Landscapes and Archives: Notes on a Method

Abstract

This article proposes reevaluating the methods for consulting archives to write landscape histories. Archives hold immense amounts of human and non-human data, but approaching them purely to extract information causes the historian to miss past networks of affinity. By using a field method, one grounded in an ethic of care and focused on maintaining the ecologies of the past, researchers can identify important actors and events among their archival traces and write landscape histories that animate social, political, and biological processes and struggles important to that landscape and beyond its borders. Using important debates in the humanities around archival inclusion and composition, avenues of interpretation, and the pleasures and frustrations of working with incomplete information, I argue that landscape is a particularly insightful and inclusive way to organize historiography. The article concludes with four methodological episodes, each highlighting a different dimension of landscape history as a practice of radical empathy and affirmative maintenance.