Читать книгу Resilience. Persistence and Change in Landscape Forms онлайн

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Thus, historians may use the present to understand the past in the absence of source material for older periods. For geographers, on the other hand, incursions into the past give a better understanding of the present, and only the elements which are helpful for this purpose will be retained. In history, this approach is called “regressive”, whereas in geography, the term “retrospective” is used (Dion 1949). In both cases, time is considered as a continuous line, in which the present never completely eliminates legacies from the past. Past and present are linked by a logical chain, as Jean Brunhes and Camille Vallaux put it in their 1921 work examining the relationship between geography and history. For these authors, history offers the means of placing an isolated fact “into the stream of life which produced it”, as “one link in a chain” (Brunhes and Vallaux 1921, p. 21).

From the outset, however, the regressive analysis approach to history was confronted with a difficulty: that of studying landscapes which are in a constant state of evolution. Without a general framework for studying the evolution of human societies, it is hard to interpret plans or documents beyond their date of production. This led to a focus on planned parcel systems which marked a clear change from previous landscape patterns, for example following periods of land clearance. From a methodological perspective, a distinction was made between two types of landscape, of which A. Verhulst summarized the characteristics.