{"id":2139,"date":"2022-08-29T14:39:10","date_gmt":"2022-08-29T14:39:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/horizon.peachpuff-wolverine-566518.hostingersite.com\/?p=2139"},"modified":"2022-08-29T14:39:10","modified_gmt":"2022-08-29T14:39:10","slug":"the-land-use-of-our-fathers-prospering-in-a-healthy-environment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/horizon\/2139\/the-land-use-of-our-fathers-prospering-in-a-healthy-environment\/","title":{"rendered":"The land use of our fathers \u2013 prospering in a healthy environment"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our ancestors dealt with large-scale environmental challenges thousands of years ago. Understanding their traditional practices may inform modern Europeans racing to adapt to climate change today.<\/p>\n

Heathlands, with their scrubby, woody plants and sandy soil, cover large tracts of Europe. Although the soil is not very nourishing, heathlands are home to unique flora and fauna. Once believed to be natural scrubland, most heathlands were formed when forests were cleared for agriculture in prehistoric times.<\/p>\n

The existence of heathlands is maintained with the grazing and burning techniques of land management over long timeframes. They must constantly be renewed, and in some respects, heathlands are deeply entangled in the human cultural landscape.<\/p>\n

Many heathlands have survived for thousands of years through countless climate, population, economic and infrastructural transformations. Their resilience may suggest ways in which humans and nature can thrive together dynamically, if their ecological fabric can be understood.<\/p>\n

Today, heathlands are under threat with more than 90% of them disappearing in the last 150 years, mainly due to the intensification of farming, a lack of sustained management, and because of pollution from industry.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0ANTHEA project<\/a>, also known as Anthropogenic Heathlands: The Social Organization of Super-Resilient Past Human Ecosystems, researches the ways in which human interactions with heathlands have changed over time.<\/p>\n

\u2018There is currently a trend towards nature conservation and restoration resting on the idea that we want to take people out of nature,\u2019 said Prof Mette L\u00f8vschal, an archaeologist at Aarhus University in Denmark who studies Neolithic heather landscapes from an archaeological perspective. Yet, she argues that \u2018heathlands and their more than 5 000 year survival depend on the presence of humans.\u2019<\/p>\n

Grazing spaces<\/strong><\/p>\n

Thousands of years ago, people in Northern Europe cleared tracts of post-glacial forest to create space for their grazing animals. Naturally-occurring species of heather flourished in such landscapes, providing an evergreen source of winter grazing and other valuable resources such as fuel and bedding.<\/p>\n

For thousands of years, humans have continued to maintain these special areas, in which nature and humans rely on each other. The question is, what features of the landscape \u2013 location, soil composition, habitation, land use and organisation factors, for example\u00a0\u2013 are important to the survival of heathland.<\/p>\n

Heathlands offer pastoralists an advantage over grass in that, while grass is more nutrient rich than heather, it tends to die out in winter. In fact, farmers\u2019 livestock\u00a0\u2013 sheep and goats in particular\u00a0\u2013 can graze on heather in the cold months, without farmers having to collect and store fodder. These landscapes require continuous maintenance over generations, L\u00f8vschal explained.<\/p>\n

\u2018Heathlands in themselves are an unstable landscape,\u2019 said L\u00f8vschal. \u2018Most places quite quickly, within 15 to 25 years, transform into forest if you don\u2019t manage them with grazing, cutting, or by controlled fires.\u2019<\/p>\n

Plant records<\/strong><\/p>\n

For the ANTHEA project, researchers are combining the archaeological history of humans with ancient plant records in seven case-study areas from Norway to Ireland.<\/p>\n

\u2018Several of us are working with archaeological material,\u2019 said L\u00f8vschal. \u2018When do the earliest kinds of settlements appear in the heathlands? Is there any evidence of people using heather or turf as a construction material or as fuel or as bedding?\u2019<\/p>\n

With that information, the researchers will see how people engaged with the heathland on a practical as well as a social and ideological level.<\/p>\n

Excavation of ancient pollen can reveal which plants once inhabited the landscape. Tree, shrub and grass pollen blow through the air before settling on the ground or sinking to the bottom of a body of water. Over time, soil and organic matter cover this pollen, trapping it in the ground.<\/p>\n

By extracting long cylindrical samples of soil, known as cores, from the bottom of lakes or wetlands, researchers can identify and date the pollen and ultimately reconstruct the ancient landscape. Microscopic charcoal also points to whether the heathland had been burnt and when.<\/p>\n

Beautiful balance<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is not the first time heathlands have been under threat, L\u00f8vschal said. During the Bronze Age, about 5 000 years ago, people tore up large tracts of heathland and grasslands to create human burial mounds, known as barrows. Unfortunately, this activity \u2018led to an ecological catastrophe\u2019 since removing turf causes an extreme depletion of soil fertility. On the other hand, there have also been times at which humans and heathlands were \u2018in beautiful balance\u2019.<\/p>\n

One of the major questions the ANTHEA project addresses is the ways in which this \u2018beautiful balance\u2019 was achieved by different pastoral groups across Europe and \u2018whether the long-term survival of these heathlands was the product of people doing very similar kinds of things or whether they gave rise to a myriad of ways of living and organising.\u2019<\/p>\n

The\u00a0TerraNova<\/a>\u00a0project is also looking to ancient landscapes to identify ways in which humans can sustainably coexist with nature.<\/p>\n

\u2018We want to understand how natural landscapes have been shaped over time in order to find the best practical guidelines and solutions for sustainable land use,\u2019 said Prof Karl-Johan Lindholm, an archaeologist at Uppsala University and co-investigator on TerraNova.<\/p>\n

Historical epochs<\/strong><\/p>\n

Archaeology divides historical epochs based on human technology and tool development, so we have The Stone Age, The Bronze Age, and The Iron Age.<\/p>\n

Anthropology, on the other hand, identifies human organisation by size and complexity, so you have community, tribe, and state, Lindholm explained. \u2018None of these conventional explanatory frameworks is really helpful for land management.\u2019\u00a0That’s why the researchers are applying an interdisciplinary approach, using information from archaeology, ecology, climatology, and landscape studies.<\/p>\n

The project is investigating land use over time at different \u2018field laboratories\u2019, which run along river catchment areas in Sweden, in Germany and the Netherlands, and in Portugal, Romania and Spain, Lindholm said. Catchment areas represent a number of different environments through which water flows to a river.<\/p>\n

Ecosystem study<\/strong><\/p>\n

By mining existing data in the archaeological and paleo-ecological (the study of ecosystems in the distant past) records, the project will model the vegetation, animal distribution and human land use over time to develop different scenarios and land-cover models.<\/p>\n

\u2018Our ambition is to have a digital European atlas,\u2019 Lindholm said.<\/p>\n

TerraNova researchers are also engaging with people who are currently managing land to provide insight and tools for policymakers.<\/p>\n

\u2018Basically what TerraNova aims to do is better understand these kinds of landscape histories in order to provide recommendations, tools, and guidelines for helping today\u2019s land managers to understand and manage their landscapes in a more sustainable way,\u2019 he said.<\/p>\n

The research in this article was funded via the EU\u2019s European Research Council and the Marie Sk\u0142odowska-Curie Actions (MSCA). <\/em>This article was originally published\u202fin <\/em>Horizon<\/em><\/a>, the EU Research and Innovation Magazine.\u202f\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

More info<\/p>\n

Follow the links below for more information.<\/p>\n