Pathways to Europe’s Landscape

E N G L I S H H E R I T A G E

European Pathways to the CulturalLandscape2000 - 2003

Published by EPCL 2003www.pcl-eu.de

Printed by Boyens Offset, Heide, Germany

General Editors: Jo Clark, John Darlington, Graham Fairclough

For further information please contact:info@pcl-eu.de

© EPCL

ISBN 1 8999 07 75 0

It is with very great pleasure that we introduce this book. It has been produced at the conclusion of aproject called ‘European Pathways to the Cultural Landscape,’ that was carried out by twelve partners in theyears 2000 to 2003 under the supportive and visionary guidance of the municipality of Albersdorf inDithmarschen County (Schleswig-Holstein) and managed by the Archaeological Spessart-Project inAschaffenburg and Lohr (Bavaria). The project was generously funded by the EU Culture 2000 programme,and supported by grants and other contributions from the national governments, regions or localmunicipalities, and from many of the universities and charities, of the twelve partner project areas. We are alsovery grateful to Lancashire County Council for preparing the original English language master copy of thisbook, with substantial funding from English Heritage.

Pathways to Europe’s Landscape draws together a few of the many experiences of Europe’s culturallandscape that we have found and shared during the three years of our work. Our wish in writing this book isto share with a much wider audience the increased understanding of landscape that we have built up duringour work and meetings. We hope too that it will encourage other people to look at their own landscapeswith new eyes and in new ways.

Furthermore, in keeping with the European Landscape Convention of the Council of Europe and theEuropean Spatial Planning Perspective of the EU Council of Ministers, whose principles our project hasadopted, we believe that landscape is a central part of the European common heritage and culture, and that it‘belongs’ in a very real sense to all citizens of Europe. In some small way, therefore, we hope that this bookwill contribute to the aims of the Convention by helping to guide people along their own personal pathwaysto the cultural landscape, and by underlining the economic as well as the social value of a sustainably-managedlandscape.

Our book is the product of collaborative working between more than seventy archaeologists and otherlandscape scientists in twelve regions of Europe. Our regions are all very different: from mountain to marsh,from the Atlantic to the Baltic, from forest to farmland. Yet we have found that this variety (and the evenricher diversity of our cultures, languages and food, or ‘taste-scape’) is matched by an equally rich commonheritage that unites our landscapes and makes them very recognisably and distinctively European. Wediscovered that this combination of diversity and unity was a powerful force for increased mutualunderstanding, respect and friendship, just as too was our exchange of experience and expertise. We firmlybelieve that the landscape can be a strong and vital for European unity, and we think that our project – andthis book – is a symbol of European partnership and shared culture.

This book should not mark the end of the EPCL network of European archaeologists. EPCL itself was thesuccessor to a smaller, but equally successful two-year project called European Cultural Paths, and the twoprojects have together shown the great value of pan-European, inter-regional partnership. Our network stillhas much useful work to achieve, and we are planning several future projects that will continue and expandour network and its important work for the European idea.

Dr. Gerhard Ermischer Manfred TrübeChair of EPCL Mayor of Albersdorf

Forew

ord Pathw

ays to Europe’s Landscape

ForewordPathways to a European Union

October 2003

PART I: Introduction 1

PART II: Stories about 13our landscape

Chapter 1 - Places and 13Traces: Their Meaning in Landscape The meaning of thingsThe passage of time Evidence of change Interpretations of landscape Constructed nature Uncertainties and interpretationsScale and magnitude Conclusion

Chapter 2 – Interacting 31With Nature: CreatingLandscapesThe emerging cultural landscapeNatural Forces and LandscapeCharacterAdapting nature Changing with nature Overcoming nature Exploiting nature’s resources Shifting balances - nature returns? Conclusion

Chapter 3 - People and 47Communities: SocialLandscapesLandscape and interactionSustenance and nourishment Spiritual perceptions and manifestations Status and power Economy and exploitation Cultural connections Conclusion

