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The Dresden Elbe Valley World Heritage Site is according to the UNESCO "an outstanding example of land use, representing an exceptional development of a major Central-European city" having almost half a million inhabitants.

Cultural landscape is defined as the human-modified environment, including fields, houses, churches, highways, planted forests, and mines, as well as weeds and pollution.

A cultural landscape defined as:

"a geographic area, including both cultural and natural resources and the wildlife or domestic animals therein, associated with an historic event, activity, or person or exhibiting other cultural or aesthetic values."

History of the Cultural Landscape Idea

The geographer Otto Schluter is identified as having used the term “cultural landscape” in the early twentieth century (James and Martin 1981:177). In 1908, Schluter argued that by defining geography as a Landschaftskunde (landscape science) this would give geography a logical subject matter shared by no other discipline (Elkins 1989:27, James and Martin 1981:177). In approaching landscapes Schluter used the historical geographic approach. He defined two forms of landscape: the Urlandschaft or landscape that existed before major human induced changes and the Kulturlandschaft a landscape created by human culture. The major task of geography was to trace the changes in these two landscapes.

Schluter looked to the impact of humans on the natural environment rather than determination of human activities by the natural environment. The method used was morphological and based firmly on the fixed and movable forms of the landscape, ignoring non-material aspects (such as social conditions) (James and Martin 1981:177).

Conzen’s review of historical geography suggests that by the mid-1920s geography had developed a distinct historical stream with a heavy emphasis on environmental determinism. “The first quarter of the twentieth century had witnessed Promethean battles over the scope and orientation of American geography, in which the historical perspective had played a critical role and produced a literature of brash generalisation balanced precariously upon fragmentary research (Conzen 1993:25).

Enter Carl Sauer

It was in this context that Carl O. Sauer produced his paper on the Morphology of the Landscape in which the concept of cultural landscape was introduced. Carl Sauer, who had been educated in Germany, was based at the University of California at Berkeley. Sauer's paper "The Morphology of Landscape" (Sauer 1925) is probably the most influential in developing ideas on cultural landscapes (see Baker 1992:6; Haggett 1965:11; James and Martin 1981: 321-324; Jackson 1989; Leighly 1963:6; Meinig 1979:227; Price and Lewis 1993; Williams 1983) and it is still cited today. Ironically however, Sauer's paper was really concerned about his own vision for geography, which was to establish the discipline on a phenonomological basis rather than it being specifically concerned with cultural landscapes.

“The cultural landscape is fashioned from a natural landscape by a cultural group. Culture is the agent, the natural are the medium, the cultural landscape is the result. Under the influence of a given culture, itself changing through time, the landscape undergoes development, passing through phases and probably reaching ultimately the end of its cycle of development. With the introduction of a different, alien culture, a rejuvenation of the cultural landscape sets in, or a new landscape is superimposed on remnants of the old one” (Sauer’s, 1925).

Sauer was explicitly concerned to counter an environmental determinism which had dominated the American geography of the previous generation, within which human agency was given scant autonomy in the shaping of the visible landscape. Sauer believed, and was determined to stress the agency of culture as a force in shaping the visible features of the Earth’s surface in delimited areas. Within his definition, the physical environment retains a central significance, as the medium with and through which human cultures act. Interestingly this results in elements of the physical environment, such as topography, soils, plants and animals needing to be incorporated into studies of the cultural landscape; so far as they provoke human responses and adaptations, or have themselves been altered by human activity (e.g. forest clearing and dams). Cronon (1995) believes that Sauer’s definition cannot be upheld today since it is clear that there is no clear distinction between nature and culture, since both interlink and should be regarded together as co-productions. Also, note the reference by Sauer of a different ‘alien culture’, which surely symbolises the cultural impacts caused by Europeans during colonialism which resulted in the imposition of colonial cultures upon pre-existing cultures.

The Myth of the Pristine Landscape

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With the arrival of Europeans to North and South America and their subsequent forays into the hearts of these continents, explorers frequently encountered sparsely inhabited landscapes they thought was untouched wilderness, a belief which has persisted into contemporary time. In a 1992 journal article, William M. Denevan closely examines this idea of "a world of barely perceptible human disturbance" and instead argues for the alternative hypothesis in which the state of American landscapes as they were in early post-contact times were largely shaped by anthropogenic processes such as deforestation and agricultural burning. The indigenous people largely partook in these activities out of a need for survival. Weapons were needed to defend themselves against rival tribes, and burning another tribe's land was a frequently used assault tactic. There is evidence that massive wood and stone fortresses were built by the native peoples, and giant siege engines were made to attack these, resulting in local habitat destruction. These extensive modifications done on the part of pre-contact peoples to their local ecosystems effectvely transformed them into cultural and humanized landscapes. That indigenous peoples were capable of altering the landscapes in which they lived assigns much more agency to them than was previously credited to them for the past several centuries. It also refutes the notion of the 'noble savage' who lived in immaculate harmony with nature and left little to no impact on his landscape. For an example of a landscape characteristic that is anthropogenic in origin, see the wikipedia article on Terra Preta.

References

• Conzen, M. 1993, ‘The historical impulse in Geographical writing about the United States 1850 1990’, in Conzen, M., Rumney, T. and Wynn, G. 1993, A Scholar's Guide to Geographical Writing on the American and Canadian Past, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp.3 90.

• Denevan William M. 1992, The Americas before and after 1492: Current Geographical Research, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 82, No. 3, pp. 369-385.

• Elkins, T. H. 1989. Human and Regional Geography in the German-speaking lands in the first forty years of the Twentieth Century, in J. Nicholas Entrikin & Stanley D. Brunn (eds). Reflections on Richard Hartshorne's The nature of geography, Occasional publications of the Association of the American Geographers, Washington DC. 17-34.

• James, P. E. and Martin, G. 1981, All Possible Worlds: A history of geographical ideas, John Wiley & Sons, New York.

• Sauer, C. 1925, The Morphology of Landscape, University of California Publications in Geography, 22:19 53.

Academic studies of cultural landscapes

Any Cultural Landscape is a system of interaction between human activity and natural habitat. In a sense that is broader than the definition of the UNESCO and that includes the mentalities, concepts and traditions of the people living in a cultural landscape, the Universities of Naples, St.-Étienne, and Stuttgart offer the study of Master of Cultural Landscapes (MaCLands), which will be graduated with a European Master diploma: (www.maclands.eu).

See also

• Cultural region
• Landscape architecture
• Permanent European Conference for the Study of the Rural Landscape

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