Christopher Tilley
Biographic Data
| ID | 88054 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Christopher Tilley |
| GIVEN NAMES | Christopher |
| FAMILY NAME | Tilley |
| SIGNATURE | TILLEY C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University College London |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 52 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 770 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 51 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1982 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2020 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
The Materiality of Stone: Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology: 1
With Wayne Bennett From the silky wax qualities of the surfaces of some quartz menhirs to the wood-grain textures of others, to the golden honeycombed limestones of Malta, to the icy frozen waves of the Cambrian sandstone of south-east Sweden, this book investigates the sensuous material qualities of stone. Tactile sensations, sonorous qualities, colour, and visual impressions are all shown to play a vital part in our understanding of the power a…
Interpretative Archaeology
An Anthropology of Landscape
memory of Tor, an extraordinary Border Collie who knew the heath better than either of us
Body and Image: Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology 2
The understanding and interpretation of ancient architecture, landscapes, and art has always been viewed through an iconographic lens—a cognitive process based on traditional practices in art history. But ancient people did not ascribe their visions on canvas, rather on hills, stones, and fields. Thus, Chris Tilley argues, the iconographic approach falls short of understanding how ancient people interacted with their imagery. A kinaesthetic appro…
Interpreting Landscapes: Geologies, Topographies, Identities; Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology 3
This book takes a new approach to writing about the past. Instead of studying the prehistory of Britain from Mesolithic to Iron Age times in terms of periods or artifact classifications, Tilley examines it through the lens of their geology and landscapes, asserting the fundamental significance of the bones of the land in the process of human occupation over the long durée. Granite uplands, rolling chalk downlands, sandstone moorlands, and pebbled…
Magna Carta and the honour of Wallingford: Magna Carta and the honour of Wallingford
Magna Carta mentions the honour of Wallingford twice. Exploring the context of this shows how a tenurial relationship predating John's accession to the throne led to minor ‘gentry’ landholders experiencing the king's manipulation of marriages, wardships and escheats directly, and resulted in many serving in John's military expeditions. All this was in addition to the increasingly onerous demands of royal government also felt by many of their neig…
Material Culture and Text: The Art of Ambiguity
Originally published in 1991, this is the first book-length exploration of post-structuralist discourse theory in archaeology. It tackles the most basic problem of historical and archaeological analysis - the relationship between text and artefact – in an analysis of prehistoric art fusing theory and the practice of interpretation to create a fresh framework for understanding the relationship between past and present. Focusing on a collection of …
Bronze Age stone worlds of Bodmin Moor: Excavating Leskernick
Most archaeological work on the British Bronze Age has been undertaken in Wessex. Here a team fr om UCL' s Institute of Archaeology and Department of Anthropology describe their investigation of a very different Bronze Age landscape on Bodmin Moor in Cornwall. Their project, at the site of Leskernick, is innovative in its methodology and in how it is presented to the public
Interpreting material culture
This paper similarly analyses historical meaning in objects, through the discussion of a group of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century New England gravestones and their motifs. It has come to be a classic statement of the fundamental techniques-dating, seriation, diffusion, typology and style classification-that the working material culturalist uses every day. It combines this methodological ease with an interpretative analysis which aims to sharpe…
Landscapes beyond land: Routes, Aesthetics, Narratives
List of figures Notes on contributors Preface Introduction Arnar Arnason, Nicolas Ellison, Jo Vergunst and Andrew Whitehouse Chapter 1. Walking the past in the present Christopher Tilley Chapter 2. 'A painter's eye is just a way of looking at the world': botanic artist Roger Banks Griet Scheldeman Chapter 3. Encountering glaciers: Two centuries of stories from the Saint Elias Mountains, Northwestern North America Julie Cruikshank Chapter 4. Fence…
Materializing identities: An Introduction
From the English Cottage Garden to the Swedish Allotment: Banal Nationalism and the Concept of the Garden
This article considers Billig's concept of “banal nationalism” in relation to a comparative material culture study of ordinary English and Swedish gardens and gardeners. Banal nationalism is about the myriad everyday practices, rather than overt ideologies, by means of which nations reproduce themselves as nations. While Billig's own work considers this solely in terms of linguistic discourses in relation to such matters as political speech and r…
