Investigating rural change. Legal access rights and changing lifestyles in rural mountain communities (Ligurian Apennines, Italy, 16th-21st centuries)

Abstract

The paper focuses on the strong relationship between changes in legal access rights to land, environmental resource management, as well as organization and lifestyles of past rural societies. The problem will be addressed through case studies derived from research projects in Southern Europe that rely on archaeological and historical research methods. The focus will be on the Ligurian Apennines in northwest Italy. I will demonstrate how changes in environmental resource management are recorded both inside and outside settlements, through archaeological and architectural study and through the landscape and environmental archaeology; I also examine how parallel changes in rural lifestyle can be tackled with these approaches. Particular attention will be paid to the period between the 18th and 20th centuries, when important transformations occurred related to access rights to common lands. The consequences of those changes played a leading role in the construction of rural landscapes that today are preserved as natural and cultural heritage. KEYWORDSCommons; management of environmental resources; rural societies; archaeology of architecture; landscape archaeology «The landscape is the world as it is known to those who dwell herein, who inhabit its places and journey along the paths connecting them . . . . But in a landscape, each component enfolds within its essence the totality of its relations with each and every other. In short, whereas the order of nature is explicate, the order of the landscape is implicate» (Ingold 2000, 71).

Managing the Historical Agricultural Landscape in the Sicilian Anthropocene Context. The Landscape of the Valley of the Temples as a Time Capsule

“…All this indicates that agriculture in Sicily, despite the good quality of its soil and the favourable climate, does not form a solid basis for economic development for individual agricultural entrepreneurs. Furthermore, after the abolition of the feudal system and the mechanisation of agriculture, civil uses and customary rights were progressively abolished and the common lands, which were used by the resident population for both grazing and wood harvesting and temporary cultivation, were sold to private individuals [36].…”