Anthropogenic Heathlands: The Social Organization of Past Grazing Landscapes

Project Information

ANTHEA

Grant agreement ID: 853356

DOI

10.3030/853356

EC signature date 21 October 2019

Start date 1 August 2020

End date 31 March 2027

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 499 457,00

EU contribution

€ 1 499 457,00

Coordinated by

AARHUS UNIVERSITET
Denmark

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - ANTHEA (Anthropogenic Heathlands: The Social Organization of Past Grazing Landscapes)

Reporting period: 2023-08-01 to 2025-01-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

More than 4,000 years ago, small-scale agropastoral communities of Northern Europe began the first fire-based management and expansion of naturally occurring heather (Calluna vulgaris).Palynological evidence suggests that there was an exceptional continuity of some of these enormous landscapes, covering thousands of hectares, until the 18th-19th century. Large-scale anthropogenic heathland is a unique form of ecosystem, an artificially sustained vegetational succession stage, whose retention is dependent on systematic disturbance. Left on its own without repeated and frequent efforts to rejuvenate heather, including burning, grazing and turf-removal, heathland will turn into crowberry or grass heath and eventually dwarf shrub and forest. As a result, the palaeoecological evidence poses an intriguing puzzle regarding how such a particular type of landscape, which is constantly in the process of becoming something else, could be sustained for more than four millennia. Their survival suggests the existence of highly specialised multispecies entanglements and forms of social organisation based on grazing and controlled burning with a unique capacity to persist or re-establish.And they invite an exploration of how people can self-organise around land held in common and devise resilient structures of governance: What was the actual stability of these landscapes? How did they apparently become super-resilient in some areas but not in others? And how did these heathland regimes self-organize and manage to stay in place in spite of radical demographic, political and tenure changes?

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

We have, so far, created an extensive dataset based on archaeological excavations and data from our 7 case study areas; a supplementary dataset based on all palynological data from our 7 case study areas and a dataset of heathland-indicating macrofossils from Denmark. We have carried out literature-based reviews on heathland research spanning archaeology and paleoecology, resilience research as well as historical documentations of heathland living. We have carried out a trench-excavation and paleoecological sampling of a Bronze Age barrow in NW Jutland. We have carried out supplementary peat and barrow corings from Mid-West Jutland, and collected samples for micromorphology, pollen/NPPs, macrofossils and parasites from other archaeological contexts, including barrows, funerary and settlement sites.

We have documented the temporal dimensions of the earliest heathland expansion and carried out a series of mappings of heathland emergence and resilience across Northern Europe as well as phenomenological approaches to heathland landscapes. We have shown that this particular kind of anthropogenic landscape emerged and became meaningful landscapes by being tied to pastoral and cosmological practices from its very onset. And we have put these processes into a wider geographical and historical perspective by looking into how the antidote of heathlands, the expansion of boundaries and fences, give rise to the collapse of deep time pastoral ecologies and forms of governance as well as new spatial conceptions.

We have critically engaged with a set of prevalent concepts and debates in archaeology, including resilience-thinking, topological comparison, and the more-than-human.

Our main results achieved so far have been published in 18 papers, and a series of other more public and dissemination-oriented publications.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The project so far has already achieved several significant results that show importance and progress significantly beyond the state of the art.

We have presented the first known potential for reformulations of resilience theory and its attendant concepts within a less positivistic and human-centered conceptual register. Such new translations of resilience in archaeology pave the way for more nuanced approaches to concepts of history and their sociopolitical use, as well as alternative time dynamics of historical change.

Our concept of ‘ancestral commons’ unites practical concerns (subsistence practices, settlement choices) with ontological concerns (cosmologies, worldviews) and nonhuman concerns (landscape and plant affordances, grazing preferences). We consider this as a breakthrough for understanding how this particular kind of anthropogenic landscape emerged and became meaningful landscapes by being tied to pastoral and cosmological practices from their very onset, which will be both theoretically and empirical relevant way beyond this specific period and geographical focus.

Moreover, our study of concentrational agriculture interrogates the possibility of deep-time persistence of concentrational farming practices from the early Iron Age to mid-19th century. We advance the hypothesis that the long-term persistence of Danish heathlands is not achievement of sustainability but the inability of agrarian peoples to escape the conditions of soil exhaustion their extractive manuring practices produce. Being able to detect continuity-amidst-change transforms our approaches to periodization as well as our theories of historical change.

Expected results until the end of the project includes a quantitative temporal resilience mapping, a geographical mapping of the spatial expansion and contraction of heathlands in a long-term perspective, an investigation of the social organization responsible for heathland resilience and persistence and a contemporary perspective of heathlands and their role in the future landscape.

Calluna heathland in Mid Jutland, Denmark