Stranger than Fiction

The book I chose for the 2022 NONFICTION READER CHALLENGE in the category Geography is A Phenomenology of Landscape, by Christopher Tilley, 1994. This book was recommended reading for a course I took about the Archaeology of Pilgrimage. While it wasn’t directly relevant to my course, it presented a number of ideas that relate to interests I have in ancient monuments and spiritual sites. And his overview of what he proposes in the book was interesting for me. When I read about Stonehenge in England or the Ring of Brodgar in the Orkney Islands, I wonder why they were constructed in their particular location. In his introduction, Tilley writes that “The key question addressed is deceptively simple: why were particular locations chosen for habitation and the erection of monuments as opposed to others?” He proposes that it is not merely due to “factors of the environment such as relief, climate, soils, water supply and the seasonal availability of exploitable resources,” which he refer...