People, Land and Time

An Historical Introduction to the Relations Between Landscape, Culture and Environment

Brian Roberts, Peter Atkins, Ian Simmons

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134635115
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias físicas
• Subtopic: Geografía

This major new text provides an introduction to the interaction of culture and society with the landscape and environment. It offers a broad-based view of this theme by drawing upon the varied traditions of landscape interpretation, from the traditional cultural geography of scholars such as Carl Sauer to the 'new' cultural geography which has emerged in the 1990s. The book comprises three major, interwoven strands. First, fundamental factors such as environmental change and population pressure are addressed in order to sketch the contextual variables of landscapes production. Second, the evolution of the humanised landscape is discussed in terms of processes such as clearing wood, the impact of agriculture, the creation of urban-industrial complexes, and is also treated in historical periods such as the pre-industrial, the modern and the post-modern. From this we can see the cultural and economic signatures of human societies at different times and places. Finally, examples of landscape types are selected in order to illustrate the ways in which landscape both represents and participates in social change. The authors use a wide range of source material, ranging from place-names and pollen diagrams to literature and heritage monuments. Superbly illustrated throughout, it is essential reading for first-year undergraduates studying historical geography, human geography, cultural geography or landscape history.

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Part 1

The pre-industrial world

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INTRODUCTION

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In economic and ecological terms, this phase of human history comprised two types of culture: that of hunter-gatherer-fisher communities, and that of agriculturalists. The spread of these cultural types encompassed two major transitions, namely the occupation of the land surface by anatomically modern humans, and the changes from hunting and gathering to farming.

Both economies had in common a base of solar power. It was the energy of the sun which they harvested as plants and animals, which they harnessed as wind and falling water in mills, and which they released as fire from stored form in vegetation. All of these human communities thus lived off the recent products of photosynthesis, unlike their industrial successors who would tap vast reserves of long-stored products of photosynthesis like oil and coal. So hunter—gatherers and agriculturalists alike relied upon the energy of human bodies to carry out any actions which their cultures suggested (or dictated) that they perform. For them there was no steam shovel, no bulldozer. Instead, a scoop made from the shoulder-blade of a deer, perhaps, and a digging stick.

Food and other materials used in the pre-industrial phase of human culture derived their substance from the very recent fixing of solar energy as plant and animal tissue: the maize cob tastes sweetest straight from the stalk into the boiling water. Wood represents several years of accumulation at least and so it is a repository of energy which can, along with more recent material like grass stems, be released by burning. Controlled fire at the landscape scale can be used in many beneficial ways to improve yields for hunters and agriculturalists and not for nothing has been called ‘the first great force employed by humans’.

Hunting-gathering is sometimes classified as food-collecting or foraging since the humans gather wild species of plants and animals as resources; agriculture and pastoralism, on the other hand, are labelled food production because the biota are under a much greater degree of human control, in terms of the characteristics of the varieties used, the sites of cultivation or herding, and the degree of manipulation of the natural scene needed to accommodate this economy. These two relatively simple ecologies have, however, given rise to an immense variety of cultural practice in time and space. On one hand, the climatic and topographic zones of the world have enforced particular patterns: the Inuit of the Arctic gained most of their subsistence from the sea like any other predator, since that is where the high-energy biological resources such as seals and whales were found. In tropical forests, hunters likewise caught mammals when they could, but depended for basic nutrition upon a variety of plant materials. Agriculturalists in the wetter tropics might grow rice but their distant cousins in Scandinavia depended upon rye instead. Both crops are cultivated grasses but their climatic tolerances are markedly different. Herders in the Andes kept flocks of llamas, and in the Himalaya a similar ecology revolved round the yak.

