The Society for Garden Archaeology fosters and promotes international scholarly communication regarding methods, techniques, and theories related to the archaeology of gardens. Gardens are bounded spaces purposefully created for human interaction, and while they may contain a diversity of plants and other features, they are also staging grounds for a myriad of social and civic interactions within a given society. While the conceptual categories of different peoples may or may not include “garden,” such places are often identified and investigated by researchers as spaces, remains, and refuse distinct from, and yet integral to other archaeological features.
Garden remains at Block 6, East Second
Ward
on Third Street, Nara Capital Site
--------
© National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, Nara
on Third Street, Nara Capital Site
--------
© National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, Nara
ing archaeological research successfully in and about gardens requires special approaches, from excavation techniques to laboratory analyses to theories used to interpret the results of field research. It is a domain of investigation with unique challenges and potentials.
Gardens occupy the twilight realm between architecture and landscape, and are manifest as repositories of cultural meaning across the broad spectrum of social, civil, and eco-
logical exchange. These are domains in which archaeologists often situate themselves. There is a shortage of accumulated and shared information that would be helpful in broadening and deepening the study of places where human activities and natural processes interact, resulting in culturally produced biotopes with specific cultural values.
Currently, many archaeologists engage in garden archaeology without clear understand-
ings of the range of methods and interpretive vehicles that may be employed in such undertakings, while others, though few in number, identify themselves as Garden Archaeologists. Many archaeologists who do not consider themselves Garden Archaeologists nevertheless will excavate gardens and therefore desire information on approaches that they might take in such work. The Society of Garden Archaeology intends to promote better knowledge of such opportunities and, thus, advance scholarship in the general field of Archaeology.