European landscape research

The European Science Foundation’s new Science Policy Briefing paper on current landscape research and future themes and directions 'is an important document that portrays landscape research as a wide-ranging field of study, crossing many disciplinary boundaries. Being published in a series that largely includes policy on the “hard sciences”, which are the ones that tend to get political and funding priority, is important symbolically for putting landscape research (and therefore large areas of archaeology) into the mainstream of the European science agenda. Whether it will be influential depends on how people use it; it will not release funding, but it is a very useful tool, which needs to be taken up and used, while it is new and visible.’