Chapter 4 - Imagination 67and Explanation:Landscapes of the Mind People and landscapeLandscape – what does it mean?Explanations from the past Giants and gnomes – tales of thesupernatural Historical tales The riddle of the wolf pit

Chapter 5 - Reading 83and Understanding:Landscape as Information Learning to understand the past Archaeology’s origins Archaeology today Written records Public conversations Reconstructing landscape Conclusion

PART III: Conclusions 103

Acknowledgements 113

Co

ntents Pathways to Europe’s Landscape

Contents

Un

AlAr

Bj

BoDoFu

Ka

Pr

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Pathways to Europe’s Landscape

Locations of the twelve projectsbrought together by the

EPCL initiative

Du DowrisAr ArfonBo BowlandUn UntamalaKa KaaliBj BjäreHa HallandFu FunenAl Albersdorf Sp SpessartPr PrachenskoPa Paneveggio

Memory and managementThe landscape is a pathway into our

memories.It is also, of course, a place where people

appreciate Nature. It is a place whereaesthetic senses are stretched and exercised;it is a source of both physical and mentalhealth. It is where we live and work, andhave our being. Our identity, personal, localor national, is partly rooted in ourlandscapes. We make landscape in our ownimage.

Landscape is therefore many things todifferent people. To a great many people, alandscape’s significance and value lies in itshistory. The purpose of this book is to give asmall taste of this meaning of landscape, usingexamples from twelve areas of Europe.

These twelve places, from Estonia in theeast to Ireland in the west, form the basis ofa network of about seventy archaeologists,historians and heritage managers with sharedinterest in the cultural landscape. Thisnetwork was set up under the aegis of anEU grants programme, and the productionand publication of this book marks the endof a three year Culture 2000 project withinthe network called ‘European Pathways tothe Cultural Landscape’ (EPCL). It wassupported by EU grants and by matchingnational funds, and operated in twelveseparate regions in nine countries. EPCL wasthe successor to an earlier three-year projectinvolving five countries, and we hope that itwill be succeeded in turn by another stage ofwork drawing in new partners. In this waywe hope to build up an expanding networkof partners, some more active than others atany one time, but all contributing to the aimof exchanging ideas and experience aboutthe landscape, and sharing ways of bringingthem to a wider public audience.

The EPCL project, running from 2000 to2003, gave itself three main objects – toincrease understanding of the culturallandscape; to find ways to achieve the

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Part 1Introduction

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presentation of this knowledge to widerpublic audiences; and to promote sustainable methods of managing the landscape.We worked by means of staff exchanges,seminars, conferences, and joint meetings; weused the web and arranged educationalevents for schools; we carried out localresearch, wherever possible using newtechnology such as Geographical InformationSystems to produce new understandings, andwe created both real and virtual trailsthrough the landscape.

In its work, our network has adopted theEuropean Landscape Convention as itsguiding framework. We believe we are oneof the first groups to put into practice theConvention’s principles of landscape ascommon heritage, of the need for a truedemocratisation of landscape, and of therequirement for the sustainable managementof the landscape. In all our work we havetaken the landscape as a visible guide to thepast, to the origins and long development ofour culture that has grown in Europe,relatively uninterrupted, over ten thousandyears, even without counting the longmillennia before the land began to befarmed. Only small parts of this story can befound in historical documents or in old maps.The landscape itself can tell us a much biggerstory, more dramatically, more personally andmore directly, as we hope the stories in thisbook will demonstrate.

The Albersdorf landscape

If you look at the landscape with care –if you ‘read’ it, and its messages from the past,metaphorically speaking – you can develop astronger understanding and appreciation ofEuropean identities, of local character, and ofhistory. In turn, that increased understandingcan lead to better care for the landscapeitself, so that it becomes easier to pass onour landscape in good condition to thefuture, for others to enjoy and interpret.

