Small changes: local knowledge, resilience and adaptation in medieval landscapes

This project will examine how changes took place in historic landscapes, especially in local economic systems. By focusing particularly on small-scale societies, we will examine the environmental appropriateness and effects of decisions made at the local level as reactions to greater environmental and societal changes in short- and long-term perspectives. We will consider decision-making processes, and how responses to change were manifested in the material fabric of local landscapes. We will examine how effective the adaptations made by small-scale societies were in the long term, and how durable they proved to be. For a long time, scholars imagined that pristine nature once existed in a state of stable equilibrium, inhabited by non-modern societies that seemed almost unchanging. We once thought that it was only modernity which alienated people from nature and broke up this harmonious co-habitation. Prompted by growing awareness of present and pressing environmental issues like pollution, overexploitation of resources and climate change, modern archaeological, anthropological and historical research has shown the assumed equilibrium of nature and the imagined harmony in human-nature-engagements never existed. Today, we understand that nature itself and all its components (e.g. climate, geology, vegetation, fauna) are in permanent flux. Societies are likewise permanently changing at all scales. Landscapes are shaped and transformed as much by humans as societies change as they are altered by environmental factors. Researchers recognise that change is one of the fundamental characteristics of landscape, experienced everyday at scales from daily rhythms, through the changing seasons, to the passage from life to death. 'Historic' landscapes are understood as the result of myriad processes and practices which have changed in step with the societies who have inhabited them. Although both physical features and practices can persist from the past, their social value and practical uses may have changed over time. Relating changes to each other in terms of cause and effect can be demanding for researchers, and especially so when these changes appear at different scales. Such challenges of up- and downscaling are even greater for historical contexts with highly fragmented records. This project will combine innovative theoretical and methodological approaches developed by members of the team to investigate (in terms of cause-and-effect) the relationships between environmental and/or societal changes with transformations of economic systems and landscapes. Our project will focus on the Middle Ages, primarily the ‘first Middle Ages’ (5th - 11th centuries), when Europe was organised much more at small and local scales and the landscapes of our case studies were fundamentally (re-)shaped. Taking a diachronic perspective, we consider repercussions through the major changes of the second Middle Ages (12th - 16th centuries), e.g. the start of the Little Ice Age, the growth of towns, and environmental disasters such as the Black Death. We will our apply innovative approach to investigate in detail three contrasting case-studies in south-west Britain, southern Germany and southern Greece.