Landscape research in a world of domesticated landscapes: The role of values, theory, and concepts

Abstract

This review takes as its starting point the relationship between landscape history and environmental policy. Landscape historians now face the same problem that social scientists have long faced, i.e., how to relate to values and to the political use of scientific results, which demands greater conceptual and theoretical rigour from integrative landscape studies. The concept of social-ecological systems is criticised for its reduction of the complexity and human agency involved in land use; in contrast, Clark Erickson"s concept of domesticated landscapes offers an approach that can incorporate humanist as well as scientific considerations. The roles of surplus production and labour allocation in early societies are seen as crucial for understanding early domesticated landscapes. Different social formations result in different landscapes, but landscapes also have an earthly inertia. Investments in land govern, steer, impede, or inspire land use in subsequent social formations. This specific understanding of time and place is shared by quaternary geology, landscape archaeology, and historical geography, and distinguishes them from both history and physics.Keywords: relevance, domesticated landscapes, landesque capital, engineered landscapes, labour, time IntroductionLandscape history today plays a central role in relation to several different discourses at the interface between environmental policy and research. At the European level, the broad process initiated by the Council of Europe in the European Landscape Convention could move the landscape issue from the hands of experts and researchers to a broader arena, in which landscape is increasingly part of European policy and politics. At the global level, the environmental change debate, focusing on the climate, has highlighted the role of humans in the long-term change of the earth"s system to such an extent that it has been proposed that we now live in the anthropocene era. The question of whether the anthropocene started in the industrial revolution or at the dawn of agriculture has not been answered. The fact that the question has even been asked, however, paves the way for the more intense involvement in broader global change studies of landscape archaeologists and other researchers focussed on long-term studies of human influence on the landscape. This is a new development for many landscape researchers. Many of us started our studies at a time when landscape was a much smaller and narrower academic concern, and our main contact with the public was with local history enthusiasts. Any applied aspects of our research were mainly confined to cultural heritage planning. The new situation poses new challenges to landscape researchers. The positive aspect, of course, is that there is greater interest from society and more research money -at least if we can frame our projects so that they address wider issues of current political, social, and environmental concern. In these new fields of applied research in landscape and environmental history, politicized ...

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