Archaeologists and their landscapes

We remember our past through stories.Historians tell stories that are knittedtogether from documents written by ourpredecessors. Artists and writers use thelandscape to tell stories about life, the humancondition and our place in the world. ButEPCL is mainly a network of archaeologists,and archaeologists do not only dig holes andfind buried treasure. Archaeologists have ourown ways of looking at the whole of theworld. We interpret the environment thatwe inhabit in particular ways, drawing out ofit information about past human societiesand individuals. Drawing out and finding thatinformation (whether buried in the groundor visible in the shape of fields and woods inthe modern landscape) is what the practiceof archaeology is all about. And there is also‘applied’ archaeology, in which understandingof the past and therefore of the present isput to good use in managing and conservingthe landscape for future generations.

Archaeologists find stories about the pastin all types of material culture, in the objects,the traces, the ‘things’ left behind by the past,whether buried deep in the ground or still

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part of the world we inhabit. One of therichest sources for archaeologists is thelandscape itself, the whole of the landscapethat has been shaped, modified, designed andreconstructed over centuries. We can seeour predecessors’ footprints all over thelandscape: from medieval times, from theIron Age, from the Bronze Age, or from thefirst ‘Neolithic’ farming ages - evensometimes, more faintly, from the long-distantearly stone ages. There are millions ofstories within the landscape, waiting to beread; this book offers only a few examplestaken from the twelve areas in our network.

There are stories in the landscape thattell us about our predecessors and theiractions, how they changed the world aroundthem and turned it into the world that wehave inherited. They explain how ourpredecessors lived, how they farmed theland, eating its produce, exploiting its rawmaterials, and using it to validate andreinforce social and political structures.Aristocracies used it to justify their position,and left much evidence of their power. Thebulk of the population used it to live and todie, and have left traces no fewer and no lessimportant that tell us about their lives, howthey organised their communities, what theyate, where they sheltered from the weather.There are also stories that are as muchabout how our predecessors thought aboutthe world as they are about the landscapeitself; they reveal past mentalities andinterpretations of the world, religious andspiritual as well as secular and political.

This book’s stories from the landscapealso tell us about our world of the 21stcentury. We can see why the landscape inthis place here has small fields, but elsewherethere are only large open farmed expanses.Here it is thickly wooded, in some placeswith long-established almost naturalwoodland, in others with more recentcommercial plantations; elsewhere trees areconfined to the slopes of valleys, or growonly at the edges of village territories, or inthe common land between communities.The diversity of landscape across Europe isoutstanding, and it is only partly to beexplained on the basis of geology, soilvariation or altitude. Equally influential(though often subtle and more difficult totrace) have been the cultural differencesbetween communities across Europe andover time; if these can be traced, we get veryclose to a true understanding of theEuropean cultural landscape.

The Arfon landscape

The insight that landscape embodieshistory, culture and identity, and that thestories it can be made to tell can illuminateour lives, is the starting point of this book,and of the EPCL Culture 2000 network thathas produced it. We have used three mainideas as the philosophy of our work, basedaround the concept of historic landscapecharacter :

‘Past but still present …’Although most of us in the EPCL

network are archaeologists, and thereforemore used to studying the past than thepresent, we agreed that our guiding principlewould be that EPCL is concerned with thepresent–day landscape, not with pastlandscapes or past environments. Webelieve, however, that one of the mostimportant characteristics of the present–daylandscape is that it contains the past, its ‘time-depth’, the way that history and earlierlandscape and the evidence of past changecan still be seen within the present-daylandscape. The changes that have happenedin the past are particularly important to us,because studying change and its effects isone of archaeology’s main preoccupations,and one of the things that archaeologicalstudy explains best. But we also believe thatchange is one of the landscape’s primarycharacteristics. Perhaps more than anything,it is the long process of change through timethat for us makes a landscape cultural ratherthan natural. Nature as been modified bycultural activity, and the results of that havelater been changed and remodelled time andtime again, producing the essentially culturallandscape that we see today, and that weoccupy as our physical and emotional andspiritual habitat. EPCL has been concernedto identify and explain the historic dimensionof the landscape, its historic character. This isan historical and archaeological approach tolandscape, not one of geography.

