CULTURAL LANDSCAPE

In the broadest sense, those areas of landscape which have been influenced by human activity. The term became common after World War II with increasing recognition of past and present human impact on ecological and environmental systems. Contemporary cultural landscapes of Britain and northwest Europe have been studied intensively via vegetation survey, field mapping, aerial photography and documentary evidence. Prehistoric and older historical cultural landscapes, which cannot be observed directly, have been investigated, for example, by techniques of environmental archaeology, charred-particle analysis and pollen analysis in mires, soils, lacustrinesediments and colluvium. Significant cultural events identified in this way include evidence of initial mesolithic activity, the onset of neolithic cultivation, the elm decline and, more recently, hazel declines due to coppicing and changes in grassland and heathland due to grazing. Causal relationships between past landscape change and cultural development nonetheless often remain difficult to establish due to the retrospective nature of the analysis, and spatial and temporal diversity in both nature and human activity.

Human influence on the landscape was initially subtle and confined spatially as populations and technological capacities were limited. Landscape modification increased with the introduction of controlledfire as a management tool, followed by technological change, the development of agriculture, agricultural intensification, agricultural abandonment, industrialisation and urbanisation. The industrial revolution and associated increases in population and the utilisation of resources produced more substantial landscape change whilst political regimes and conflicts have also had considerable impacts. Since the eighteenth century, anthropogenic rather than natural factors have become the major cause of landscape change throughout Britain and northwest Europe. Around 99 per cent of the almost continuous wildwood that covered Britain during the early holocene has been destroyed and the British landscape appears to have been predominantly open by AD 1700, mainly as a result of forest clearance for timber and agricultural land, whilst lowland wetlands were drained and cultivated. Agricultural intensification in the twentieth century, urban-industrial growth and afforestation have produced particularly distinctive landscapes with many exotic species (wild and cultivated) and sharp ecotones. Although small areas that are often perceived as ‘natural’, such as the New Forest, may have escaped more recent impacts of cultural development, these too have in fact been altered by management or non-intensive landuse. Many other distinctive semi-natural vegetation types created by people over previous centuries have meanwhile been continually modified or destroyed.

[See alsoanthrobleme, anthrome, anthropocene]