Landscapes by Extraction: Contemporary Approaches to the Roman City of Tiermes, Spain

Abstract

The landscape of Tiermes is discovered to the eyes of a viewer as a seductive artificial topography, with large sandstone rock walls difficult to understand. Apparently the whole hill seems to be the result of geology and erosive action, but an intelligent regard discovers geometric traces, cuts and excavations, which are the real remains of a Roman city built directly on the rock and that make up a real anthropic landscape. Future challenges of landscape performance call for a contemporary reading of Tiermes, as a place in which scientific archaeology and urban studies coexist on the one hand, but also to keep alive in the viewer the aesthetic seduction that produces the negative architecture on the rock. This reflection on the excavated landscape is done in parallel with some works by American artist Michael Heizer as Double Negative or Vertical Displacement, with excavations that play with the perception of empty space and cycles of matter which develop the idea of landscapes by extraction. (Treib 1987)