Tilley, C

English

UCL Discovery

Cambridge Archaeological Journalhttp://journals.cambridge.org/CAJAdditional services for Cambridge Archaeological Journal:Email alerts: Click hereSubscriptions: Click hereCommercial reprints: Click hereTerms of use : Click hereMind and Body in Landscape ResearchChristopher TilleyCambridge Archaeological Journal / Volume 14 / Issue 01 / April 2004, pp 77 ­ 80DOI: 10.1017/S0959774304240057, Published online: 02 June 2004Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0959774304240057How to cite this article:Christopher Tilley (2004). Mind and Body in Landscape Research. Cambridge Archaeological Journal,14, pp 77­80 doi:10.1017/S0959774304240057Request Permissions : Click hereDownloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/CAJ, IP address: 144.82.107.38 on 22 Aug 201263ViewpointViewpointCan Archaeology Recover Past Intentions?The issue of intentionality lies at the heart of most archaeological interpretation. In thecourse of excavation or analysis we uncover the traces of sequences of human actions thatwe then proceed to interpret in terms of an original form or an original purpose ormeaning that lay inside the minds of prehistoric or early historic individuals.To take a very simple example, we see a polished stone axe as an intentional end-product,and an axe rough-out as evidence of an arrested process, on the assumption (perhaps quitea reasonable one) that the desired objective was in each case to produce a polished stoneaxe. Many of those abandoned at the rough-out stage are interpreted by archaeologistswho look for imperfections in the raw material or other blemishes — which again assumesa particular intentionality — that the makers would have completed the work if only somesuch factor had not come to dissuade them. The problem of ‘intended’ form underlies (andindeed threatens to undermine) many typological approaches in archaeology; at the veryleast it questions whether the patterning that we see corresponds to some desired andintended end-product. It is easy to assume that Palaeolithic flint-knappers had in mind theimage of an end-scraper or a backed knife when they set about their task, but is this borneout by ethnography?Such ambiguities are not restricted to artefacts but apply also to settlement, economy andsymbolic or ritual behaviour. Were prehistoric burial mounds designed as finished wholesand built stage by stage, by successive generations, according to a preconceived plan? Orwere they constantly in process of modification and redescription? Can we distinguishsacred spaces from profane? Can we determine whether particular effects were intended orwere merely chance by-products; the acoustics of enclosed spaces such as burial chamberspose particular challenges of interpretation. Rock art may appear to depict animals such asdeer or boar: but are these real, living animals or are they mythical or symbolic beings?The concern with the built and the made extends into the wider prehistoric landscapewhen we consider the meanings traditionally attached to rivers, lakes or mountains. Theseare sometimes materialized (or at least hinted at) through special practices of deposition orthough the carving or painting of images at sacred locations. This may lead us to supposethat particular places in the landscape held a special significance, but can or should weseek to go further, and suggest what meaning or meanings were attached to them?The contributions to this Viewpoint consider issues of intentionality across a range ofarchaeological contexts, from lithics to landscape. There are no simple answers, but a carefulreading of patterning and innovation may allow informed insights into the ways in whichpast individuals interacted knowledgeably and intentionally with their surroundings andwith each other.77ViewpointMind and Body in Landscape ResearchChristopher Tilley‘Don’t you find it all a bit depressing in the end?You’ll never really know what was going on’ (stu-dent comment)Intentionality  would  seem  to  be  the  fundamentalconcept  in  all  prehistoric  landscape  research.  Wewant to know the reasons why people chose to settlein  one  place  or  another,  built  particular  types  ofmonuments where they did, how they moved aroundthe landscape, procured, exchanged and consumedmaterial and non-material resources, deposited arte-facts,  etc.  If,  then,  we  are  hoping  to  interpret  thepatterns we perceive in the landscape in terms ofintentions  or  reasons,  archaeological  research  be-comes inevitably cognitive in nature: we all have tobe mind-readers.From a traditional perspective, understandingthe nature of prehistoric minds supposedly providesthe key to interpreting material culture because thelatter is a product of the former. We have to try andreconstruct the way people thought about the land-scape in order to understand the manner in whichthey lived in it. Reconstructions of these prehistoricCAJ 14:1, 77–80      © 2004 McDonald Institute for Archaeological ResearchDOI: 10.1017/S0959774304240057     Printed in the United Kingdom78Viewpointmind-sets in the literature — usually implicit, be-cause  particular  types  of  cognitive  processes  arerarely discussed — currently range between the ex-tremes of a utilitarian logic of practicality and func-tionalist efficency, and a symbolic logic without anyapparent constraint apart from, perhaps, its own in-ternal coherence. Landscapes and environments ei-ther more or less determine what people do or theyare blank slates in which anything becomes possible.Yet whatever kind of logic we infer we’re allbad mind-readers at the end of the day. Almost allstatements in archaeological publications are repletewith standard qualifications, the words: ‘perhaps’,‘possibly’, ‘could be’, ‘might be’ fill our texts simplybecause the one thing that we can be certain about isthat we can’t think like prehistoric people and cannever know their minds.This, of course, is only the tip of the interpre-tive iceberg. Besides people having intentions or rea-sons  for  their  actions  we  may  need  to  