Materiality in materials
I really welcome Tim Ingold's paper because intellectual debates about the meaning and significance of material culture or general attempts to theorize material forms are comparatively rare as opposed to the mass of literature discussing particular categories of things. In the paper he systematically sets out to oppose a concept of materiality (apparently worthless) to the study of materials which, in contrast, he suggests, may lead to many new i…
Objectification
Monuments and Memorials
Handbook of Material Culture
THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES In the Matter of Marxism - Bill Maurer Structuralism and Semiotics - Robert Layton Phenomenology and Material Culture - Julian Thomas Objectification - Christopher Tilley Agency, Biography and Objects - Janet Hoskins Scenes from a Troubled Engagement - Bjornar Olsen Post-structuralism and Material Culture Studies Colonial Matters - Peter van Dommelen Material Culture and Postcolonial Theory in Colonial Situations THE BODY…
The Sensory Dimensions of Gardening
This paper considers the multiple sensory dimensions of gardening and their synesthetic significance in an ethnographic study of gardens and gardening in England and Sweden. It challenges the notion that the different senses (vision, smell, sound, touch and taste) can be considered in hierarchical terms i.e. some as being more important than others in an assessment of the meaning and significance of gardening as an everyday practice. It argues th…
Materializing Stonehenge: The Stonehenge Riverside Project and New Discoveries
This article reviews recent interpretations of Stonehenge in terms of contrasting uses of stone and timber in the mid-3rd millennium BC. It explores the relationship of this enigmatic monument with circles of wood at nearby Durrington Walls and Woodhenge, establishing how these various monuments might have been integrated into a single scheme in which these remarkable structures were linked by artificial avenues and the natural feature of the Riv…
Round Barrows and Dykes as Landscape Metaphors
This article outlines the results of phenomenological research on the significance of landscape features, in particular ridges and coombe (dry valley) systems, in relation to the locations of Bronze Age round barrows and late Bronze Age/early Iron Age crossridge and spur dykes constructed along a chalk ridge in central southern England. It considers the locations of these monuments in a holistic manner and argues that together the round barrows, …
Mind and Body in Landscape Research
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Negotiating Materiality: International and Local Museum Practices at the Vanuatu Cultural Centre and National Museum
In this paper, we examine the idiosyncratic ways in which the Vanuatu Cultural Centre has incorporated global museum technologies into highly localised systems of object management. The convergence of understandings of subject‐object relations, and indeed of materiality, highlights the effects of museum practices of objectification on local practice as well as the effects of local agenda on museum practice. In constructing a holistic analysis of …
Ethnography and Material Culture
An Archaeology of Supernatural Places: The Case of West Penwith
This article interprets 'natural' features of the landscape unaltered by human agency - hills, rock outcrops, and solution basins - in West Penwith, Cornwall, and discusses their significance in relation to Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Age monuments, cairns, and enclosures. We argue that 'nature' provides a fundamental conceptual resource for understanding cultural form, and that 'natural' architecture had a super-natural significance for prehisto…
Nature, Culture, Clitter: Distinguishing Between Cultural and Geomorphological Landscapes; The Case of Hilltop Tors in South-West England
This article addresses the problem of how to distinguish between natural and humanly modified features of the cultural landscape with reference to clitter (boulder and stone) masses in the south-west of England using the example of Leskernick hill, Bodmin Moor with its well-preserved Bronze Age settlement. We first set out a series of criteria for distinguishing between natural and humanly placed stones on the basis of a series of formal geomorph…
Art and the Re-Presentation of the Past
This article considers conceptual links between producing installation art works in the present and interpreting prehistoric lifeworlds. We consider connections between the work of contemporary 'landscape', 'environmental' or 'ecological' artists and an on-going landscape archaeology project centred on Leskernick Hill, Bodmin Moor in the south-west of Britain. We argue that the production of art works in the present can be a powerful means of int…
Handbook of Material Culture
THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES In the Matter of Marxism - Bill Maurer Structuralism and Semiotics - Robert Layton Phenomenology and Material Culture - Julian Thomas Objectification - Christopher Tilley Agency, Biography and Objects - Janet Hoskins Scenes from a Troubled Engagement - Bjornar Olsen Post-structuralism and Material Culture Studies Colonial Matters - Peter van Dommelen Material Culture and Postcolonial Theory in Colonial Situations THE BODY…
