SPACE,PRESSURES AND THE MANAGEMENT OF THE GREEK LANDSCAPE

Landscapes are the result of the interaction of natural and human factors, with many dimensions; they are part of natural and cultural heritage and an important component of the quality of life. Greece has heterogeneous and mixed landscapes issuing from both geomorphology and the impact of complex human systems. Despite the existence of many and early legislative efforts, Greece has a relatively poor history of spatial planning and landscape has been particularly neglected. The adoption of the European Landscape Convention (ELC) in 2010 provides an updated strategic context for integrating landscape in spatial planning. In this article, we seek to contribute to the discussion of landscape policies and the inclusion of the landscape level in the spatial planning national framework. We identify the dominant landscape types by categorizing landscapes at the national scale with reference to the (combined) presence of three different components: geomorphology, land cover and coasts/islands. Then, we investigate the most important processes of change for each type and link these processes with spatial planning policy. The identification of these dynamics sheds light on current and future trajectories of the changes of Greek landscapes, thus providing challenges for its management in the context of the ELC. The case study concerns the regional level; we focus on Attica, Thessaly, Epirus and the Cyclades and identify the principal characteristics according to the proposed landscape typology.     

Fortifications and Enclosures in European Prehistory: A Cross-Cultural Perspective

This article reviews recent research into the archaeological interpretation and investigation of fortifications and enclosures during the Neolithic and Bronze Age in Europe. Recent methodological, technological, and cultural developments have expanded our understanding of the temporal, spatial, and formal variability of these features on the landscape. Interpretations of this variability also have varied with different theoretical trends in the discipline. We advocate a cross-cultural approach that focuses on the occurrence of enclosures and fortifications over the long term at the continental scale. Such a macroscalar approach complements interpretive frameworks at the regional and microregional scales. The geographic and temporal distribution of these features indicates that social institutions associated with principles of segmentation and substitutability became formalized and tethered to the landscape during the Neolithic.     

Spatial-Domain Chaos in Landscapes

It has been speculated that deterministic chaos may be responsible for the spatial complexity commonly observed in biophysical landscapes. However, deterministic chaos is a temporally defined concept and has been rigorously investigated only in the temporal domain. It is shown here, using a simple hillslope regolith cover model as an example, that temporal chaos in the presence of even minor spatial anisotropy will result in a spatially chaotic pattern. It is also shown that behavior of spatially chaotic landscape systems can be deduced, at least in theory, from spatial patterns of a single landscape component or variable. Because stochastic complexity is likely to exist in landscapes in addition to any deterministic complexity, detecting and analyzing chaotic behavior in landscapes is difficult. Progress in efforts to examine chaos in the spatial domain and to isolate deterministic and stochastic complexity may be the key to developing a theory of landscape evolution that can reconcile the simultaneous presence of apparently random, irregular variability and orderly, regular patterns.     

On reductionism and emergence in geomorphology

Much geomorphological enquiry has been devoted to the understanding of landscapes via the construction of models based on the relationships between process and form. This paper examines the philosophical, theoretical and practical problems involved in bridging the gap between studies of geomorphological processes and explanations of landscape development. It argues that process geomorphology is essentially reductionist and discusses the practical and logical limitations of such an approach to science. It suggests that landscapes are emergent phenomena and, by drawing from the philosophical and practical lessons derived from the physics of non-linear systems, demonstrates that they are not amenable to reductionist explanations.     

