Between daily existence and divine order: the landscapes of Roman Gaul Ton Derks In his introduction to a recent collection of essays, the British anthropologist Eric Hirsch reached the conclusion that all landscapes are double-faced and consist of a foreground actuality of everyday exist- ence and a background potentiality of an imagined timeless ideal (Hirsch 1995). The phenomenal and the imagined landscape are alternately perceived and inextricably intertwined, in that people con- tinuously seek to realize in ordinary life the ideals of an imaginary existence. While, according to this view, daily practices like tilling the tlelds or herding the cattle generally might be the simple 'mundane' activities for which we normally take them, at oth- er moments they might evoke memories of an ex- istence beyond or be experienced as re-enactments of a divine model transmitted through the recita- tion of myths, the performance of rituals or the building of monuments. In comparison to the dialectic approach advo- cated by Hirsch and others, the archaeological study of the landscape has always been remarkably one- sided. For a long time, attention was concentrated on the physical environment and the assessment of its impact on the realities of everyday life. The ima- gined landscape as embodied in stories and myths was either simply neglected or considered a realm inaccessible to the archaeologist. 'Ibis situation has rapidly changed over the past decade, and the in- terpretation of what sometimes is called the 'ritual landscape' is now a major topic of research, partic- ularly in the prehistoric sections of our discipline. But in much new work the objective and rational- istic analysis that dominated the field until recently now seems to have been completely replaced by subjective interpretations of meaning, and the ques- tion of how the symbolic landscapes which are in the centre of interest today related to experiences of daily life is seldom addressed seriously ( cf Derks 1997, 127-30). In this paper, I will try to redress the balance. I hope to do so by presenting a case taken from my own work on Roman Gaul, for which, thanks to the help of written documents, the link between an experienced and an imagined world is much easi- er to make than for any of the prehistoric periods. 1 "!be aim of mv contribution is to demonstrate that .I differences in the organization of the cultural land- scape are not simply determined by different cli- matic or soil conditions, nor by different degrees or different ways of integration into wider economic or political networks. Without \vishing to deny their role in the structuring of the phenomenal landscape, I suggest that different ways of life and the concomitant differences in regimes of values and cosmologies should be considered as at least equally important factors. My argument falls into three sections. First, I will offer a short introduc- tion to the realities of farm life in Northern Gaul. Next, I will present the epigraphical data upon which mv reconstruction of North Gallic cosmo- , logies is largely based. And finally, by comparing this evidence with that available for the much bet- ter documented Mediterranean area, I will present my interpretation of how in Northern Gaul the ex- perienced reality of everyday life may have articu- lated vvith a mythical reality of an imaginary world. Farm life in Northern Gaul In the area between Seine and Rhine roughly three types of natural landscapes can be distinguished: 351