Inscribed Landscapes: Marking and Making Place

by Bruno David (Editor), Brano David (Editor)

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 social participation and resistance. Participation involves interrelationships 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 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.

303 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2002

About the author

Bruno David est un naturaliste français spécialisé en paléontologie et en sciences de l’évolution et de la biodiversité. Depuis 2015, il est président du Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle (MNHN).

Il a été chercheur au CNRS et directeur de l’unité Biogéosciences à l’Université de Bourgogne. Paléontologue et biologiste marin, ses recherches l’ont conduit à explorer l’évolution de la biodiversité à partir de modèles actuels comme fossiles. Bruno David a participé à plusieurs grandes missions océanographiques, notamment dans l’Océan Austral, la mer des Caraïbes et dans le Pacifique avec le submersible Nautile.