Sequent Occupance

Sequent occupance is a model of landscape change that was widely adopted by American geographers from the 1930s through the 1950s. It views the landscape as a series of superimposed patterns accumulating as culturally distinct ways of life (modes of occupance) that leave their imprint on the land. Each mode is hypothesized to rework the prehuman landscape and earlier cultural layers in distinctive ways, leaving traces visible in the present landscape. The term was introduced by Derwent Whittlesey in 1929. The word occupance was in use, denoting the whole complex of human interactions with the land, to which Whittlesey added the idea of a succession of discrete historical layers. In his original paper, he offered as an exemplar a hypothetical small area of New England for which he proposed the following stages: (a) hunting and gathering by Native Americans, (b) farming, (c) the “present” stage (1929) of declining agriculture and rising secondary forest, and (d) a predicted future stage of forestry by nonresident owners.

Whittlesey used ecological and developmental language in his definition. He saw human occupance as a biotic phenomenon and suggested that it obeys rules analogous to a human organism, an analogy that echoes William Morris Davis's normal cycle of erosion; indeed, in later work, Whittlesey invoked the Davisian idea of rejuvenation. In keeping with the same developmental metaphor, Whittlesey emphasized endogenous changes, arguing that human occupance contained the “seed of its own transformation.” Nevertheless, he recognized the role of exogenous forces such as the impact of midwestern farming on New England agriculture. Although sequent occupance assumes human adaptation to the environment, it also posits the active reshaping of landscape and can thus be seen as part of the contemporary reaction against environmental determinism.

Until 1928, Whittlesey was at the University of Chicago, associated with a group of midwestern geographers engaged in intense discussion over the nature, content, and technical vocabulary of the emerging discipline. Preston James and Cotton Mather noted the importance of these interactions in the midwestern spring field conferences begun by Carl Sauer and Wellington Jones in 1923. Whittlesey attended many of these conferences, which focused on small-area fieldwork. Other regular attendees included scholars who took up the idea of sequent occupance, including Preston James and Stanley Dodge. Many dissertations and articles employed the concept during the 1930s and 1940s, and James used it in his influential text An Outline of Geography (1935). Important exemplars of the method include Stanley Dodge's work on the Illinois Prairie, Alfred Meyer's study of the Kankakee Marsh, Lewis Thomas's work in Missouri, and Edward Ackerman's study of the influence of Boston on Concord, Massachusetts. Details of these and many other applications can be found in Marvin Mikesell's account.

A clear aspiration of Whittlesey's original article was generalization and regional comparisons; he thought it likely that relatively few “sequence patterns” had ever existed. In fact, as studies proliferated, there was little consensus about the number of stages or the criteria by which they were to be defined and very little explicit comparative work. Despite the aim of encompassing the whole complex of human interactions with the environment, stages were most commonly identified with modes of economic exploitation and land use either at a high level of abstraction (e.g., hunting and gathering, agriculture) or at a finer scale of resolution (e.g., dairying, truck farming). Stages were also sometimes identified with indigenous or immigrant ethnic groups. Whittlesey's original illustrative area in Northern New England had been small (15 square miles), [Page 2535]but subsequent researchers applied the idea across a great range of geographic scales.

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