Landscape, Taskscape, Life Julian Thomas University of Manchester Introduction It is fascinating to read Tim Ingold’s reflections on writing The Temporality of the Landscape (1993), more than twenty years after the event. His article was originally published at a time when archaeologists were vigorously debating the concept of landscape (see Ashmore and Knapp 1999; Bender 1993; 1998; Tilley 1994). Ingold shows how his reflections on landscape principally responded to developments within his home discipline of social anthropology, and yet he chose to present them in an archaeological journal. As Rajala and Mills (this volume) demonstrate, he found a receptive audience, and the notion of ‘taskscape’ that was introduced in the article has become a staple of archaeological investigation, as this book amply demonstrates. Yet Ingold now expresses reservations over his creation, and it has enjoyed comparatively less attention within anthropology itself. Why, then, do archaeologists continue to find taskscapes compelling? In his contribution to this collection, Ingold shows how he originally distinguished between the restful vista of a traditional landscape painting and the turbulent activity of Breughel’s ‘Fight between Carnival and Lent’. While the former might be understood as something static, this could not be the case with the latter, whose multiple subjects were all engaged in doing something. That is, they were caught up in tasks or projects of one kind or another, and because of the way in which these activities responded to or intertwined with one another, they collectively formed a taskscape. However, it is important to recall that even in this initial formulation Ingold did not present the taskscape as an exclusively human entity. Rather, it was “a resonating sphere of activity”, which included phenomena ranging from non‐human animals to the surges of the tides and the cycles of the weather. A taskscape, then, was a “totality of rhythmic phenomena” (Ingold 1993: 163). Yet it is hard to describe the sun’s shining, the swirling of the mist, or a plant’s photosynthesis as ‘tasks’, and this may account for some of Ingold’s retrospective discomfort. The taskscape idea attempts to capture a