Hydrology at Aberdeen – thinking about water locally and globally

ABSTRACT

Although geographical hydrology research at Aberdeen contributed significant insights into the connections between river channel processes and landscape evolution in the early twentieth century it was not until the 1980s that hydrology became a discernible research theme in the Department of Geography. Whilst the research initially focused on understanding the linkages between fluvial geomorphology, hydrology and in-stream hydraulics, since the mid-1990s a burgeoning research community has made significant contributions to advancing physical hydrology, understanding water quality issues and elucidating inter-connections between hydrology and both terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. A particular research strength has been the use of isotopic tracers (especially high-resolution, field-based data) to advance hydrological models. Work at Aberdeen has also been internationally leading in terms of understanding the role of hydrology in shaping the life cycle of Scottish Atlantic salmon and other aquatic organisms. Ideas and research approaches developed at local Scottish field sites are being increasingly applied and adapted to advance hydrological understanding in geographical regions as diverse as the rain forests of Costa Rica, the karst of south west China, aquifers in east Africa, the Chilean high Andes, Arctic Canada, peatlands in western Siberia and forests in northern Germany.     

Retracing Rivers and drawing swamps: Using a drawing tablet to reconstruct an historical hydroscape from army corps survey maps

Abstract

This article presents a novel geospatial approach to reconstructing and analyzing environmental change over extensive spatial and temporal scales, even in systems such as rivers and streams that are comparatively difficult to digitize. We used a drawing tablet and stylus to digitize features found on historical Army Corps maps across the spatially extensive landscape of the Lower Wabash River’s riparian zone, in Indiana and Illinois, USA. The methodology allows for an efficient reconstruction of sinuous and irregular environmental features, such as sloughs, and demonstrates the utility of digitizing historical maps to understand the evolution of surface water quantity and location across a landscape. We then compared these historical data to contemporary environmental datasets for the same study area to understand what changes have occurred over a 100?year period. This reveals that the hydroscape of the Lower Wabash River has been significantly altered by past human activity, notably through the reduction of swamps, wetlands, and sandbars, and the increase in drainage ditches and overall stream area. Notably, many of these historical alterations are not captured within current environmental datasets.     

Agricultural potential and actualized development in Hawai’i: an airborne LiDAR survey of the leeward Kohala field system (Hawai’i Island)

Archaeological investigations of Hawaiian agriculture have relied on relatively coarse-grained data to investigate archipelago-wide processes, or on fine-grained data to examine patterning within localized zones of agricultural production. These trade-offs between spatial coverage and data resolution have inhibited understanding of both spatial patterns and temporal trends. Our analysis of 173 km² of high-resolution airborne Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data for leeward Kohala, Hawai’i Island identifies spatial and temporal patterning in regional agricultural development. Differential densities of alignments suggest variable levels of agricultural intensity. Agricultural processes of expansion, segmentation, and intensification can also be discriminated, with distinct zones of the field system having undergone different mixes of development. Areas within the field system with moderate to high levels of both average production and variability in production (determined using a climate-driven productivity model) were utilized relatively early in a highly intensified manner; these areas often underwent processes of segmentation and intensification. Less productive areas were developed later and exhibit evidence of expansion with lower amounts of segmentation and intensification, at set levels of intensity. The spatial and temporal variability in agricultural activities was influenced by the diverse environmental conditions across the landscape as well as variation in cultivars and cultivation techniques. Combining the high-resolution LiDAR data from a large area with potential productivity modeling allows for a more fine-grained understanding of agricultural development in this region of the Hawaiian archipelago.     

Taphonomic resolution and hominin subsistence behaviour in the Lower Palaeolithic: differing data scales and interpretive frameworks at Boxgrove and Swanscombe (UK)

The identification of human butchery-signatures on fauna from Lower Palaeolithic sites is well documented and readily identifiable. Such bone surface modifications have the potential to provide not only information about past hominin meat-procurement behaviour but address the wider issue of competition for resources with other carnivore species. To understand and discuss these broader issues both hominin and natural bone surface modifications must be understood and contextualised within a site-specific spatial and temporal framework. This paper presents new results from faunal analysis at two key British Lower Palaeolithic localities: Boxgrove and Swanscombe. It illustrates that different depositional environments and excavation histories have resulted in different scales and resolutions of available data and hence in varying interpretive potentials. At Swanscombe the archaeological record has been disturbed by both fluvial activity and excavation history providing a coarser-grained record of anthropogenic behaviour than previously acknowledged. Conversely, at Boxgrove, a finer-grained, higher resolution record of human behaviours has been preserved; this, combined with both an extensive and intensive excavation strategy, has allowed for a broader discussion of hominin landscape use, resource competition and meat-procurement behaviour. This paper highlights that assessing the specific depositional environment at each site is crucial to understanding Palaeolithic faunal assemblage formation and, consequently, the available data-resolution and behavioural interpretation.     

