Landscape as a concept and a practice was originally devised by artists. It has been ‘discovered’ as a topic of intense interest by academics in several disciplines: landscape history, for example, especially in the form of English landscape history, has an honourable academic pedigree. In archaeology the rise of surface survey has led in the last two decades or so to an emphasis on the ways in which settlements have appeared and disappeared in different landscapes. Geographers, too, have for many years investigated settlement patterns and land use in landscapes, both historically and synchronically. Social anthropologists, on the other hand, with their emphasis on humans as actors in a social milieu and on the organisation of social systems, have traditionally shown much less interest in landscapes, although the situation has changed in the last two decades.

Archaeologists have traditionally focused on ‘the site’: social anthropologists have likewise traditionally focused on its living equivalent, ‘the community’. Despite the development of surface survey in archaeology and the recognition of ‘the site’ as an inherently artificial construct, it has continued to be the mainstay of most archaeological thinking.