Inscribed Landscapes: Marking and Making Place

Landscapes all over the world are inscribed with enduring physical marks. Socially constructed and engaged, landscape inscriptions (monuments, roads, gardens, rock-art) are foci of social experience and as such are symbolic expressions that mold and facilitate the transmission of ideas. Through inscription, landscapes become social arenas where the past is memorialized, 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 twenty-one scholars across a range of fields - primarily archaeology, anthropology, and geography - it discusses how social codes and hegemonic practices have resulted in the production of particular senses of place, exploring the physical and metaphysical 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 inter-relationships 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 parts: the first focuses on rock-art, the second on monuments, and the third describes how the physical and metaphysical articulate to inscribe places with meaning.