Capturing spatial patterns of rural landscapes with point cloud

Over the past few decades, rural landscapes have been the subject of increasing international cultural heritage research, and one of the most important issues under investigation at both theoretical and pragmatic levels concerns how to identify the spatial character of rural landscapes for conservation purposes. This article establishes an innovative approach adopting a cultural landscape perspective with the support of point cloud technologies to capture spatial patterns of rural landscapes. This approach was explored by reference to Tunpu villages in Guizhou, China—these being a specific kind of military fortress settlement. Cultural landscape values and landscape characters of Tunpu villages were identified using historical research and document analysis. Aerial and terrestrial photogrammetry and laser scanning systems were combined to collect and process spatial information at environmental, village, and architectural scales. Point cloud models can quantitatively represent villages' spatial patterns and inform the interpretation of their heritage significance. We conclude that the strengths of point cloud technologies could meet the requirements of rural landscape heritage documentation from a cultural landscape perspective. This mixed‐technology approach could also greatly improve the efficiency and precision of traditional rural landscape documentation, which has the potential to change methodologies applied to rural landscape research and management.     

Towards an Archaeology of Disentanglement

The impact of connectivity in past societies has long been a focus of archaeological studies. Well-established approaches have been developed over the years to understand emergent connections and entanglement between distant communities, including world system, culture contact, post-colonial theories and network analyses. Our understanding of connectivity remains partial, however, because researchers have focussed on the establishment and consequences of contact and largely ignored the dynamics that often led to its interruption. Yet these processes of ‘disentanglement’ are just as complex and far-reaching as their converse and need to be understood in their own right. This paper shows that a thorough analysis of disentanglement processes can contribute to our understanding of the very nature of the interrupted contacts, as well as shed light on the social dynamics that engender long-term changes in contact patterns. The concept of disentanglement is discussed in the light of current theories of connectivity and explored through regional case studies in Late Bronze Age Italy (Salento) and Greece (Achaea).     

BOSERUP BACKWARDS? AGRICULTURAL INTENSIFICATION AS ‘ITS OWN DRIVING FORCE’ IN THE MBULU HIGHLANDS,TANZANIA

Why do farmers intensify their agricultural practices? Recent revisions of African environmental historiographies have greatly enriched our understanding of human–environmental interactions. To simply point at poor farming practices as the main cause of deforestation, desertification and other processes of land degradation is, for example, no longer possible. The contemporary analytical focus is instead on the complex and often unpredictable set of causal relations between societal, ecological and climatic factors. In the literature on agricultural intensification, conventionally defined driving forces, such as population pressure and market demand, remain important explanatory factors despite a growing body of research that suggests more dynamic scenarios of agricultural development and landscape change. This article reports on a case where the common‐sense logic of population pressure theory has dominated the historical narrative of a local process of agricultural intensification among an agro‐pastoral people in north‐central Tanzania. By way of a ‘detailed participatory landscape analyses’ a more complex and dynamic historical process of intensification is suggested, in which the landscape and the process of agricultural intensification itself are in focus. It is concluded that the accumulation of landesque capital has been incremental in character, and that the process of agricultural intensification in the study area has largely been its own driving force based on self‐reinforcing processes of change, and not a consequence of land scarcity and population pressure. This result demonstrates the possibility and usefulness of reversing the Bose‐rupian argument in analyses of agricultural intensification.     