‘… all encompassing …’Our second guiding idea has been that

we adopted the widest interpretation ofwhat makes up the landscape. We tried toescape from the more conventionalarchaeological perspective of looking at siteswithin the landscape rather than at thewhole landscape as a site in its own right.We recognised no chronological cut-off date:anything, no matter how recent or modern,can be treated as part of historic landscapecharacter. Nor do things that make up thelandscape necessarily need to be visible.Below–ground remains can be as much part

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of the mental construction of landscape ascan visible things. An understanding of thechains of cause and effect that have led tothe present–day landscape in any particulararea can also be part of that perception oflandscape, whether or not all links in thechain are still visible or even still exist.Equally, the components that contribute tohistoric landscape character do not onlyinclude the obvious built features such ashouses and farms. They also include semi-natural and living features such as woodland,land cover and hedgerows, which are asmuch a part of historic landscape characteras are archaeological sites. Matching thisbreadth of approach to the object of study,we adopted a broad view of the ‘right’methods to use, recognising that thetraditions of archaeological and landscaperesearch across Europe were nearly as variedas its landscapes. EPCL used a large numberof different approaches, but each operatedwithin the framework of this overallphilosophy.‘… and an idea, not a thing.’

Our third principle, unavoidable, is thatlandscape characterisation is a matter ofinterpretation more than of record, and ofperception more than of hard facts.‘Landscape’ is an idea, not a thing. It is this,along with the human actions that changedthe shape and appearance of the land, whichmakes today’s European landscape cultural:because we perceive it, indeed define it, inour heads and hearts, and this is inevitably acultural act. Even untouched naturalwilderness, for example, becomes cultural ifwe have seen it through spiritual or artisticperception. As an idea, as an intellectual orcultural construct, landscape is created by ourminds and emotions. We use a combinationof physical objects or things as our buildingblocks, and the physical basis of landscape istherefore the ‘Environment’. Theenvironment can be pinned down withobjective statistics and data, but landscapeitself is more fluid, more personal, morevaried, more open to debate andconfrontation, better suited to carrymessages and signals about identity andplace. An important aspect of landscapecharacter in EPCL has therefore been asearch for collective and public perceptionsto lay alongside expert views. This bookcontains expert views and legends, myths andfables in about equal measure, drawingtogether the two ways of seeing into a betterview of landscape as perception.

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The Bjäre landscape

The Bowland landscape

The diversity and distinctiveness of the Europeanlandscape

In only three years, and even with asmany as twelve partners, we have of coursenot been able to look at all of the Europeanlandscape. But our twelve projects arespread across the length and breadth ofEurope, reflecting much if not all of Europe’slandscape diversity. We are aware that majorparts of Europe are not represented in thisbook, most notably Iberia, the Mediterraneanzones, the eastern countries and Turkey, butnevertheless our spread is wide enough toallow preliminary generalisation until we canextend our network.

Our twelve projects, arranged inalphabetical order by country, are:

Czech Republic (Práche?sko)Denmark (Funen)England (Bowland)Estonia (Kaali)Finland (Untamala)Germany (Albersdorf)Germany (Spessart)Ireland (Dowris)

Italy (Paneveggio)Sweden (Bjäre)Sweden (Halland)Wales (Arfon)There are many ways in which these

