Understanding the Landscape, Understanding the Past: How and Why Archaeologists Read the Landscape
Landscapes provide a powerful lens for viewing the past. By studying how ancient peoples interacted with and understood their landscapes, and how they constructed and used the environments, archaeologists gain insights into beliefs, practices, and social structures. Landscape archaeology emphasises the interconnectedness of human activity or occupation strategies and the environment, revealing how the physical world shaped—and was shaped by—ancient societies.
This new discipline emerged in the 1960s, initially focusing on environmental and geographical data. By the 1980s and 90s, it adopted a more interdisciplinary approach, blending methods from geography, anthropology, history, and environmental science, and incorporating diverse perspectives and new technologies. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, technological advancements revolutionised the field. Tools such as Geographical Information Systems (GIS) enabled researchers to layer diverse datasets—topography, vegetation, climate, and archaeological features—onto a single digital map. Furthermore, remote sensing technologies, including Radar and LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging), have transformed our ability to see through dense vegetation or soil. The ability to observe and map landscapes from the air opened opportunities for identifying sites, revealing unknown features such as buried structures, roads, and agricultural systems, in their spatial relationships.
Archaeologists interpret landscapes using a range of methods. Field Surveys across a landscape are made to identify, record and map signs of human activity. Geophysical Surveys and Remote Sensing are detecting subsurface features without digging. Aerial Photographs identify other patterns. GIS and Spatial Analysis reveal the many relationships among archaeological sites, monuments, and natural features.
Landscape archaeology combines traditional fieldwork with technology. We now study landscapes as dynamic systems that are not just static features but constantly change over time due to both natural processes (erosion, climate change) and human activities (farming, settlement, monument construction, transport routes).
Professor Pascale Chevalier, University Clermont Auvergne, France
Landscape in Language: Space, Emotion, and Evaluation in Social Interaction
This plenary lecture approaches landscape not merely as physical space, but as a socially, culturally, and emotionally structured category that is fundamentally shaped and mediated by language. Spatial expressions are shown to function not only as neutral descriptions of the world, but as tools for social positioning and emotional evaluation. Drawing on cognitive, pragmatic, and cultural-linguistic perspectives, the lecture demonstrates that spatial concepts such as proximity, distance, verticality, containment, and movement provide a foundation for abstract and metaphorical meanings, enabling speakers to conceptualize social hierarchies, emotional distance, intensification and evaluation. In this sense, space functions as a metaphorical infrastructure for social and emotional meaning-making.
Emotion and evaluation are also structured through metonymic strategies and comparative constructions, which often rely on spatial imagery, extremity, and contrast to strengthen emotional impact. Spatial idioms and comparative phraseology thus serve as powerful linguistic tools for encoding emotional intensity, evaluation, and symbolic positioning in discourse. The lecture highlights how spatial idioms and metaphors systematically structure emotional and evaluative meanings. They enable speakers to conceptualize emotional states, social relations, and life experience in terms of movement, direction, access, and spatial extent.
Attention is also given to contact-linguistic processes and the role of loanwords within these evaluative and comparative frameworks. In language contact situations, borrowed elements are often shown to carry sociocultural connotations. Speakers exploit loanwords to compare entities or situations along specific semantic dimensions, thereby producing evaluations. Overall, the lecture argues that spatial language provides a linguistic mechanism for expressing not only location and movement, but also emotional involvement and evaluative perspective. Space, as structured through language, emerges as a key medium through which speakers conceptualize, experience, and emotionally interpret their social and experiential worlds.
Professor Anita Pavić Pintarić, University of Zadar, Croatia