Pages: 595-601

The article is dedicated to Christopher Tilley’s A Phenomenology of Landscape published in 1994. The book by Tilley attempts to propose a concept of interpretation of ancient landscapes, relations between the man and the surrounding world, which is a new concept for archaeology. According to Tilley, the modern archaeological literature is dominated essentially by economic approach to studying prehistoric landscapes. This approach regards mainly rational factors as motivating prehistoric people’s choices. Tilley shows that in many cases it is not true, and a choice of place for a settlement or a sacral construction depends on irrational factors based upon the way of understanding landscape, typical for that or another society. To reconstruct this way of world outlook, Tilley proposes to use phenomenology and illustrates its application by a particular example – relations between Mesolithic and Neolithic societies of Southern England with their surrounding landscapes. As a result, Tilley managed to see and understand a new perspective of many nuances of relations between people of the epoch with their surrounding world. The authors of this article believe, however, that although Ch. Tilley’s work is a highest class research, «a high fashion» of the modern theoretical archaeology, Tilley’s method can hardly be called «phenomenology».