Of 'Little People' and Ancient Monuments

Bibliographic Data

ID2130697
AuthorsTon Lemaire (corresponding author)
Year1995
Volume2
Issue1
Pages30-32
Publication date1995-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueArchaeological Dialogues (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1380-2038 • E-ISSN: 1478-2294
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s1380203800000295
OpenAlexW2044450845
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited15

Roymans' article is an original and valuable contribution to an interpretation of the 'cultural biography' of the landscape of a specific area by combining archaeological and folkloric evidence. His study concentrates on the sacred places of this landscape, especially the urnfields and barrows, because 'these are focal points from which local communities order and interpret the surrounding landscape'. The author rightly stresses that funerary monuments not only had a certain significance in the societies that constructed and used them, but that they also had a prominent place in the landscape of later societies up until pre-modern times. He suggests that, in the Meuse-Demer-Scheldt region, there has been 'a long-term incorporation of prehistorical burial monuments in the mythical landscape of later inhabitants'. Archaeology itself, for that matter, should be understood in the perspective of the (dis)continuing biography of the landscape because it presupposes the destruction of the ancient mythical geography, including the Christian one. Archaeology is the product of the 'modernisation' of space: it is presupposing and reflecting (upon) the coming of the modem world with its rationalisation and Entzauberung (disenchantment) of the landscape. In a similar way the study of folklore (Volkskunde in both Dutch and German) has been made possible and interesting by the waning of rural popular culture as a consequence of both the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution. Thus, it is no accident that modernity produced the conditions of becoming aware of the mythical meaning of the landscape exactly at the time that its traces are disappearing in the physical landscape as well as in the memory of the rural population

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Biography · Cultural landscape · Disenchantment · Enlightenment · Folklore · Geography · Landscape archaeology · Landscape design · Landscape history · Modernity · Modernization theory · Cultural History and Identity Formation · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · History · Landscape and Cultural Studies · Law · Philosophy

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