Introduction

This chapter explores theories of the symbolic maintenance of collectivities, and seeks to demonstrate their applicability to questions concerning the material environment. It considers the ways in which architecture, construction and reconstruction can serve as a temporal map, not just of relations between individual citizens and governments, but also as indicators of other oppositions that are subsumed by, or partially overlap with, that dichotomy. The focus of the chapter is on what might be called a speculative archaeology of sites in the neighbourhood of Krushevo, a town in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. The history of Krushevo demonstrates how landscapes are always bound up with politics, not just for the states that seek to control them, but for the people who inhabit them. While most of the contributions to this book are offered by professional archaeologists, and describe the activities of professionals, this chapter deals with the involvement of local communities with the landscape and its meaning. It thus seeks to take an ethnographic approach to the social relations within a state which are built around the landscape.

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