The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research hosts a keynote Annual Lecture delivered by eminent, international scholars on a wide range of archaeological research which crosses continents, periods and approaches in its exploration of the diversity of the human past. The Thirty-seventh McDonald Annual Lecture, 'After Landscape, will be given by Dr Zoë Crossland, Columbia University. Lecture to be held at 5:00pm GMT.
Abstract:
We’re living in a world in which historic landscapes are being destroyed and remade at an unprecedented scale. Humans have reshaped the very geology of the planet, as debates over the Anthropocene have highlighted. Increasingly, notions of landscape seem to exist as a nostalgic retreat or as something to be saved. And yet landscape aesthetics are also implicated in modernity’s destructions, emerging alongside and underwritten by the European colonial project, enclosure, and the plantation.
What might happen to the archaeological study of place if we take up postcolonial critiques of landscape's provincialism, and posthumanist challenges to its centering of human subjectivity? What questions and perspectives might this open up for contemporary research? In a world where researchers ask whether glaciers listen, and how forests think, what is left for landscape study? How might we start to think place differently as archaeologists, and how might this help us engage with the challenges of the contemporary world?
I explore this question in the context of the historical reshaping of rice landscapes in highland Madagascar, taking my cue from the remembered speeches of the 18th century king of highland Madagascar who insisted that “rice is my friend and my equal”. This offers a different starting point from which to explore the politics and histories of place, with resonances that go well beyond highland Madagascar.