Human inventiveness, however, always sought to transcend the apparent limitations imposed by nature and much of what we call material culture consists of ways of pushing back these limits. Irrigation, for example, allows the surplus water from a wet season or a water-rich neighbourhood to be stored and then released to allow crops to grow at a time of year when otherwise it would be too dry: the spread of Islamic cultures into the Mediterranean basin, for example, brought irrigation practices which added a whole season (the summer, when it rains little) to the agricultural year, as well as some lovely flowers like the lilac and the rose. Another inventiveness which improved food supplies was the ocean-going ship, which might search for richer fishing grounds at a considerable distance and then bring home the catch preserved in salt or by drying and smoking. Thus the Spanish and the Bretons were accustomed to fishing and whaling off Newfoundland as early as the fourteenth century. The addition of large areas of ocean to a culture’s resource base has been vividly described as the cultivation of ghost acreage.

Wherever there were surpluses of food, then, people could be supported whose contribution to society was not directly economic: the pyramids of Egypt, the universities and cathedrals of Europe, and Angkor Wat are examples, as are the works of Mozart and of Botticelli. These remind us that not all culture is devoted to material ends.

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1

HUNTERS AND GATHERERS

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Of the estimated 80,000,000,000 men [sic] who have ever lived out a life span on earth, over 90 per cent have lived as hunters and gatherers, about 6 per cent have lived by agriculture and the remaining few per cent have lived in industrial societies. To date, the hunting way of life has been the most successful and persistent adaptation man has ever achieved.

(Lee & DeVore 1968, 3)

INTRODUCTION

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Within our chosen theme of cultural landscapes, our interest here is the emergence of the genus Homo as the creator of landscapes. At some early stage of our history we must have been no more creators of landscapes than any other animal that builds nests or tears down trees. Indeed, we must have been less inventive than some, like the mound-building species of termites, for example. There are two ways in which hunter—gatherers may place an impress upon the land. The first of these is to make another species extinct, e.g. by culling it until it is no longer reproductively viable or by changing its habitat; the second is to unleash energy upon the landscape at an intensity not possible if just the energy of human bodies (even if augmented by tools) is used. For hunter—gatherers, fire constituted the avenue down which such energy could be loosed.

HUMAN EVOLUTION AND THE ACQUISITION OF FIRE

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The story of the stages of human emergence is subject to constant review. When exactly the remnants of something burned which are found in association with human remains or tools constitutes the control of fire is uncertain. There are at least two major views about the control of fire by humans. One group thinks that the species Homo erectus gained control of fire in Africa about 0.5 million years ago and took it with them when they radiated out into Europe and Asia. Another group thinks that it was much later, about 100 000 years ago that modern humans of the Homo sapiens type acquired control of this tool and likewise spread outwards from their African heartland. Without it, no group would have been able to survive anywhere near the fringes of the great ice sheets of the Pleistocene. If the former group were the initiators, then we need to note that control over and use of fire were present even before our physical evolution was complete; even in the latter case, the role of fire might be said to have been bred into early cultures even if not actually ‘bred in the bone’.

The ecology of fire

A fire running through dry vegetation evokes fear in all animal species except humans and even they may get a little scared now and again, especially if surrounded. The heat and the smoke cause most species to flee and so they are vulnerable to being caught: in traps, nets and by dogs as well as by men (usually) with spears, bows and blowpipes. If this process is repeated over many years, then the vegetation shifts in composition. Any species which is killed by the burning and cannot regrow loses its place to a fire-resistant species. Having thicker bark or a seed which is not killed by fire confers a selective advantage and indeed there have come to be species of conifers whose cones will not open and release the seed unless they are burned. So an oft-fired landscape bears the marks of its history in its plant composition and thence in its animal ecology as well. Knowing this, we need not doubt that hunter—gatherer communities throughout time have burned in order to improve the resources available to them: to flush out deer, to encourage lush young shoots on bushes or in the case of one Australian cycad to improve the number of edible seeds per tree. At a material level, therefore, fire has uses beyond the community’s blaze where cooking makes a lot of plant material more edible by breaking down tough cellulose plant walls. Non-materially, it must have acted as a powerful social bond, both in the settlement and in the cooperative action needed for successful use in the landscape.

HUNTERS AND SPECIES EXTINCTI...