The powers of rocks: Topography and monument construction on Bodmin Moor
This paper is an exploration of the relationship between topographic features of the landscape, agency and power in small‐scale societies. In it I argue that topographic features of the landscape constitute a series of symbolic resources of essential significance in the formation of personal biographies and the creation and reproduction of structures of power. I attempt to explore these ideas through a discussion of the prehistoric landscapes of …
Ideology, Power and Prehistory
This book starts from the premise that methodology - the procedures for obtaining an 'objective' knowledge of the past - has always dominated archaeology to the detriment of broader social theory. It argues that social theory is archaeological theory, and that past failure to recognise this has resulted in disembodied archaeological theory and weak disciplinary practice. Ideology, Power and Prehistory therefore seeks to reinstate the primacy of s…
Performing Culture in the Global Village
■ This paper discusses the revival and performance of cultural traditions and 'ethnic lives' for a tourist audience in the third and fourth worlds using the example of a newly emergent development on Wala island, Malekula, Vanuatu. It examines issues of the commodification and objectification of culture, in the light of debates about the 'invention of tradition', in relation to a global tourist industry. A major concern is with the politics and v…
Excavation as theatre
Everyone who has dug up anything knows the excitement of bringing an ancient object to its first light for centuries. Everyone who has directed an archaeological excavation knows the excitement of finding sense in the pattern of many ancient objects revealed. Why is it, then, that the publication of that pattern in a site report is a more wearisome business when-if ever-it take place? Is that just the nature of the business, or is there more to b…
Materializing Stonehenge: The Stonehenge Riverside Project and New Discoveries
This article reviews recent interpretations of Stonehenge in terms of contrasting uses of stone and timber in the mid-3rd millennium BC. It explores the relationship of this enigmatic monument with circles of wood at nearby Durrington Walls and Woodhenge, establishing how these various monuments might have been integrated into a single scheme in which these remarkable structures were linked by artificial avenues and the natural feature of the Riv…
Leskernick: Stone Worlds; Alternative Narratives; Nested Landscapes
The first season of an on-going project focused on Leskernick Hill, north-west Bodmin Moor, Cornwall, entailed a preliminary settlement survey and limited excavation of a stone row terminal. Leskernick comprises a western and a southern settlement situated on the lower, stony slopes of the hill and including 51 circular stone houses constructed using a variety of building techniques. Walled fields associated with these houses vary in size from 0.…
Reading Material Culture: Structuralism, Hermeneutics and Post-Structuralism
Part 1 Structuralism: Claude Levi-Strauss - structuralism and beyond, Christopher Tilley. Part 2 Hermeneutics: Paul Ricoeur - action, meaning and Henrietta L.Moore Clifford Geertz - toward a more thick understanding?, Eric Kline Silverman. Part 3 Post-structuralism: Roland Barthes - from sign to Bjornar Olsen Jacques Derrida - There is nothing outside of the text, Timothy Yates Michel Foucault - towards an archaeology of archaeology, Christopher …
Archaeology into the 1990s
Materiality in materials
I really welcome Tim Ingold's paper because intellectual debates about the meaning and significance of material culture or general attempts to theorize material forms are comparatively rare as opposed to the mass of literature discussing particular categories of things. In the paper he systematically sets out to oppose a concept of materiality (apparently worthless) to the study of materials which, in contrast, he suggests, may lead to many new i…
Art and the Re-Presentation of the Past
This article considers conceptual links between producing installation art works in the present and interpreting prehistoric lifeworlds. We consider connections between the work of contemporary 'landscape', 'environmental' or 'ecological' artists and an on-going landscape archaeology project centred on Leskernick Hill, Bodmin Moor in the south-west of Britain. We argue that the production of art works in the present can be a powerful means of int…
An Archaeology of Supernatural Places: The Case of West Penwith
This article interprets 'natural' features of the landscape unaltered by human agency - hills, rock outcrops, and solution basins - in West Penwith, Cornwall, and discusses their significance in relation to Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Age monuments, cairns, and enclosures. We argue that 'nature' provides a fundamental conceptual resource for understanding cultural form, and that 'natural' architecture had a super-natural significance for prehisto…