twelve areas can be perceived as covering arange of landscape types. In bio-climaticterms, some are Atlantic areas (e.g. Dowris),others Boreal (e.g. Untamala), othersContinental (Práche?sko) or Alpine(Paneveggio).The network covers farmland(e.g. Halland or Bjäre), forests (e.g. Kaali orSpessart), wetlands (e.g. Albersdorf) andmoorland (Bowland). We have islands (e.g.Fyn) and mountains (e.g. Arfon), dry landand drained land, bog and marsh, land that issinking towards the sea and land that is stillrising out of the sea. We saw landscapes ofvillages or towns, but also landscapes ofhamlets or even just farmsteads. We sawlandscapes where people have lived forthousands of years, and others wherepeople are only periodic visitors as part oftranshumance and other seasonal land-use.In yet other landscapes people have onlylived for two or three thousand years, or justa few centuries, or only tenuously,sometimes being driven away by Nature.We include areas of land characterisedmainly by quarrying and industry, others byfarming, and no areas are single purpose.We have land that to some of us seemedfrighteningly over-populated and over-exploited, and land that to others seemedremote and empty of people. Our networkincludes high lands and low lands, tamedland and still-dangerous land. We have ‘new’landscape, where most of what first catchesthe eye seems to be 19th or 20th century,and of course we have very ancientlandscape.

The people who live in or visit ourtwelve areas speak a wide range oflanguages, including the ten languages intowhich this book is being translated (English,Welsh, Gaelic, German, Danish, Swedish,Finnish, Estonian, Czech, Italian). We haveenjoyed in our project meetings an

astonishing diversity of landscape andarchaeology, but we are aware that we haveseen only the tip of a very large iceberg. Wehave savoured a wide range of foods anddrinks specific to each landscape that wehave been able to visit, a very relevantdemonstration of how landscape shapesculture, but again (even more sadly), this isonly a small fragment of Europe’s hugevariety. Whether landscape or townscape,taste-scape or sound-scape, however, ourwork in these twelve areas has been morethan enough, as we hope this book willdemonstrate, to confirm the richness,diversity, range – and value – of Europe’scultural landscape.

As well as this great variety, however, thelandscapes of Europe are connected one toanother, no matter how different they mightbe. They are connected physically, through ageography, geology and topography thatoften ignores international boundaries, andthey are connected culturally, throughcommon social processes shared byEuropean inhabitants, both past and present.Europe is not simply a patchwork of uniqueand separate landscapes, but it is also aconstructed single landscape in a very realsense. We can see a multitude of differentlandscapes which overlap and reflect oneanother, from local scale to pan-Europeanscale and beyond, but we can also see thedistinctive single European landscape thatincorporates diversity within a strong set ofcommon and shared attributes. We thinkthis is one of the prime characteristics ofEurope’s cultural landscape: any area issimultaneously locally distinctive andunarguably European.

One starting point for exploring theshared European landscape is to identify thecultural commonality that leads to repeatingpatterns in the landscape, and where andwhy those patterns differ in space and time.

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The Dowris landscape

The Funen landscape

As Europeans we share many things that maybe reflected within the landscape, including:•Family, ethnic and tribal connections;•Language and its traditions;•Trade – of goods, of ideas, and of people;•Political, economic and social systems;•Religious and spiritual beliefs;•Artistic, architectural and industrial

traditions;•Proximity and shared borders;•A long, shared ‘history’ (taught and

perceived).

This is not to say that shared traditionsdo not also exist outside of Europe, anymore than it is to deny the variation withinEurope that we have spoken of earlier. Everycontinent has its own unique, long-livedculture and landscape, and the connectionsformed by migration and trade ensure thecontinual cross-fertilisation of cultures acrossthe world. But it does point to a placewhere there is overlap and a coming-together of shared history, sometimes simplyas a result of mere physical proximity, andthis creates the common patterns of ourinherited European landscape. Very often,however, landscape, like history, has beenstudied within national borders and thesewider connections and similarities have beenoverlooked. This is perhaps the real value ofour EPCL network – that we each sharedour own landscapes with colleagues fromother countries.

