Landscapes Under Pressure Theory and Practice of Cultural Heritage Research and Preservation

About this book

There is a growing realization that human intent and activity are not easily separated from natural forces in the shaping of landscapes. The pervasive Western dichotomy of culture and nature has proved to be a poor basis for scientific research and long-term environmental management. Humans have been major factors in environmental change for thousands of years using fire, intensive hunting and a wide range of agricultural strategies to transform most ecosystems on the earth long before the Industrial Revolution. All these activites contribute to the making of cultural landscapes which incorporate elements generally classified in two groups: tangible empirical evidence of human behavior, and intangible, symbolic meanings.

This book investigates the newly emerging scope of interests and project agendas to investigate and preserve cultural landscapes. It presents the historic, archaeological, ethnographic, and environmental traditions of cultural landscape study and the attempts to reconstruct and analyze the complex processes of cultural changes through prehistoric and historic times.

The "guiding light" of the book is that the fullest understanding of a cultural landscape will materialize through interdisciplinary cooperation, which should involve an ecological approach with historical ecology as the guiding tool, applied archaeology, and environmental planning. The book addresses issues of interest to policymakers-makers and planners and those who investigate cultural landscapes.

Contents

Introduction

Part I: Theory
- Place, Problem and People: Issues in Interdisciplinary Cooperation
- Place, Historical Ecology and Cultural Landscape: New Directions for Culture Resource Management
- The Colonial Southwest: Pueblo and Spanish Shared and Separate Landscapes
- A New Landscape for Cultural Heritage Management: Characterization as a Management Tool
- The Site as a Modern Locality

Part II: Methodology and Practice
- Changing Places: Developing an archaeology of place at Lower Pescado Village, Zuni, New Mexico
- Envisioning Future Landscapes in the Environmentally Sensitive Areas of Scotland: an Introduction
- Critical Data for Understanding Early European Farmers
- Alternative Archaeologies of the Cold War: THe Preliminary Results of Fieldwork at the Greenham and Nevada Peace Camps
- Building on the Past: Archaeological Preservation in Large-Scale Transportation Corridors

Part III: Legal, Economic and Political Constraints of Cultural Heritage Preservation Programs
- Private Sector Archaeology: Part of the Problem or Part of the Solution
- Protection, Maintenance and Enhancement of Cultural Landscapes in Changing Social, Political and Economical Reality in Poland
- Cultural Heritage Preservation and the Legal System with Specific Reference to Landscapes

- Afterword
- Index
- References

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