Inscribed Landscapes: Marking and Making Place.
B. DAVID & M. WILSON (editors),
2002. Inscribed Landscapes: Marking and Making Place.
University of Hawai'i Press, Honolulu.
Landscapes all over the world are inscribed with enduring physical marks. Socially constructed and engaged, landscape inscriptions (such as monuments, roads, gardens, rock-art) are foci of social experience and as such are symbolic expressions that mould and facilitate the transmission of ideas. Through inscription, landscapes become social arenas where the past is memorialised, where personal roots, ambitions and attachments are laid, and where futures unfold.
Inscribed Landscapes explores the role of inscription in the social construction of place, power and identity. Bringing together 21 scholars across a range of fields - primarily archaeology, anthropology and geography - it examines how social codes and hegemonic practices have resulted in the production of particular senses of place, exploring the physical and sensual marking of place as a means of accessing social history.
Two major conceptual themes link the chapters of this book: social participation and resistance. Participation involves interrelationships between people and place, the way inscribed environments and social experience intertwine; resistance relates to the rejection of modes of domination and their inscription in the landscape. The volume explores these themes in three Sections: the first focuses on rock-art, the second on monuments, and the third describes how the physical and the sensual articulate in a process of experience and dwelling to inscribe places with meaning.