One very important aspect that allEuropean landscapes do have in commonwithin their wonderful diversity is that theyare all cultural. Nowhere has completelyescaped being changed by human activities.There are some places – the high mountain

tops, the deep forests, some coasts – wherepeople have but lightly touched thelandscape. Even here, the lack of physicalimpact and of material remains is most oftenmore than compensated for by a wealth ofcultural associations in legend, myth,sentiment, art, literature and music. Indeed,some of the most natural places sit at thevery heart and soul of the European psyche,and in human consciousness they have beencreated by these associations just as much as– or more than – they can be said to behave been made by Nature. At the otherextreme there are almost wholly ‘artificial’landscapes, and not only those caused byindustry (e.g. the ‘wastelands’ left by Irish peatextraction to fuel power stations). And inbetween the extremes lie the majority ofEuropean landscapes. These are areas wherenature and culture interact in a multitude ofdifferent subtle combinations, each able to beread by those who look.

The landscapes in our project are notvery famous or widely celebrated. Most ofthem, indeed, are local small-scale jewelsrather than acclaimed masterpieces. Ourproject deliberately chose such mainlyforgotten – or at least overlooked –landscapes. We wished to emphasise asstrongly as possible that any landscape inEurope has stories to offer, that all areas arelocally distinctive examples of the history ofour culture but also contribute to thecommon European heritage of landscape.Our landscapes are marginal not in the senseof being marginal to mainstream agricultureand urbanisation (as for example were theArfon landscapes of plats and grazing), butthey are marginal to current mainstreamEuropean identity and awareness. They arenevertheless important on a wide range offronts, as part of local character and

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distinctiveness, for example, because they are‘reserves’ of particular aspects of landscapethat can stand as Europe-wide exemplars,and because they form part of the richtapestry of the whole European landscape.

It is this aspect that makes the landscapesuch a central element of Europe’s commonheritage, and why the Council of Europerecently, in 2000, added a LandscapeConvention – the Florence Convention to its‘family’ of treaties. This is a forward-lookingconvention, designed as much as anythingwith the 21st century landscape in mind. It isnot prescriptive, and does not try to protectonly special areas: instead it promotes alllandscape as a common European heritage, acentral aspect of everyone’s lives, with itsroots in nature but also the product of along human history. It concerns landscape asliving culture. That it is needed, and that it istimely, is seen by the rapidity with which ithas collected national signatures andratifications.

The European Landscape Conventionis the first instrument devoted exclusively tothe protection, management and planning ofall landscapes in Europe. It adopts theinnovative starting point that its aspirationsapply everywhere, to the whole landscape.Other measures may apply particularprotection to especially beautiful orapparently natural areas within thelandscape, but the Convention’s democraticapproach is concerned with so-calledordinary, ‘everyday’ landscape, even withlandscape that may be perceived as spoiledor damaged. Any landscape has beenproduced by human/natural interactionthrough time, and if some aspects are ugly orunnatural, they are nevertheless part of thecultural landscape’s rich story. Whether veryold or very recent, all landscapes are part ofEurope’s culture, the setting to someone’s life,a focus of identity, and the foundation forcreating Europe’s landscape for the newcentury.

The Landscape Convention is animportant step forward, taking into newterritory the Council of Europe’s existingheritage conventions (Bern for the naturalheritage, Grenada for the architecturalheritage,Valetta for the archaeologicalheritage). It breaks new ground in severalways:•Providing a significant new definition that

has both simplicity and inclusiveness:“landscape means an area, perceived bypeople, whose character is the result ofthe action and interaction of natural

The Halland landscape

and/or human factors”.These wordsemphasise the human aspect oflandscape: landscape is created bypeople’s perceptions, and is the productof people’s interactions throughout timewith nature, and this is a definition thatEPCL adopted to underpin its work.

•Recognising that ordinary, typical,‘everyday’ landscapes, often characterisedas much by human impact as by ‘naturalbeauty’, have their own special value,contributing to the rich variety of theEuropean landscape.

•Emphasising that landscape is a productof people’s perceptions – not, in otherwords, simply another term forenvironment, but something more,created in the eyes, minds and hearts ofbeholders by treating the material, ‘real’components of our environment as rawmaterial for memory and association,understanding and interpretation.

