European mountain areas represent forty per cent of the European landmass and nineteen per cent of the European population lives in them (EU Mountain Areas Report 2004). During the last two centuries, the abandonment of mountain areas, as well as their political marginalisation, has had strong environmental and social consequences. Addressing these consequences is a priority for national and European governments (EU Mountain Areas Report 2016). In the Mediterranean, the loss of mountain cultural and natural heritage due to the abandonment of rural activities, and resulting hydrogeological instability and (wild)fires, makes it urgent to address the question of the historical dynamics of this loss, with the aim of understanding effectively the mechanisms underlying the process of marginalisation and of providing new tools for planning a sustainable future and a revitalised role for local communities.
ANTIGONE explores crucial aspects of this process that have previously not been considered: changes in the social practices of environmental resource management (relating to pastures, meadows, grass, woodlands, water etc.), from the beginnings of this marginalisation process tied to the pressure for a “rationalised” management of resources promoted by 18th c. physiographic theories and 19th c. liberal ideology until the present. Practices result from the dialectics between individuals, communities, and central States and how they shape and change the landscape (Stagno et al. 2018).
ANTIGONE uses archaeological methods to study and uncover the shared management practices that characterized European mountains until at least the 19th century. Medieval and modern historiography has extensively studied the practices of managing commons, analysing them primarily through three main categories: materiality, jurisdiction and possession. However, the interconnection between these three aspects of common resource management has not yet been explained, and there is a lack of basic understanding of the mechanisms that allowed commons to persist over time.
The ANTIGONE project sets out to demonstrate the direct connection between the disappearance of certain shared practices for the management of natural resources and the process of abandonment has affected European mountains from the 18th century to the present day. ANTIGONE aims at verifying the hypothesis that some alleged improvements in agro-forestry-pastoral practices (e.g. the underground conduction of water channels), far from advancing the development of mountain areas, in many cases, contributed to the abandonment of rural activities and depopulation.
In doing so, ANTIGONE is carrying out micro-historical enquiries in four main study areas: the French Pyrenees, the Ligurian Apennines, the Spanish Sierra Nevada, Asturias and the Basque Country. Within each of these geographical macro-contexts, ANTIGONE identifies a series of case studies related to specific local communities that allow for a deep understanding of the aforementioned mechanisms. The scale of observation adopted is highly local: ANTIGONE intends to observe phenomena of general significance by breaking them down into much smaller parts, thereby examining local communities through the lens of a microscope. This specific approach allows, among other things, an understanding of why the phenomenon of abandonment operates differently in different contexts, not only at the level of macro-geographical regions but also within the same local communities.
In the case studies, ANTIGONE employs techniques provided by archaeology, archaeobotany, palynology, and dendrochronology to identify the presence of shared management practices of commons in various European mountain contexts. At the same time, the project integrates research on historical archival documentation, as well aswith interviews and (over the next years) work with local communities. Historical documentation helps to identify and understand the fundamental role of jurisdictional conflicts on access rights to environmental resources, as tools to understand social dynamics underlying the use of resources. For this reason, ANTIGONE focuses particularly on the analysis of conflicts surrounding resources, assuming that conflicts represent the way in which social actors, through their interactions, promote a sustainable and collective maintenance of natural resources.
Through this micro-historical approach, ANTIGONE aims to achieve two primary objectives:
- to acquire new knowledge on the processes of marginalisation and abandonment of European mountains, particularly regarding the specific political, economic, and social mechanisms that have led to these outcomes.
- to establish a new interdisciplinary research methodology centred around and guided by archaeological investigation. This interdisciplinary approach involves the close interaction of archaeological evidence, documentary exploration of jurisdictional practices and possession, and investigation and the work with local communities. The latter especially entails a close dialogue and a close collaboration with local communities.
ANTIGONE aims at building a bridge between local communities and the access to policy tools that enable a better management of their resources, avoiding their heritagisation. ANTIGONE seeks to amplify the voices of local communities, helping them to be acknowledged as key players in the dynamics concerning the management and survival of mountain areas and striving to prevent their political marginalisation, or their transformation just in heritage “monuments”, without a social dimension.
