Essay --

People relate to landscapes through tactile and visual experience of surfaces around them, beneath their feet and in their hands. Textures are most immediate and close physical contact with the landscape. Ploughing, grazing, clearance – create distinctive textures of surface, some of them deliberately created for the properties of the texture itself. Textures incorporate time; they are result of a slow but constant change of the very texture of surface. Mundane practices which might have a minimum impact on the surface can in a long term combine to form a distinctive textures. Aerial photographs and high resolution topographic data is full of textures. We tend to ignore them and focus solely on "features", traces. What can we do with textures? How can they be harnessed for deciphering the biography of surfaces and the way people interacted with the land in close physical contact? In the modern, Western, world the visual sense has primacy over the other senses. Since sixteenth century, vision has become increasingly important in how we engage with and understand our world, with the other senses marginalised. The visual became considered the most reliable form of representation. Archaeology, and especially aerial archaeology, has come to rely almost solely on vision for both the collection of data and the dissemination of information. Visual sense turns us into spectators, detached and distanced from the object of study. Landscape becomes a particular way of seeing and representing the world from an elevated, detached and even ‘objective’ vantage point, --- as an artistic genre and a culturally conditioned habit of visual perception, unique to European, Western societies. In this way visual technologies (photographs,... ...worth exploring. Textures offer access into the richness and immediacy of the perceivable world and allow us to enmesh with it. When we turn the eye in the organ of touch, we are able to see the â€Å"stuff† of landscape rather than its â€Å"things.† It is highly subjective, embodied view of the world, but one that helps us to "understands materiality" of the landscape. Dwelling in the landscape is about the rich intimate, ongoing â€Å"togetherness† of beings and things which make up textures and which, over time, bind together nature and culture. Textures blur the nature/culture divide and emphasise the material and temporal nature of landscape. In this way, landscape is a never finished process of weaving, â€Å"entanglement", of materials and activities. And they can perhaps to help us to reflect what we really see when we interpret aerophotos and lidar imagery.