•Promoting awareness–raising, exchange ofinformation and expertise, and multi-disciplinary approaches for the betterunderstanding, assessment andmanagement of the landscape. Foremostis the need for better and strongerunderstanding of landscape’s history andcharacter, and of people’s perceptions.

•Asserting that landscape appreciation isnot solely a matter for expertjudgements, but that dialogue andexchange of viewpoints are necessaryacross the full spectrum of society.Anyone can create their own perceptionsof a landscape where they live or work,and this democratic participationcontributes to the cultural and social aswell as the environmental and economicsignificance of landscape.The Convention stands at the core of the

EPCL project, as should be clear from ouradopted ‘philosophy’ that we describedearlier. Perhaps most importantly, theConvention is a democratising instrumentwhich states that landscape is a commonheritage and a shared resource. Citizensshould have access both to the process ofdeciding which landscapes are most valuedand why, and to that of deciding howlandscape is changed, protected andmanaged. We hope that this EPCL book willhelp in a small way to start this process ofpublic participation. We have tried to engagewith public perceptions during our three yearwork, and some of the results are in thisbook. More importantly, however, we offer

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this book as some indication of how we (theEPCL partners) see these landscapes, notoffering this as necessarily the ‘correct’ oronly interpretation, but saying: ‘here is ourunderstanding, our interpretation andperception, of these areas, these are our‘landscapes’: tell us about yours’. Perhapsthey are the same, perhaps not: sharing is theway to find out.

Reading this bookThis book is constructed around a series

of stories. Each project provided three, to fitinto an agreed structure, but each story in itsdifferent way arose naturally from its area’sdistinctive landscape. They are arranged infive chapters, which are based on broadlydifferent ways of understanding anddescribing (‘making’) landscape. Supportingexamples and comparisons from the otherEPCL projects have been added whereverpossible.

The overall theme of our book – itsnarrative, plot-line or meta-story – is themessage that this introductory part has beenputting forward. This is that the present-day

The Paneveggio landscape

The Práche?sko Landscape

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The five chapters that follow, therefore,reiterate, using the distinctive landscapecharacter of each project area, twoimportant points about the Europeanlandscape: first, that the cultural landscape is acreation of human action and humanimagination (as the Convention puts it, theresults of the human/nature interactionthrough time and current perception bypeople); and second, that there is a distinctivearchaeologists’ ‘way of seeing and explaining’landscape, but that this can use manymethods, and wherever possible needs to beintegrated with other ways of understandingand seeing.

The first chapter of the five explores aview of the historic landscape that isrelatively straightforward and simple, andwidely-held. This chapter (Places and Traces:Their Meaning in Landscape) demonstratesthat the environment is only partly natural,and has been modified over thousands ofyears by people and their actions. Thisprocess has left many material remains thatare our starting point – often our only one –for understanding why the environmentlooks as it does today.

The Kaali landscape,Estonia

The Spessart landscape,Germany

landscape of Europe, in all its diversity andrichness, is pre-eminently a ‘cultural’landscape, and that it is cultural in a dualsense. It has been created both by humanactions and by human ideas and thought:•the physical elements of the environment

that we use in the making of landscape(including its biodiversity and its naturalelements) have been created by humanaction and modification, and

•the landscape’s character – intellectual,emotional, aesthetic, associative andscientific – is created by human thought,and by interpretation and imagination.The stories in each of the five chapters

illustrate in one way or another this overallidea. Moreover, the stories demonstrate anumber of specific archaeological (orhistorical) ways of seeing and understandingthe landscape, within the framework of theEPCL philosophy set earlier. We hope thatthese concrete and simple demonstrations ofhow we look at landscape will be one ofEPCL’s particular, distinctive contributions tothe wider debate being promoted by theEuropean Landscape Convention.

