Does the landscape have a memory and what can it tell us about our ancestors?

Is there such a thing as an indigenous landscape? Why do we cling so much to landscape as such? And where does an archaeologist fit in? These were not the only topics of the interview with Petr Krištuf in the university radio Wéčko. You can listen to the audio version in Czech at the link below.

Roughly six thousand years ago, our ancestors began to build the first monuments, which for centuries symbolically structured the landscape. What was the evolution and perception of ritual sites, defined by mounds or massive enclosures, by subsequent generations? Does the landscape have a memory, and what can it tell us about our ancestors? This is not only what Petr Krištuf – a lecturer at the Department of Archaeology and Vice Dean for External Relations at the Faculty of Arts of the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen – is now exploring with an international team of scientists in a project supported by the Czech Science Foundation (GAČR).

"People left traces in the landscape not only in the form of artefacts, i.e. objects and buildings, but they also left chemical traces. Thus, we can still trace human activity in the landscape today. We are therefore using modern archaeological methods and at the same time natural scientific ones," said Petr Krištuf about the project.

In an interview for the university's radio station Wéčko, the archaeologist also addresses the question of why we cling so much to the landscape as we know it: "Personally, I believe it is because people cling to stability, which also applies to the landscape they live in, and find it difficult to accept change. They try to keep the landscape that surrounds them as they know it, for example, from their childhood. In some cases, they go further and try not to preserve it, but even to return it to a state that they believe is either ideal or better than its current state. But this is an individual view and each person may perceive the ideal state a little differently."

Is archaeology just about "digging in the ground"? "While fieldwork is part of archaeology, it is such a broad field that it is not just excavation. When you study archaeology you can do remote sensing, process digital photographs and data, or create 3D models of landscapes and artefacts. You can therefore find employment both in the laboratory, processing various finds, and at the computer in a virtual environment," said the vice-dean.

And what, according to Petr Krištuf, is the most fascinating thing about archaeology as such? "The fact that you can discover how different views of the world people can have across geographical space, but also across time," he said.

Not only that, you can listen in Czech here: