Powerpoint presentation: Download
ViewLandscapes of the Near East

Discussion points

• Barbara Bender writes "Landscape is 'the world out there' as understood, experienced, and engaged with through human consciousness and active involvement" (303). What are the various ways we materially and imaginatively engage with landscapes? Travelling, cultivating, building in, smelling... What else? How is the concept of "environment", or let's say "world" different from landscape?

• What does Bender refer to when she speaks of landscape as palimpsest?

* Haptic knowledge of the world: the practice of climbing a hill every day and the way we learn the inclination of the hill in our bones.

• Gathering by the water: Spatial practices and the event of the place

• The poetic and subtle materiality of place: Inebolu, Black Sea region of Turkey.

Additional bibliography/further reading for the curious and the ambitious

• Wilkinson, Tony J.; 2003. Archaeological landscapes of the Near East. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press.