They are the building-blocks of‘landscape’, one of the key ways in whichwe trace the passage of time in ourlandscape, and recognise the scale ofhuman and cultural change affecting it.This first chapter therefore takes a fewexamples from our projects to emphasisethat constructing ‘landscape’ from materialtraces (apparently a simple matter) isactually quite complicated, a question ofcultural interpretation and of perception.The chapter highlights landscape context,wider patterns of landscape, and showshow ‘things’ – objects – help us toconstruct landscape.

The narrative of the book then moveson to talk about how two sorts ofinteraction in the past have created ourperception of landscape. Chapter 2(Interacting with Nature: CreatingLandscapes) examines the effect on thelandscape of human interaction withnature over time, especially in its moreextreme forms. Some of theseinteractions have given rise to importantlegends about the landscape that willreappear in other chapters, showing howdifficult it is to separate the variousstrands of landscape perception. Themain focus of Chapter 2, however, is onhow today’s landscape still contains theevidence, if we look in appropriate ways,of how people have struggled with andusually overcome nature, whilst adaptingto changes in their environment such aschanges in sea level. We will also seeexamples of how people have createdreligion in the landscape, investing naturalfeatures with religious and culturalsignificance and thereby making everynatural landscape ‘cultural. This chapterwill consider both present-dayobservation of how interacting withnature in the past affects our landscapetoday, and ways in which people in the

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past created symbolic landscapes (e.g.fishponds or deerparks) using features whichwere also functional.

Chapter 3 (People and Communities:Social Landscapes) shows how the landscapeis also a result of social interactions betweenpeople. It introduces into the story thehistoric social and community processes thatmade our landscape look how it does, andthe various ways in the communal efforts,actions and activities of our predecessors canstill be recognised in the landscape. It isabout the people themselves and how theylived in the landscape – about how they livedlives and left traces. It focuses on people-to-people social interaction, and in so doing itmoves further away from the sites, remainsand physical traces that Chapters 1 and 2are mainly about. In Chapter 3 too, inanticipation of Chapter 4, we start to see therole of symbolism and status in the world oflegend and myth. This reminds us again thatwe cannot separate traditional story–tellingfrom modern scientific story–telling, that thetwo can be sides of the same coin, and thatone is not necessarily superior to the other.

The final two of the five chaptersconsider the ways in which landscapes areexplained. Chapter 4 (Imagination andExplanation: Landscapes of the Mind) tellsabout the traditions and legends of earliersocieties, which perhaps still hold somethingfor us. Chapter 5 (Reading, Understandingand Explaining: Landscape as Information)describes modern archaeology, and rationalscientific approaches. People in the past haveexplained the landscape by making up andpassing on stories, often in terms ofsupernatural beings. But thereby they havecreated our landscapes just as much as theydid with ploughs or building works. Thesetwo final chapters counterbalance each other.

The main difference is that modernstories seem to be based on science and

The Untamala landscape,Finland

rationality. Most of us find it more difficultthan our ancestors did to believe in giantsand trolls. But all the stories that we haveselected for both chapters answer thequestion ‘how do we know what happened’.They also raise the question of why peoplehave forgotten the past, and of how wemight be able to bring it back to notice byre-explaining it in modern ways. In particular,Chapter 5 is focused on EPCL’s secondobjective of presenting the landscape to awider audience.

Taken as a whole, we hope that the fivechapters and their 36 stories will illustratewhat we mean by Europe’s culturallandscape, and how its historic depth andcharacter can be studied and understood.We have taken our examples almost entirely

Part 1

Pathways to Europe’s Landscape 10

from EPCL’s own twelve areas, but we knowthat similar stories can be told about anypart of Europe’s landscape. Our areas arenot special – indeed they have been chosenbecause they are the exact opposite, beingtypical, representative and evencommonplace (but still each has their ownidentity and is significant in their own way).Precisely because of this ordinariness, wethink that our work has a wider significancebeyond our own project areas, indeedbeyond our own regions and even countries.Europe’s landscape diversity tells us that ourstories cannot be applied in detail anywhereelse, yet we know they are representative atsome level and we hope they will encourageothers throughout Europe to collect theirown stories.