considerdifferences between individual intentions and col-lective intentions. Then there are the unintended con-sequences, or outcomes of actions, which need to betaken into account, differences between the reasonsbehind making something and how it is receivedand understood by others. Furthermore, differencesbetween  discursive  consciousness  and  practical,routinized or ‘habitual’ thought may be important.A classic understanding in anthropological researchis that people frequently say one thing and do an-other. The reasons for their actions may typically berationalized afterwards and therefore do not pro-vide a reliable guide anyway to understanding whythey have acted in one way or another. Fortunatelythis is not a problem for archaeologists as the ar-chaeological record is the outcome of actual practice.Nevertheless, unacknowledged reasons or intentionsare often fundamental: people may not be fully awarethemselves of what they are doing and why. So theintentions an archaeologist might reconstruct wouldoften not be the same as those which might havebeen  held  by  prehistoric  agents  if  we  could  onlyinterview them. To cap it all, intentions or reasonsfor actions are rarely simple and singular. They areoften complex and multiple and change through time.Consequently  there  is  never  likely  to  be  oneway to understand landscapes in terms of intentions,but many. It becomes a multiple field of interpretivepossibilities, a dialogue between the archaeologistand the material remains of practice. The only rea-son to be depressed about this is if we are strivingfor certainty. But that is not the name of the game inany social science. Just as we can’t read past minds,we can’t read those in the present either. Whetherwe can even understand our own individual mindsadequately is inherently problematic. We try to makesense of the material with which we work, exploreinterpretive possibilities which may throw more, orless light, on that which we seek to understand.Material culture bears meaning and, because ithas meaning, a recourse to mind in terms of seekingreasons  or  intentions  for  its  production  seems  al-most  inevitable,  bringing  with  it  all  the  kinds  ofconsiderations mentioned above. Fieldwork in land-scape archaeology crucially depends on the assign-ment of intentionality. The art of being able to makethe statement ‘this is a round barrow’, ‘this is a mega-lithic tomb’, as opposed to a natural undulation orrock  in  the  land  surface,  instantly  makes  a  placemeaningful for us. Then we can ask: why is it there?and what was it for? We do not ask such questionswith regard to natural features. This culture/naturedistinction, however, is in many ways problematic.A hill or a rock formation which nobody has madecan, of course, be as meaningful as the round barrowor  the  megalith  and  sometimes  more  so.  Conse-quently we need to uncouple the concepts of mean-ing and intentionality. The former is always assigned,the latter occurs because of human involvement. Oneof the problems of landscape research until recentlyhas been a failure to do this so that the significanceof ‘natural’ places for human settlement and landuse have typically been downplayed or ignored.Meaning may, in principle, reside anywhere ina landscape. Intentionality, by contrast, is fixed in itthrough human action, but both are invested in spe-cific places. By investigating the relationship betweennatural places and cultural places in the landscapewe can hope for a fuller and more nuanced interpre-tation. In doing so, an interpretive stress on mind interms of intentions and reasons becomes radicallyaltered. We do not require these concepts when in-vestigating the potential significance of hills or stonesbut we are, of course, still interested in the mannerin which people may have thought about and relatedto these places. This is a question of perception.The traditional view of perception is that it flowsfrom the mind. We are therefore dealing solely withcognitive  processes.  An  alternative  phenomeno-logical view suggests that perception flows from themind in the body. In other words, the manner inwhich  humans  perceive  the  world  is  intimatelybound up with the kinds of bodies we all have, andin  a  basic  sense,  share.  We  see  the  world  in  andthrough the fleshiness of our bodies: perception isembodied. Now this perspective moves us away from79Viewpointa focus on intentionality and meaning as tradition-ally understood and in the manner discussed so far.We  do  not  just  interpret  with  our  minds  in  adistanciated way, but through our sensing bodies.The body, in effect, becomes a primary research tool.We understand landscape not just through thinkingabout it, employing concepts of meaning and inten-tionality but through feeling it, through being there:the significance of the stone or the hill as experi-enced through the body. The logical outcome of thisperspective is to call radically into question all formsof  landscape  research  which  are  purely  cognitiveand attempt to reconstruct reasons or intentions with-out relating these to the physicality of bodily experi-ence, at rest or in movement, in the landscape itself.There is a further and more radical consequenceof this stress on the embodied nature of experience:the need to call into question a distinction betweenpersons with their minds and intentions, or reasons,and stones and hills and megaliths and barrows with-out any of these. A notion of intentionality has al-ways been the key attribute of agency. It creates thefamiliar distinction between active subjects who thinkand passive objects that are inert and may have mean-ings ascribed to them or not. However, natural fea-tures of the landscape have effects on people as docultural products. They may constrain or determinehow one may move and what one perceives. In thissense they possess agency without thought or inten-tionality:  they  are  more  like  subjects  than  objects(Tilley 1999). The power of this agency has profoundeffects on the manner in which we experience themand think them through