The Sensory Dimensions of Gardening
This paper considers the multiple sensory dimensions of gardening and their synesthetic significance in an ethnographic study of gardens and gardening in England and Sweden. It challenges the notion that the different senses (vision, smell, sound, touch and taste) can be considered in hierarchical terms i.e. some as being more important than others in an assessment of the meaning and significance of gardening as an everyday practice. It argues th…
TAG and ‘post-modernism’: A reply to John Bintliff
Two organizers of the TAG meeting at Lampeter, December 1991, take issue with Bintliff's view of their intellectual position, starting with the label ‘post-modern’
Reading Material Culture: Structuralism, Hermeneutics, and Post-Structuralism
Interpreting material culture
This paper similarly analyses historical meaning in objects, through the discussion of a group of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century New England gravestones and their motifs. It has come to be a classic statement of the fundamental techniques-dating, seriation, diffusion, typology and style classification-that the working material culturalist uses every day. It combines this methodological ease with an interpretative analysis which aims to sharpe…
Materializing identities: An Introduction
Interpreting Landscapes: Geologies, Topographies, Identities; Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology 3
This book takes a new approach to writing about the past. Instead of studying the prehistory of Britain from Mesolithic to Iron Age times in terms of periods or artifact classifications, Tilley examines it through the lens of their geology and landscapes, asserting the fundamental significance of the bones of the land in the process of human occupation over the long durée. Granite uplands, rolling chalk downlands, sandstone moorlands, and pebbled…
Mind and Body in Landscape Research
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
From the English Cottage Garden to the Swedish Allotment: Banal Nationalism and the Concept of the Garden
This article considers Billig's concept of “banal nationalism” in relation to a comparative material culture study of ordinary English and Swedish gardens and gardeners. Banal nationalism is about the myriad everyday practices, rather than overt ideologies, by means of which nations reproduce themselves as nations. While Billig's own work considers this solely in terms of linguistic discourses in relation to such matters as political speech and r…
Round Barrows and Dykes as Landscape Metaphors
This article outlines the results of phenomenological research on the significance of landscape features, in particular ridges and coombe (dry valley) systems, in relation to the locations of Bronze Age round barrows and late Bronze Age/early Iron Age crossridge and spur dykes constructed along a chalk ridge in central southern England. It considers the locations of these monuments in a holistic manner and argues that together the round barrows, …
Nature, Culture, Clitter: Distinguishing Between Cultural and Geomorphological Landscapes; The Case of Hilltop Tors in South-West England
This article addresses the problem of how to distinguish between natural and humanly modified features of the cultural landscape with reference to clitter (boulder and stone) masses in the south-west of England using the example of Leskernick hill, Bodmin Moor with its well-preserved Bronze Age settlement. We first set out a series of criteria for distinguishing between natural and humanly placed stones on the basis of a series of formal geomorph…
An Anthropology of Landscape
memory of Tor, an extraordinary Border Collie who knew the heath better than either of us
Questions rather than answers: Reply to comments on archaeology into the 1990s
Archaeology: The Loss of Isolation
It is interesting to reflect that only nine years separate David Clarke's paper 'Archaeology: the loss of innocence' and the publication of Symbolic and structural archaeology (Hodder 1982), which may be taken to mark the beginning of a 'post-processual' archaeology. Many of the ideas put forward in that book were being discussed and developed at Cambridge from around 1978. David's paper, and its publication in ANTIQUITY, may be taken as represen…
Ideology, symbolic power and ritual communication: A reinterpretation of Neolithic mortuary practices
The first part of this chapter attempts to arrive at an adequate notion and definition of ideology. An alternative to the viewpoint of Althusser concerning the nature of ideology is discussed, and the close relationship between ideological and symbolic form emphasised. Material symbols, especially those involved in ritual such as burial of the dead, may play an active part in the misrepresentation or concealment of real social relations. The trea…
Social formation, social structures and social change
In this chapter Tilley outlines aspects of a general social theory which has implications for all archaeological processes – the use and deposition of material culture and its analysis and interpretation. The concern is to situate archaeology securely within the social sciences to which it can contribute positively as a discipline defined by a distinctive body of information.