An Initial Analysis of River Discharge and Rainfall in Coastal New South Wales,Australia Using Wavelet Transforms

In many coastal catchments of south eastern New South Wales, Australia, changes in river morphology are a response to human impact superimposed on spatial and temporal patterns of variability in precipitation and discharge. Understanding, and preferably quantifying, spatial and temporal patterns of hydrologic variability are essential to understanding natural changes, and to separate these from artificial changes in river systems. Prediction and management of water resources are also dependent upon this understanding. We assess the variability in precipitation and discharge using the wavelet transform which projects the time series of data into a three dimensional surface of frequency, amplitude and time. The analysis reveals that changes across time often reflect changes in individual seasons and may be linked to changes in particular seasonal atmospheric circulation systems. Strong perturbations in the analysis of one catchment are consistent with documented, geomorphically‐effective, flooding sequences. The characteristics of the series in the transformed data reveal interesting differences at certain times and scales which may be a reflection of changes in larger scale atmospheric processes.     

Recent Landscape Archaeology in South America

South American archaeologists use the term landscape to analyze a broad range of relationships. Examples include intensive agriculture and political power, myth and place, and climate change and cultural development. Landscape archaeology is necessarily spatial analysis, but scholars work at different scales and use different methods. This essay highlights the influence of geography, anthropology, and new methodologies on four definitions of landscape: ecological habitat, built environment, a stage for performance, and integrating subsistence and settlement. In a number of cases, landscape archaeologists, stakeholders, and researchers from different traditions work at different scales to meaningfully share information, clarify their differences, and compare their analyses and conclusions.     

Editorial I

Communication strategies emphasize concerns for content (what is said) and process (the way things are said). Scientists have a responsibility to communicate the findings of their research, enhancing prospects that their insights can meaningfully inform management practice. When used effectively, principles from geomorphology provide critical guidance for environmental management. Three key geomorphic messages are outlined here: Respect diversity through communicating spatial and temporal controls upon landscape character and behaviour; Work with nature in conveying the range of behaviour of any given system; and Be proactive by determining the trajectory of landscape change. Uptake of geomorphic understanding reflects, among many factors, our ability to communicate findings clearly. In communicating these messages, different approaches are likely to prove more effective when addressing differing audiences, whether school/university classes, stakeholders, managers, politicians, or the broader community. Collective approaches to learning through dialogue are encouraged as they promote deeper learning, prospectively enhancing the uptake of geomorphic understanding, thereby promoting healthier environmental futures.     

Diagnostic uncertainty and medical geography: what are we mapping?

The administration of the Canadian health care system requires the collection of large quantities of health data that some health researchers have used to map the spatial distribution of disease. The authors discuss the difficulty of separating genuine geographic variations in health and disease from geographic differences in how diseases are diagnosed, and how these diagnoses are represented in an administrative data system. Although there have been attempts to deal with this problem at the international scale, little research has considered the issue at intranational or intraprovincial scales. There are several strategies available that can help separate spatial patterns of disease from nonmedical confounders, though they remain largely untested in medical geography. Future research should consider the scale of the problem and the effectiveness of existing approaches in mitigating the effects of geographic diagnostic inconsistency on the representation of health statistics in space.     

Historic landscape management: a validation of quantitative soil thin-section analyses

The archaeological interpretation of past land management practices can be greatly enhanced through examination of soil thin sections. Features relating to manuring practice are among those key to interpreting agricultural practices. The sources and the processes leading to the distribution of these manure materials may further improve knowledge of the past landscape utilisation. The use of quantitative analyses to examine soil thin sections opens the possibility of considering these relationships between manured areas in greater detail and to extract more subtle spatial and temporal changes in past management. In this study the validation of this methodology has been tested with quantitative image analysis methods used to examine manure inputs to a well-documented historical landscape of Papa Stour, Shetland, where intensive manuring has been practised until the 1960s. By using both historic and ethnographic evidence to validate the image analysis protocol, differences in spatial and temporal distribution are examined for the practices of manuring with both fuel residues and with turf. The validation of the hypotheses expected from ethnographic and historical data that quantitative soils-based evidence allows the definition of variations in manuring strategies and provides a more secure basis from which to interpret manuring management strategies in archaeological landscapes.     