our bodies. Landscape re-search then becomes the art of describing and dis-cussing what kinds of effects natural features andcultural monuments have on us through our bodilyexperience of them. Quite crucially this leads to aredefinition  of  meaning  in  which  we  move  awayfrom considering it simply in traditional cognitiveterms and linking it with a notion of intentionality.In other words we can discuss the bodily effects oflandscapes: how landscapes come to be meaningful;and uncouple this question from what these land-scapes meant. We can suggest reasons why the posi-tion of a natural stone or the location of a barrowwas significant without necessarily having to trans-late this further into specific statements such as: ‘itwas significant because it may have represented afounding ancestor’.I will try to illustrate this point by referring toan ongoing study of rock art in the landscape (seeTilley 2004, ch. 4; Tilley n.d.). While rock art typi-cally occurs on ‘natural’ stones in landscape settingsmost work has ignored both. The study of rock arthas always been dominated by the attempt to inter-pret the specific images. On one level this is simplyabout denotative meaning: is it a horse or a deer, aboat or a sledge? Then we move on to questions ofconnotative meaning and almost automatically wantto know: what does this representation symbolize?What was its significance in the mind of the personwho carved it? We go straight back to all the prob-lems  of  trying  to  grapple  with  intentionality  andmeaning discussed above. We may get depressedand give up altogether, or simply write the imagesoff in some way according to a standard rote for-mula, e.g. as yet another example of so-called ‘en-toptic phenomena,’ or seek another kind of solace inthe acts of documentation, and counting and meas-uring the images.The alternative to this is to investigate: 1) therelationship between the images and the form andcharacter of the rocks on which they occur; 2) thelandscape settings and relationships between theserocks; and 3) the manner in which the carved panelsand the individual images physically impact on anobserver  and  the  manner  in  which  perception  ofthem is mediated through the human body itself,either at rest, or in movement. It is this last point Iwill expand on here.The images themselves, according to their spe-cific arrangement on the rock surface, clearly per-form work. They exert an agency through the bodythat must look down, look up, move among them, orview them at a distance, walk to the right or to theleft, turn and so on. They may also, to various de-grees, exert a purely visual fascination and power bydrawing in and transfixing vision, acting as ‘traps’(see Gell 1998). Moving around, between and overthe decorated rocks always involves an encounterwith image fields of different densities and intensities:those that hold attention, and those that only requirea glance, those that make you stand still and thosethat demand changes of position and posture. Thereis thus a theatrical and performative element to thepower  of  these  images  in  terms  of  the  degree  ofattention they hold and the experience of their en-counter. We can thus discuss these images and thepowerful effects they have on an observer’s bodyentirely without recourse to a traditional emphasison intentionality and meaning. Furthermore we cancompare and contrast the different bodily effects ofimages on different rocks: on this rock I must movealong it in a linear fashion in order to see them, onanother rock I must move around the images in acircular motion and so on. This is important because80Viewpointpart of the reception, and therefore the significanceof the images, was how they are perceived by anobserver. Whether the effects these images have onour bodily reception of them was discursively in-tended by the rock carver(s) or an unintended conse-quence of their action(s) is something that we can thengo on to discuss. What is important here is that wecan describe and discuss the bodily effects of the im-ages in an adequate fashion entirely without need-ing to make reference to specific intentions in themind of the rock carver with regard to the meaningof the imagery (e.g. the circle cross was a sun symbol).Similarly, we can describe the bodily effects ofrocks, hills, monuments, etc., and their relationshipsin the landscape, without recourse to a traditionalnotion  of  intentionality  and  meaning.  My  answerthen to the question under debate ‘can archaeologyrecover past intentions?’ is that we can indeed dothis from a phenomenological perspective stressingembodiment,  but  not  from  a  traditional  cognitiveviewpoint demanding that we interpret what thingsmean or connote.Christopher TilleyDepartment of AnthropologyUniversity College London33–35 Torrington PlaceLondonWC1E 6BTUKEmail: c.tilley@ucl.ac.ukReferencesGell, A., 1998. Art and Agency. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Tilley,  C.,  1999.  Metaphor  and  Material  Culture.  Oxford:Blackwell.Tilley,  C.,  2004.  The  Materiality  of  Stone:  Explorations  inLandscape Phenomenology. Oxford: Berg.Tilley, C., n.d. The Agency of Imagery: Explorations inLandscape Phenomenology 2 (manuscript in prepa-ration).Author biographyChristopher Tilley is Professor of Anthropology at Uni-versity  College  London.  Recent  books  include  TheMateriality of Stone: Explorations in Landscape Phenomenol-ogy (2004), Metaphor and Material Culture (1999), The Dolmensand Passage Graves of Sweden (1999) and An Ethnography ofthe Neolithic (1996). He is currently researching two fur-ther volumes of a trilogy of books on Landscape Phenom-enology and an ethnography concerned with gardens andgardening.

Art and Agency.

The Agency of Imagery: Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology 2 (manuscript in preparation). Author biography Christopher Tilley is Professor of Anthropology at University College London. Recent books include The Materiality of Stone: Explorations

Mind and body in landscape research

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