthropology and Archaeology at University College London.
Tilley obtained his PhD in Anth ...
proposes that all people who seek to engage with and understand a non-neutral 'humanized' space have a human body, and will therefore engage with the landscape in similar ways.
By paying close attention to, and documenting, their bodily engagement with the archaeological site and landscape, Tilley says that archaeologists can use phenomenology to better understand prehistoric humanized space. Phenomenological methods therefore include approaching a place from different directions, experiencing it from every angle, spending time there, and exploring its relationships to other landmarks such that one starts to develop “a feeling for the place.”
Tilley says that this process allows one to make observations one never could have otherwise. Phenomenological methods are therefore highly reliant on the archaeologists own senses of sight, smell, and hearing as they enter and move about the landscape that they are studying.
Phenomenology in Alternative Representations
According to Christopher Tilley in ''The Materiality of Stone'', phenomenological approaches in archaeology are focused on an embodied experience of the archaeological landscape.
Therefore, representational forms of archaeological features such as diagrams, pictures, statistical analyses,
geographic information system
A geographic information system (GIS) is a type of database containing Geographic data and information, geographic data (that is, descriptions of phenomena for which location is relevant), combined with Geographic information system software, sof ...
s,
simulation
A simulation is the imitation of the operation of a real-world process or system over time. Simulations require the use of Conceptual model, models; the model represents the key characteristics or behaviors of the selected system or proc ...
s, or narrative descriptions are said to be inadequate to produce phenomenological knowledge or understanding, as they cannot be substituted for first-hand experience.
Other archaeologists have found various representational tools useful for expanding one's phenomenological analyses.
Geographical Information Systems
Geographic information system
A geographic information system (GIS) is a type of database containing Geographic data and information, geographic data (that is, descriptions of phenomena for which location is relevant), combined with Geographic information system software, sof ...
s (GIS) have also been employed to augment phenomenological approaches.
Due to the intensive nature of phenomenological methods, sample sizes tend to be small, making it difficult to validate relationships identified through phenomenological research.
However, for relationships such as intervisibility between archaeological monuments and landscape features, GIS analyses such as visibility analyses can quickly provide estimations of this experience for a large number of archaeological features.
Researchers have paired visibility analyses with models of movement to better understand Spanish colonial surveillance and the effects of colonial architecture in the Andean Highlands.
Similar approaches have also been used to model soundsheds in Chaco Canyon, to better understand Ancestral Puebloan ritual and political theater. However, Geographical Information Systems modeling has been critiqued for reifying the Cartesian model of space,
and the abstract nature of GIS analyses are far removed from the usually embodied, experiential focus of phenomenological methodologies.
Virtual Reality Modeling
Virtual Reality Modeling (VRM) is one method that has been proposed for augmenting phenomenological approaches.
Virtual reality representations overcome shortcomings of two dimensional representations such as maps, diagrams or pictures and allow researchers to digitally move through a space in a way that imitates an embodied experience without having to travel to the location.
This allows for any researcher to verify and reproduce experiences of intervisibility, dimension, orientation, or other phenomenologically relevant observations. It can also provide experiences of a place that may not be available today by reconstructing elements of the landscape, removing modern structures, or simulating different environmental contexts.
GIS and VRM are also being combined into augmented reality in an effort to "bridge the gap" and bring GIS insights into the phenomenological experience. Nevertheless, Pollard and Gillings say that their efforts in Virtual Reality Modeling are not intended to replace direct observation entirely, as it is impossible to simulate all of the bodily experiences of being at an actual place.
Furthermore, like GIS, Virtual Reality Modeling has been critiqued for continuing to maintain a Cartesian model of space and centering of visual experience over other embodied experiences.
Criticism
According to Joanna Brück, phenomenology "has provoked considerable discussion within the discipline",
receiving criticism from members of the archaeological community who deem it to be "unscientific" and "subjective".
Brück says the crucial phenomenological question is “whether contemporary encounters with the landscape
..can ever approximate the actual experience of people in the past”
and that, in spite of
Christopher Tilley's claim that the common use of human bodies between archaeologists and past peoples implies that both groups will engage with the material world in a similar way, the body itself is culturally constituted and bodily engagement with the world will be shaped and controlled by social norms and practices.
Therefore, it cannot be assumed that modern human experiences of a space will closely match those of the past simply because they may share a similar physical form.
Barret and Ko say that Tilley's idea of a culturally neutral body separated from its history itself relies on a Cartesian separation of body and mind that is at odds with Heidegger's phenomenology which Tilley takes as a foundation for his methods.
Therefore, they say that archaeological phenomenology as practiced is premised on a rejection of processual archaeology's claim to seek generalization cross-cultural historical processes, and a rejection of scientific archaeology's methodological consensus, rather than a philosophical alignment with phenomenology.
Others have critiqued the data and interpretations of Tilley and other phenomenological research. Andrew Fleming, says that many of Tilley’s claims that certain megalith structures are oriented so their major axis points to particular landscape features are incorrect. Rather, Fleming claims that the monument's orientations often miss the features Tilley ascribes to them, or if they are oriented with the described feature they are often ignoring other landscape features which Fleming says are much more prominent
Furthermore, Fleming says that Tilley's interpretations of Mesolithic megalithic structures fails to account for "the problem of differential site destruction", wherein structures that were constructed near rock outcrops are more likely to survive than those in appealing agricultural areas. Fleming says this difference could explain the apparent prevalence of megalithic structures near outcroppings observed by Tilley.
Notable Applications
Phenomenological approaches have been supported by a great number of archaeologists and is often used in fieldwork alongside other, more traditional methods. Typical examples of the phenomenological approach to landscapes include Christopher Tilley's own recording of the Dorset Cursus
and the
Bronze Age
The Bronze Age is a historic period, lasting approximately from 3300 BC to 1200 BC, characterized by the use of bronze, the presence of writing in some areas, and other early features of urban civilization. The Bronze Age is the second pri ...
landscape on
Bodmin Moor
Bodmin Moor ( kw, Goon Brenn) is a granite moorland in north-eastern Cornwall, England. It is in size, and dates from the Carboniferous period of geological history. It includes Brown Willy, the highest point in Cornwall, and Rough Tor, a s ...
, England. It was also used to develop an understanding of the
Neolithic
The Neolithic period, or New Stone Age, is an Old World archaeological period and the final division of the Stone Age. It saw the Neolithic Revolution, a wide-ranging set of developments that appear to have arisen independently in several parts ...
Tavoliere Plain in Italy, in an effort to more explicitly define phenomenological methodologies, Other researchers have used phenomenology to explore the subjectivity of archaeologists, embracing poetic descriptions of history , and performative tellings of the past as well as archeological ones,
References
;Footnotes
;Bibliography
*
Brück, Joanna. 2005. ''Experiencing the past? The development of a phenomenological archaeology in British prehistory'' in ''Archaeological Dialogues'' #12 (1) 45–72
*
Hamilton, Sue; Whitehouse, Ruth. 2006. ''Phenomenology in Practice: Towards a methodology for a ‘subjective’ approach'' in ''European Journal of Archaeology'' Vol. 9, 31-71.
*Tilley, Christopher. 1994. ''A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments''. Oxford: Berg.
*Tilley, Christopher. 1996. ''The Power of Rocks: Landscape and Topography on Bodmin Moor'' in ''World Archaeology'' #28, 161-176.
{{Archaeology
Archaeological theory
Phenomenological methodology