An old Nunamiut hunter, Lewis Binford’s key informant, once summed up life as a hunter-gatherer in a single phrase: “Willow smoke and dog tails. When we’re on the move, all we see are the dog tails pulling the sleds; when we stop, our life is filled with the smoke of willow fires.”
Hunting and gathering is, above all, walking. We walk to enter the world as embodied beings, as beings among beings. It is a kind of work, the work of weaving relations with the world. Walking opens the possibility of encounters and rare but powerful moments of surprise.
However, “dog tails and willow smoke” also speak to something else; to the prosaic and the everyday nature of movement. Life unfolds in slow, habitual rhythms of motion and pause, of routine travels and momentary halts, punctuated by sparse encounters and even sparser astonishments.
Walking is slow, rhythmic work. Lifting the foot, an inhale, shifting weight as the body leans forward, lowering the foot again, exhale. It is a sequence of steps, breaths, and heartbeats; the mechanical stretching of limbs, tendons, sinews; muscle contraction ; small inner body movements; fluids pumping, gases diffusing through membranes, hormones being released, electric signals jumping across synapses.
Above all, walking is pre-cognitive and pre-discursive work. As we navigate the world with our bodies, intentions and decisions are formed before we become consciously aware of them. Most decisions, such as tensing one muscle and relaxing another, do not pass through language. Yet this does not mean that we walk like biomechanical automatons. Like all animals, when human animals walk, we think with the landscape and the things entangled in it. The landscape moves us; we avoid muddy puddles and follow deer tracks along a ridge.
Walking is stubbornly material. It is a body immersed in terrain, responding to the firmness of the ground beneath our feet, the crumbling stone, the grip of limestone fissures, the obstacles posed by dense underbrush/undergrowth? or a mud patch. Walking means that the landscape is not merely seen, but sensed. And yet landscape is always more than perception; it is the overflow of affective noise, the murmuring of collective movements that make up the world (the flicker of shadows, the drift of clouds, the ripple of grasses, the breath of wind) and that sustain our bodies (as do panting breath, the surge of blood through vessels, the ache of a blister). Landscape is also the surfacing of things revealed by encounter.
We walk and walk. Most of it is unremarkable, just dog tails and willow smoke. But then suddenly, a heap of stones. Is it discovery, or just a momentary alignment of shadows?
Our first contact with the landscape emerges in a shift of sensory perception almost before thought, as one sensation or one event floats up from an ocean of affective noise, silencing the others and allowing us to experience a phenomenon. This encounter may become a surprise.
Surprise is a moment of reminiscence, a merging of the past and the present through the reappearance of remnants in the encounter. It is recognition, a summoning of the past into the now. Just as memory is not a coherent story about what was, but rather a process of repeated acts of remembering, triggered by moments in the present that link to something that persists. Memory is a particular relationship to time; it is an encounter with a past that still lingers.
The past does not exist as a series of events. We never encounter the past as a specific date, timeline or sequence. Ontologically, the past is all around us, interwoven, dissolving and fading into the present. It persists as entangled remains as traces that endure in time by virtue of their material tenacity. Every place bears the marks of its history because the past endures in its materiality. Not all things survive equally; some last longer than others, and some can be made to last.
Memory does not need a psychic substrate; it is a material phenomenon. A trace, an imprint in a medium, is a memory of the event that inscribed it. Acts of marking are acts of remembering. There is no essential difference between human memory and the impression left in wax, a fossil in rock, or a footprint in mud.
Landscape archaeology is thus memory-work. We enact memory as we walk through a landscape, when we encounter things that surprise us.
The first trait of archaeological engagement with landscapes is their sheer materiality and performativity. To encounter the material world, we must merge/immerse ourselves in? with it. Working with past landscapes is first and foremost a performative, material intervention. It is rhythmic walking, panting, sweating, mud-covered boots, tired legs; it is willow smoke and dog tails.
The second characteristic is attentiveness to the everyday. In the search for past landscapes, anything, literally anything, can become an encounter; a standing stone, a hollow in the ground, a cairn or a potsherd, for example. Each one of these things has the potential to interrupt the texture of dog tails and willow smoke, becoming a surprise. These traces are usually remnants of daily life; the texture of the past is woven from such everyday things as dog tails and willow smoke, which are occasionally interrupted by encounters.
The third is a particular sensitivity to place. “It happened here!”; here, there, somewhere, where the trace attests to a link between the present and the past. As a site of encounter and amazement place is where we stop to gather and collect. Archaeological practice is the work of material reminiscence: recognizing a place’s traces as material memories of past events, and translating them into another medium. From these sites of encounter and surprise, we take away words, photographs, drawings, and fragments. The past arises from places; we carry it forward with us.
Landscape archaeology establishes relationships between the past and the present. As we walk, the past surfaces in the present. One echoes the other; they overlap through repetition, with one reproducing the other in an altered form, through encounters and translations. The present is revealed as a complex palimpsest, where traces of the past are revised, concealed and repressed. There are no clear sequences. Everywhere are acts of concealment, reversals and ambiguities.
Landscape archaeology is a form of performative material intervention in the world, much like hunting and gathering. The routine of walking, the rhythm of movement, dog tails and willow smoke, is not just background filler between discoveries. It is the very structure that enables things to stand out as distinct and meaningful.
A routine of walking draws on reflexes and capacities sedimented in the body, layered over millennia of movement through landscapes our ancestors walked. Walking is how the evolutionary past comes alive in the present. Every new walk leaves its own trace, imprinting the past into the ground. Over time, footsteps become memories, worn into paths, patterns, and places. Walking places us within a multitemporal world. It is an ongoing process of interweaving the past with the present, the body with the landscape.
However, not every trace reveals, and not every path leads somewhere. The landscape offers us no final clarity. Some astonishments become evidence. Others become memories. Then there are those that simply leave you with the gentle shock of being wrong again. But even these leave marks.
