Working the land: imagining the landscape

Abstract

Archaeologists are prone to retrospection. In 1974 Gordon Willey edited a book in which a series of writers looked back over their most famous projects. Some of their contributions were both revealing and frank but in other cases, I suspect, the authors were trying to write themselves into history. It can be dangerous to retrace our steps over the same intellectual ground, but we may still want to attempt this so that we can come to terms with unfinished business. We study some problems which will not let us go. This paper considers a typical example.