Ideology, power and long-term social change
This concluding chapter analyses the importance of the various discussions in the preceeding papers for the study of long-term change, material culture patterning and the best manner in which the past can be understood.-from Authors
Ideology and the legitimation of power in the Middle Neolithic of Southern Sweden
Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire
Ideology, power and prehistory: An introduction
Presents a critique of the dominant models in archaeological theory. Two general discussions follow: a summary is given of some approaches to the concept of power, and in particular a description and critique of Foucault's recent work on this topic is used as the basis for developing a working model of power. A model for the critique of ideology is developed through the examination of three examples. Firstly, Marx's critique of the bourgeois conc…
Ideology, Power and Prehistory
This book starts from the premise that methodology - the procedures for obtaining an 'objective' knowledge of the past - has always dominated archaeology to the detriment of broader social theory. It argues that social theory is archaeological theory, and that past failure to recognise this has resulted in disembodied archaeological theory and weak disciplinary practice. Ideology, Power and Prehistory therefore seeks to reinstate the primacy of s…
Social Theory and Archaeology
Questions rather than answers: Reply to comments on archaeology into the 1990s
Archaeology into the 1990s
Social Theory and Archaeology
Archaeological theory and method have recently become the subject of vigorous debate centred on the growing realization that archaeological theory is social theory and as such can be looked at by means of a wide variety of sociological frameworks, such as structuralism and post-structuralism, Marxism and critical theory. In this analysis, Shanks and Tilley argue against the functionalism and positivism which result from an inadequate assimilation…
Excavation as theatre
Everyone who has dug up anything knows the excitement of bringing an ancient object to its first light for centuries. Everyone who has directed an archaeological excavation knows the excitement of finding sense in the pattern of many ancient objects revealed. Why is it, then, that the publication of that pattern in a site report is a more wearisome business when-if ever-it take place? Is that just the nature of the business, or is there more to b…
What is archaeology
Re-Constructing Archaeology: Theory and Practice
Reading Material Culture: Structuralism, Hermeneutics, and Post-Structuralism
Reading Material Culture: Structuralism, Hermeneutics and Post-Structuralism
Part 1 Structuralism: Claude Levi-Strauss - structuralism and beyond, Christopher Tilley. Part 2 Hermeneutics: Paul Ricoeur - action, meaning and Henrietta L.Moore Clifford Geertz - toward a more thick understanding?, Eric Kline Silverman. Part 3 Post-structuralism: Roland Barthes - from sign to Bjornar Olsen Jacques Derrida - There is nothing outside of the text, Timothy Yates Michel Foucault - towards an archaeology of archaeology, Christopher …
The Politics of the Past
TAG and ‘post-modernism’: A reply to John Bintliff
Two organizers of the TAG meeting at Lampeter, December 1991, take issue with Bintliff's view of their intellectual position, starting with the label ‘post-modern’
Images in Stone: A Theory on Interpreting Rock Art
Reconstructing Archaeology: Theory and Practice
Interpretative Archaeology
Clowns and Circus Acts: A response to Trigger
Critique de l'article de B. Trigger qui prone le marxisme et l'evolutionnisme dans la recherche archeologique. L'A. reprend certains points avec lesquels il est en desaccord : seule la conception materialiste de l'histoire est inevitable, seule la vraie connaissance, et non le relativisme et l'ideologie, peut ameliorer le monde
The powers of rocks: Topography and monument construction on Bodmin Moor
This paper is an exploration of the relationship between topographic features of the landscape, agency and power in small‐scale societies. In it I argue that topographic features of the landscape constitute a series of symbolic resources of essential significance in the formation of personal biographies and the creation and reproduction of structures of power. I attempt to explore these ideas through a discussion of the prehistoric landscapes of …
Leskernick: Stone Worlds; Alternative Narratives; Nested Landscapes
The first season of an on-going project focused on Leskernick Hill, north-west Bodmin Moor, Cornwall, entailed a preliminary settlement survey and limited excavation of a stone row terminal. Leskernick comprises a western and a southern settlement situated on the lower, stony slopes of the hill and including 51 circular stone houses constructed using a variety of building techniques. Walled fields associated with these houses vary in size from 0.…
An Ethnography of the Neolithic: Early Prehistoric Societies in Southern Scandinavia
Performing Culture in the Global Village
■ This paper discusses the revival and performance of cultural traditions and 'ethnic lives' for a tourist audience in the third and fourth worlds using the example of a newly emergent development on Wala island, Malekula, Vanuatu. It examines issues of the commodification and objectification of culture, in the light of debates about the 'invention of tradition', in relation to a global tourist industry. A major concern is with the politics and v…
History (32 works) · Archaeology (28 works) · Sociology (22 works) · History (21 works) · Art (18 works) · Geography (16 works) · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies (15 works) · Political science (12 works) · Aesthetics (11 works) · Anthropology (11 works)