The use of long-term historical data in exploring landscape-ecological issues

Ing. arch. Václav Fanta

Doctoral thesis

Abstract:

The original aim of this thesis was to study the influence of environmental conditions on settlement history (more precisely: on selected processes in settlement history). Simultaneously, I wanted to use the “ecological” approach, i.e. to work with bigger data sets and apply solid statistical pro-cessing. In total, we investigated 3 sub-questions of various topics, which examined the usability of the above-mentioned approaches in different fields.The first paper (“Equilibrium dynamics of European pre-industrial populations: The evidence of car-rying capacity in human agricultural societies”) describes population dynamics during the period of the Thirty Years’ War and subsequent centuries in the context of human carrying capacity. We have found that human communities were limited by environmental carrying capacity even in the 17th century, i.e. deep into the modern period. Our paper shows that the main limiting factor for popu-lation growth was the soil fertility and cadastre size – in other words, food availability.The second paper (“How long do floods throughout the millennium remain in the collective memory?”) was focused on the influence of big floods on the historical memory of people. The main question was whether people are able to pass information regarding catastrophic floods to younger generations, and whether this passed memory can affect the decision making of younger generations regarding the selection of settlement locations. The results show that the flood memory exists, but its effects are limited only up to approximately 25 years (i.e. one generation). We credit this limitation to ageing of the population and the loss of eye-witnesses. The younger generations might have heard about the floods from the story-telling of their parents and grand-parents, but it obviously had no effect on their behaviour.The third paper (“How old are the towns and villages in Central Europe? Archaeological data reveal the size of bias in dating obtained from traditional historic sources”) studied a more specialized (and more practically-oriented) topic: time-lag in the dating of historical sites. While time-lag was quite long (150 to 300 years) during the early and high medieval periods, it became significantly shorter in the late medieval and early modern period. At the end of the 16th century, the probability of time-lag was less than 5 % (towns) or 25 % (villages). Unfortunately, the data for younger periods (17th and 18th centuries) was not available. However, we expect that during the 17th and 18th centuries, time-lag would be permanently decreasing.The big data approach brings a different type of evidence than the conventional historiographical studies. However, I think that neither of these two methods alone can discover all the mysteries of nature and history. Only a combination of different approaches can help us to understand the world. The combination of settlement history and environmental sciences can result in a remarka-ble interdisciplinary study; the conclusion of this collaboration can describe interesting, large scale trends and analyse general processes. Moreover, the settlement history data can become an en-gaging proxy description of human behaviour or ecology. I think that this type of research can add a broader perspective to conventional, micro-regional historiographical research and vice versa. I suggest that a cooperation between both approaches (“big data” as well as “single features / micro-regions”) should be a subsequent step in settlement and landscape history research.

Abstract:

The original aim of this thesis was to study the influence of environmental conditions on settlement history (more precisely: on selected processes in settlement history). Simultaneously, I wanted to use the “ecological” approach, i.e. to work with bigger data sets and apply solid statistical pro-cessing. In total, we investigated 3 sub-questions of various topics, which examined the usability of the above-mentioned approaches in different fields.The first paper (“Equilibrium dynamics of European pre-industrial populations: The evidence of car-rying capacity in human agricultural societies”) describes population dynamics during the period of the Thirty Years’ War and subsequent centuries in the context of human carrying capacity. We have found that human communities were limited by environmental carrying capacity even in the 17th century, i.e. deep into the modern period. Our paper shows that the main limiting factor for popu-lation growth was the soil fertility and cadastre size – in other words, food availability.The second paper (“How long do floods throughout the millennium remain in the collective memory?”) was focused on the influence of big floods on the historical memory of people. The main question was whether people are able to pass information regarding catastrophic floods to younger generations, and whether this passed memory can affect the decision making of younger generations regarding the selection of settlement locations. The results show that the flood memory exists, but its effects are limited only up to approximately 25 years (i.e. one generation). We credit this limitation to ageing of the population and the loss of eye-witnesses. The younger generations might have heard about the floods from the story-telling of their parents and grand-parents, but it obviously had no effect on their behaviour.The third paper (“How old are the towns and villages in Central Europe? Archaeological data reveal the size of bias in dating obtained from traditional historic sources”) studied a more specialized (and more practically-oriented) topic: time-lag in the dating of historical sites. While time-lag was quite long (150 to 300 years) during the early and high medieval periods, it became significantly shorter in the late medieval and early modern period. At the end of the 16th century, the probability of time-lag was less than 5 % (towns) or 25 % (villages). Unfortunately, the data for younger periods (17th and 18th centuries) was not available. However, we expect that during the 17th and 18th centuries, time-lag would be permanently decreasing.The big data approach brings a different type of evidence than the conventional historiographical studies. However, I think that neither of these two methods alone can discover all the mysteries of nature and history. Only a combination of different approaches can help us to understand the world. The combination of settlement history and environmental sciences can result in a remarka-ble interdisciplinary study; the conclusion of this collaboration can describe interesting, large scale trends and analyse general processes. Moreover, the settlement history data can become an en-gaging proxy description of human behaviour or ecology. I think that this type of research can add a broader perspective to conventional, micro-regional historiographical research and vice versa. I suggest that a cooperation between both approaches (“big data” as well as “single features / micro-regions”) should be a subsequent step in settlement and landscape history research.

Keywords

historical geography, historical landscape, landscape ecology, big data, interdisciplinary studies

Keywords

historical geography, historical landscape, landscape ecology, big data, interdisciplinary studies

Language used: Czech

Date on which the thesis was submitted / produced: 27. 5. 2019

Thesis defence

• Supervisor: prof. Ing. Petr Sklenička, CSc.

Czech University of Life Sciences Prague

Faculty of Environmental Sciences

Doctoral programme / field:
Environmental Sciences / Applied and Landscape Ecology