The Archaeology of Myth: Rock Art,Ritual Objects,and Mythical Landscapes of the Klamath Basin

Recent research in the Klamath Basin has shown that rock art and landscape are intimately connected, mutually informed by indigenous notions of sacred places. Modeling this landscape has been possible through an understanding of Klamath–Modoc myth. This has led some researchers to derive general interpretations of the rock art that are largely in agreement with Klamath–Modoc spiritual beliefs. I take this approach a step further and propose interpretations for specific rock art images and ritual objects, arguing that oral traditions harbor the fundamental logic that underpinned shamanic rituals that led to the creation of these paraphernalia.     

Changing views in Canadian geomorphology: are we seeing the landscape for the processes?

Geomorphology in Canada, as elsewhere, has evolved into an essentially bipartite discipline focusing either on ‘process’ or broader ‘historical’ (Quaternary) landscape interpretation. A growing emphasis on process‐oriented research that relies increasingly on instrumentation and computational technologies has occurred. Critics of such research note limited applicability for landscape evolution, fashionability of methods and limited societal relevance. Indeed, some say we are not seeing the landscape for the processes. This article discusses the changing nature of geomorphology since the Quantitative Revolution of the 1950s including new advances, recent trends and challenges. Publication trends and recent advances suggest that the discipline is very healthy (following a slump in the early 1990s) and continues to evolve, which may reflect increasing research infrastructure and/or funding opportunities and new publications spotlighting Canadian research. Unfortunately, fundamental (less applied) research is threatened by funding program shifts, changing institutional pressures and a decline in research capacity from retirement attrition, and student recruitment challenges. Three research priorities are recommended: (1) continued fundamental research, (2) more integrated modelling to link micro scale processes to macro scale landform behaviour and (3) improvements in profiling our discipline amongst students and related professionals.     

A practice theoretical perspective on the Europeanization of spatial planning

This paper provides a practice theoretical approach for examining the processes of the Europeanization of spatial planning. While the supply of studies on the questions of how, where and when the Europeanization of spatial planning takes place is rich and diverse, the temporal and spatial aspects of the processes have been studied from a rather narrow perspective. In many of the studies, time and space have been examined as objective, pre-existing features of the processes, which has resulted in interpretations of Europeanization as a temporally successive and spatially scalar process. The paper has two main goals. First, it seeks to outline European spatial planning as a distinctive field of political and academic interaction whose central constitutive elements are interconnected policy and research practices. Second, as a more general theoretical goal, the paper develops a practice theoretical approach for examining the processes of Europeanization. In this paper, it is argued that the policy and research practices constitute a temporal–spatial infrastructure for Europeanization. This infrastructure consists of both objective configurations of the practices and the existential temporal–spatial dimensions opened in the practices.     

Heritage designation and scale: a World Heritage case study of the Ningaloo Coast

As heritage research has engaged with a greater plurality of heritage practices, scale has emerged as an important concept in Heritage Studies, albeit relatively narrowly defined as hierarchical levels (household, local, national, etcetera). This paper argues for a definition of scale in heritage research that incorporates size (geographical scale), level (vertical scale) and relation (an understanding that scale is constituted through dynamic relationships in specific contexts). The paper utilises this definition of scale to analyse heritage designation first through consideration of changing World Heritage processes, and then through a case study of the world heritage designation of the Ningaloo Coast region in Western Australia. Three key findings are: both scale and heritage gain appeal because they are abstractions, and gain definition through the spatial politics of interrelationships within specific situations; the spatial politics of heritage designation comes into focus through attention to those configurations of size, level and relation that are invoked and enabled in heritage processes; and researchers choice to analyse or ignore particular scales and scalar politics are political decisions. Utilising scale as size, level and relation enables analyses that move beyond heritage to the spatial politics through which all heritage is constituted.