Editorial

We have been trying for several years now to align the contents of Landscapes towards a more international if not yet global range of articles, usually by including one, very occasionally two, articles that are not about Britain or Ireland. In a couple of recent issues we already reached a majority of articles not solely concerned with these islands off the north-western cast of Europe; one special issue on the landscape of medieval castles by definition looked almost exclusively eastwards. We think however that issue 22.1 is our first to be entirely composed of research articles about landscapes elsewhere in Europe and indeed elsewhere in the world. This is unlikely to be the case for issue 22.2, but nor would we wish it to be because we hope to establish and maintain a good balance between western European and other parts of the world.

The current issue is also one of our most broadly-based in disciplinary terms. As always, we aim to continue in that direction, accepting research from any or all disciplines that offer insights into understanding past and evolving landscapes.

The growing diversity and variety of landscapes featured in this journal brings us into closer contact with other ways of seeing and thinking, and – we believe – of other ways of wring and ‘speaking’. One of the Landscapes editors, in his former capacity as a trustee of the Landscape Research Group which publishes our sister T&F journal Landscape Research, has recently contributed with a small group of others to the preparation of guidelines on how certain types of language needs to be used carefully. Those guidelines aim to advise authors contributing to Landscape Research on ways that language can be thoughtfully chosen and utilised in academic writing. One reason for saying this is of course clarity and precision of expression, but even more importantly because, first,

“(t)he way we talk, think, and write about landscape matters. It matters because what we say, think, and write influences, reflects, and constitutes not only what we do in terms of research, but how we identify and manage landscape in practice.” (Waterton et al 2022),

and second because academic authors (and editors) have what can properly be called a duty of care to their readers to be aware, and respectful, of alternative identities and perspectives. This is a widely-defined responsibility, and one which has changed its characteristics quite dramatically in the past few years, as issues of self-identity, sensitive awareness of history and solidarity have increasingly come to the fore in almost all areas of public discourse. These concerns are frequently and conveniently couched in terms of ‘inclusivity’, as made clear by the title of the advice produced for Landscape Research, to be published alongside the Editorial of volume 47–1 of that journal: Guide for Inclusive Practices: Language & Writing (Waterton et al 2022b).

The Guide has been written with Landscape Research in mind, a journal which shares with our journal the topic of landscape, but which nevertheless has a quite distinctive set of perspectives, for example much more frequently publishing sociological and anthropological work on firmly contemporary landscapes. But the issues it addresses that the Guide addresses, of respect and care for others and their identities can also apply to landscape in the past, and to archaeological and historical research. Articles in Landscapes frequently, for example, raise significant issues of how power, politics and ideology exist in and through landscape, and in and through landscapes of the present as well as of the past. We suspect that what the Guide says will be of interest to contributors to Landscapes as well as to Landscape Research, and therefore we draw attention to it. It can be found on the Landscape Research section of the Taylor & Francis webpage at https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/clar20/current; its context is described in an editorial to LR issue 47–1 (Waterhouse et al 2022a).

This present issue of Landscapes, as promised in our Editorial for 21.2, also includes an appreciation of the recently deceased British landscape archaeologist Christopher Taylor. This is the eighth in our very intermittent series called ‘Founders’, launched in 2003 by our founding editor Richard Muir in issue 4: 1, in which are considered the work of scholars and researchers who can be seen to have greatly influenced and inspired the growth of historical and archaeological landscape research. We are very aware however, to return to the beginning of our comments in this Editorial, that the Founders series has mainly focussed on British contexts, and that all but the first – on Jacquetta Hawkes - have concerned men. We would be very pleased to consider suggestions or articles about key ‘founders’ – in any of the historical and archaeological strands of landscape study - from other countries.