From a landscape symbolic archaeology to an archaeology of sacred landscapes

Abstract

This paper deals with the different models of landscapes found in the Prehistory and History of the northwest area of the Iberian Peninsula. We consider both the pattern of settlement and land-use and the arrangement of supralocal territorial units. This study particularly focuses on the form of a symbolic or sacred landscape in a specific part of our research area. This sacred landscape would have represented the models of social landscapes in each period. By these means, we try to show the different patterns of rationality that lie behind the conception of sacred through some distinctive cultural periods; the aim is to show the contribution of each period for the cumulative construction of the present day landscape and to decode a different conception of landscape for each phase. The analysis has been made for a single zone within the core area of Galician Bronze Age rock art, between Campo Lameiro and Cotobade municipalities (Pontevedra). We think we have discovered elements of that symbolic meaning in the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the Roman period, the early Middle Ages and the Galician traditional rural world. Far away from the proposal of secular survivals, our analysis try to show how each one of those land marks is built up from a specific conception of landscape, although all of them coincide in marking an area endowed with peculiar natural conditions, but given different interpretations in each period.