I've worked for years (in English Heritage and its predecessor inside government) in the field of conservation - 'applied archaeology', making it socially relevant, using archaeologists' ways of thinking to deepen people's understanding of the world around them, and to manage the archaeological resource. I'm presently head of EH's Monuments and Countryside Protection Programmes. I'm particularly interested in landscape issues, at both English (EH's national Historic Landscape Characterisation Programme - 'HLC') and European levels (being a partner in a 3-year Culture 2000 project called Pathways to Cultural Landscapes that has 12 projects in ten countries). The 2000 excavation at Herdade da Igreja was my first excavation for 18 years: quite a shock to the system, but mitigated by people and place, and by the weather and food of Évora. I was drawn to the project (being already familiar with landscape-scale time-depth; landscape biography, as it is called in the Netherlands) mainly to explore landscape-scale analogues to the concept of the life-history of sites. I also wished to explore whether the English HLC method, with modifications as needed, can be applied to very different types of landscape in southern Europe. Or, rather, at a personal level, to see how I'd begin to understand a cultural landscape that was new to me, lacking all the familiar indicators of date and function - my own mental pathways into the landscape - that I take for granted when working England. Read Graham's essay Landscape at Monte da Igreja?

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