Читать книгу Resilience. Persistence and Change in Landscape Forms онлайн

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A key goal in landscape studies is to identify the initial finished state of forms (a kind of “mother form”). All later additions or transformations are thus considered as disturbances or degradations to the original plan. For example, Bloch highlighted the case of drawings of fields or monuments which only very rarely survive to the present day in their “pure” form (Bloch 1988, p. 51). Maitland used the terms true village and purest form to describe a grouped village settlement, established at the time of the Germanic Conquests in the early Middle Ages (Maitland 1987, pp. 15–16). In this approach, there is an initial, finished, “pure” form which is then altered by time over the centuries. In ecology, the notion of a “pristine” ecosystem, untouched by human hands, plays a very similar role (see ssss1). This primal form, which, as we shall see, is more of an ideal type than an element which actually existed, is clearly situated in the past: in the present, we can only access a decayed image. The regressive approach aims to work backwards through time in order to reconstruct a “least decayed” version.