Cultural landscape
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Cultural landscape is defined as the human-modified environment, including fields, houses, churches, highways, planted forests, and mines, as well as weeds and pollution.
A cultural landscape defined as:
- "a geographic area, including both cultural and natural resources and the wildlife or domestic animals therein, associated with an historic event, activity, or person or exhibiting other cultural or aesthetic values."
In the USA, there are four general types of cultural landscapes, not mutually exclusive: historic sites, historic designed landscapes, historic vernacular landscapes, and ethnographic landscapes.
- “The cultural landscape is fashioned from a natural landscape by a cultural group. Culture is the agent, the natural are the medium, the cultural landscape is the result. Under the influence of a given culture, itself changing through time, the landscape undergoes development, passing through phases and probably reaching ultimately the end of its cycle of development. With the introduction of a different, alien culture, a rejuvenation of the cultural landscape sets in, or a new landscape is superimposed on remnants of the old one” (Sauer’s, 1925).
Sauer was explicitly concerned to counter an environmental determinism which had dominated the American geography of the previous generation, within which human agency was given scant autonomy in the shaping of the visible landscape. Sauer believed, and was determined to stress the agency of culture as a force in shaping the visible features of the Earth’s surface in delimited areas. Within his definition, the physical environment retains a central significance, as the medium with and through which human cultures act. Interestingly this results in elements of the physical environment, such as topography, soils, plants and animals needing to be incorporated into studies of the cultural landscape; so far as they provoke human responses and adaptations, or have themselves been altered by human activity (e.g. forest clearing and dams). Cronon (1995) believes that Sauer’s definition cannot be upheld today since it is clear that there is no clear distinction between nature and culture, since both interlink and should be regarded together as co-productions. Also, note the reference by Sauer of a different ‘alien culture’, which surely symbolises the cultural impacts caused by Europeans during colonialism which resulted in the imposition of colonial cultures upon pre-existing cultures.
[edit] The Myth of the Pristine Landscape
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With the arrival of Europeans to North and South America and their subsequent forays into the hearts of these continents, explorers frequently encountered sparsely inhabited landscapes they thought was untouched wilderness, a belief which has persisted into contemporary time. In a 1992 journal article, William M. Denevan closely examines this idea of "a world of barely perceptible human disturbance" and instead argues for the alternative hypothesis in which the state of American landscapes as they were in early post-contact times were largely shaped by anthropogenic processes such as deforestation and agricultural burning. The indigenous people largely partook in these activities out of a need for survival. Weapons were needed to defend themselves against rival tribes, and burning another tribe's land was a frequently used assault tactic. There is evidence that massive wood and stone fortresses were built by the native peoples, and giant siege engines were made to attack these, resulting in local habitat destruction. These extensive modifications done on the part of pre-contact peoples to their local ecosystems effectvely transformed them into cultural and humanized landscapes. That indigenous peoples were capable of altering the landscapes in which they lived assigns much more agency to them than was previously credited to them for the past several centuries. It also refutes the notion of the 'noble savage' who lived in immaculate harmony with nature and left little to no impact on his landscape. For an example of a landscape characteristic that is anthropogenic in origin, see the wikipedia article on Terra Preta.
[edit] References
William M. Denevan. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 82, No. 3, The Americas before and after 1492: Current Geographical Research (Sep., 1992), pp. 369-385
