TEBENQUICHE CHICO ON THE SURFACE OF TIME

Abstract

To study an archaeological landscape through non-destructive surveying procedures implies that the landscape is like a fragile thing lying there to be directly seen by the archaeologist. It also implies that it is the archaeologist who should display over space his/her set of techniques, with the aim of capturing that would-be object; and that s/he can manage her/himself to be soft enough not to destroy the surface in which the landscape can be seen. But the archaeological landscape could be a different one. The landscape could be not a thing, an object of reality that waits to be seen, but it could be understood, at least in part, as a representation. In that case, it would not be through non-destructive techniques that the landscape could be seen, but through a constructive and dialogic methodology that entails the creation of observations, interpretations and representations, both as an imagined reality as in the imagination of reality. In the first place, we present a historic reconstruction of the representations of the same archaeological site, Tebenquiche Chico (Antofagasta de la Sierra, Catamarca, Argentina). During the last eighty years these representations were implied in a variety of surface dialogues, including and producing characters, techniques and interpretations. Surfaces thus created represent the landscape in terms of its active past existence, with the risk of reifying the possibilities and modes of approaching landscape. In second place, with the aim of reducing that risk we examine the implication of every landscape construction, that is, how the landscape is lived in time. The tensions created between structures and practices, replaced in time from the static of landscape, help to understand the hybridism (it is representation and, at the same time, it is not) and one-dimensionality (it is mainly about spatialization of practices) of landscape. Thus, an archaeological landscape as a past reality –theory- and as a present construction –methodology-re-gains its political dimensions when it is understood as mapping the future inside the flux of dialogues in the surface of time.