Tebenquiche Chico on the Surface of Time

Abstract

To know the archaeological landscape through non-destructive survey techniques implies that the landscape is something fragile, lying there to be directly observed by the archaeologist. It also implies that the archaeologist is the one who must deploy his or her set of techniques over space in order to capture that object which the landscape is assumed to be, and that this can be done with enough care not to destroy the surface on which it is revealed.

But the landscape could well be otherwise, and this is the direction taken in this paper. The landscape may not be a thing, an object of reality waiting to be observed. It could instead be understood, at least in part, as a representation. In that case, the landscape would not be observed through non-destructive techniques, but through a constructive and dialogic methodology in the course of which observations, interpretations, and representations are created, both as an imaginary reality and within the imagination of reality.

First, we present a historical reconstruction of the representations of a single archaeological locality, Tebenquiche Chico, Antofagasta de la Sierra, Catamarca, Argentina. Over the last eight decades, these representations have involved different surface dialogues, including and producing different subjects, techniques, and interpretations. The surfaces created through this history involve representing a landscape in terms of its active existence in the past, with the risk of transferring the possibilities and modes of knowing the landscape to the idea of it as an entity of reality.

In order to reduce that risk, we then examine what every construction of landscape entails: how place is lived in time. The tensions created between structures and practices, when relocated in time from the static condition of the landscape, ultimately make it possible to understand the hybridity of landscape, since it is both representation and not representation, and its one-dimensionality, since it speaks primarily of the spatialization of practices.

Thus, the archaeological landscape, as a reality of the past—theory—and as a construction of the present—methodology—acquires, by mapping the future, its political dimension when it is understood within the flow of dialogues on the surface of time.