Quote of the week: Peter Fowler on Landscape Archaeology

“Landscape archaeology can be carried out in any part of Britain, so long as you acquire the right frame of mind to do it. If you accept that a landscape can be ‘read’, rather like a page of music, then you can learn to read it. Your view will change; instead of seeing scenery, you will find yourself looking at landscape; instead of seeing just hedges and fields and woods, your eyes will begin to elucidate patterns. This applies in towns and cities just as much as countryside.

“What is actually happening, as you learn various techniques, is that your perception of the three dimensional adjusts to a fourth dimension: you begin to see time, or if not time itself then the consequences of time. Scenery – countryside and townscape – made of shapes, smells, sounds and colours becomes a landscape which has evolved over the centuries and is still evolving, a product of the synergy of humanity and the natural.”

From Reading the Land  by Peter Fowler. British Archaeology, December 2001.