Been counting pot sherds for weeks so my brain needs some exercise. Well
I was trained in English-style landscape archaeology and history and did
my PhD on Welsh landscape history. Landscape is in the broadest sense is
as central to British and European archaeology as culture is to American
archeology- and both as difficult to define the more you look into them.
However, I have a very ambivalent position to landscape studies but
never seem able to escape it. At its worst landscape studies can be
obsessed with continuity and the visual rather than the underlying
socio-economic-political change and an excuse for not understanding any
one period or its sources at all well. I was brought up in (and rebelled
slightly from)  the Hoskins tradition of landscape history at Leicester
but the two books that have influenced me most were Rodney Hilton's, A
Medieval Region (a Marxist  study of the west Midlands) and Marc Bloch's
French Rural History, and more recently Denis Cosgrove's work- and
though he was a bit of an evironmental determinist Braudel.  I suppose
the things that continue to interest me are political and economic
competition in the landscape which I increasingly think of  as space
(the French l'espace sociale). I am very much an indeterminist when it
comes to cultural geography (more Rosaldo than Geertz) but I am
interested in origins. How something which happened in the 10th or 16th
centuries and long lost its meaning but still has an effect in the
modern landscape. I am  not very interested in reconstructing past
landscapes per se But I am still fascinated by the interpretation of
documents (but may of those I work on are in abbreviated medieval latin
in wierd hands and relate to archaic legal concepts- so can be pretty
complicated) and the importance of relating documents to the visual
landscape, maps and buildings to prise new interpretations out of them.
I suppose I see landscape as more of a tool than an end in itself. I
like regional level analysis eg of urban systems but I am also still
fascinated by looking at some small unpromising and possibly ugly unit
of town or countryscape and prising together its history and underlying
structures or sometimes being diverted into something entirely
different. An example of the latter is a study based on a chance
documentary reference when I was being paid to do of a deserted village
in Bedforshire. It  led to a study of a man from a peasant family  who
became a Gascon lord in France. However, given the resources I would
only work in places where there was warm weather, gourmet food and good
local wines but then like Hoskins's Medieval Peasant ( a book set  a
mere 2 miles from my house) I carry the impact of the cold wet English
landscape in my rheumatic muscles and joints. Despite my ambivalence to
visual landscapes I am still emotively moved by them - standing on the
Louisbourg ramparts or discovering some interesting building in a
Belgian slumscape still inspire me in a general way and I am fascinated
by landscape in film.  I am currently rewatching Edgar Reitz's brilllant
TV series Heimat having bought the DVD set for Christmas - set in the
Hunsruck area of Germany 1918-45. I know this affects my approach to
archaeology and history but in a way I find difficult to define because
it is largely at the subconsious level rather than in the logical
creation of narrative. Hope this is not totally meaningless- but the
thousands of pottery sherds and ever expanding access file are getting
to me..