Rivers as entanglements of nature and culture (original) (raw)
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Waterways and the Cultural Landscape
Water control and management have been fundamental to the building of human civilisation. In Europe, the regulation of major rivers, the digging of canals and the wetland reclamation schemes from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, generated new typologies of waterscapes with signifi cant implications for the people who resided within them. This book explores the role of waterways as a form of heritage, culture and sense of place and the potential of this to underpin the development of cultural tourism. With a multidisciplinary approach across the social sciences and humanities , chapters explore how the control and management of water fl ows are among some of the most signifi cant human activities to transform the natural environment. Based upon a wealth and breadth of European case studies, the book uncovers the complex relationships we have with waterways, the ways that they have been represented over recent centuries and the ways in which they continue to be redefi ned in different cultural contexts. Contributions recognise not only valuable assets of hydrology that are at the core of landscape management, but also more intangible aspects that matter to people, such as their familiarity, affecting what is understood as the fl uvial sense of place. This highly original collection will be of interest to those working in cultural tourism, cultural geography, heritage studies, cultural history, landscape studies and leisure studies. Francesco Vallerani is professor of geography at the University Ca' Foscari of Venice, Italy. His main fi elds of expertise are human and cultural geography, landscape evolution and heritage, with special focuses on waterscapes and water-based sustainable tourism in both European and South American countries.
What Rivers Did: a Study of if and how Rivers Shaped Later Prehistoric Lives in Britain and Beyond
Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, 2024
Countering the passive representation of rivers in many previous accounts of later prehistoryas static vessels for spectacular deposits, highways for transport and communication, and backdrops for settlement and farmingthis paper asks if and how rivers actively shaped prehistoric lives. Rivers have long been hailed as conduits for prehistoric materials and ideas. However, positive archaeological correlates of the processes involved are notoriously difficult to identify and have rarely been scrutinised in detail. Using the example of Late Bronze and Early Iron Age pottery in the east of England (1150-350 BC), we examine in detail how prehistoric pottery-making traditions cohered around river valleys over an extended time period and were thus, to a certain extent, generated by rivers. Drawing on wider evidence for the flow of people and things in this region we build a broader multidimensional account of how people, objects, and practices moved in a period of diverse lifeways in which the makeup of human mobility is not well understood. In doing so, we hope to tether abstract arguments about the active role of rivers and other non-human elements in shaping past lives and to approach the often missing 'middle ground'small-scale movements at local and regional scalesin existing archaeological discussions about mobility.
River archaeology – a new tool for historical hydrology
Iop Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science, 2008
River archaeology is consisting of underwater research of the rivers themselves, and also the archaeology of the valleys/floodplains with special interest in humanenvironmental interactions (reconstructing space, environment, economy and society on the basis of the material culture and traces of human impacts). As historical hydrology is occupying similar questions from the hydrologist's point of view, the combination of different approaches offers fruitful cooperation for both disciplines. The paper presents the type, nature and problems of archaeological record through recent work in the Drava river basin.
Large river valleys have long been seen as important factors to shape the mobility, communication and exchange of Pleistocene hunter-gatherers. However, rivers have been debated as either natural entities people adapt and react to, or as cultural and meaningful entities people experience and interpret in different ways. Here, we attempt to integrate both perspectives. Building on theoretical work from various disciplines we discuss the relationship between bio-physical river properties and sociocultural river semantics and suggest that understanding a river’s persona is central to evaluating its role in spatial organization. By reviewing the literature and analyzing European Upper Paleolithic site distribution and raw material transfer patterns in relation to river catchments, we show that the role of prominent rivers varies considerably over time. Both ecological and cultural factors are crucial to explaining these patterns. Whereas the Earlier Upper Paleolithic record displays a general tendency toward conceiving rivers as mobility guidelines, the spatial consolidation process after the colonization of the European mainland is paralleled by a trend of conceptualizing river regimes as frontiers, separating archaeological entities, regional groups or local networks. The Late Upper Paleolithic Magdalenian, however, is characterized again by a role of rivers as mobility and communication vectors. Tracing changing patterns in the role of certain river regimes through time thus contributes to our growing knowledge of human spatial behavior and helps to improve our understanding of dynamic and mutually informed human-environment interactions in the Paleolithic.
This article explores the explicative value of Bronze Age archaeological finds from the Upper Rhine valley. It discusses various aspects of the metal finds dredged from the river – their quality and quantity, the circumstances of their discovery and their distribution in space and time – and proposes the notion of the river as a border zone between different spheres of the Bronze Age world. The liminal character of the Rhine as a frontier between the world of the living and the other-world is particularly evident in the deposition of metal objects in the river. This practice is placed in a long-term perspective by comparing the river finds of the Bronze Age with religious sites of the Iron Age. Brief mention is made of the potential of contextualising archaeological finds of all kinds (depositions, settlements, burials) in the geographical, geological and environmental data.
Hussain, S.T. & Floss, H. 2014. The role of river courses in organizing the cultural space of the Upper Paleolithic: examples from the Rhine, Rhône, Danube and Garonne. In: Otte, M. & Le Brun-Ricalens, F. (eds.), Modes de contacts et de déplacements au paléolithique eurasiatique, p. 307-320.
In order to understand human spatial behavior in the Paleolithic and related processes such as dispersal and mobility, it is urgently imperative to focus on a finer grained analysis of human-environment interactions than usually provided. Recent studies tend to overlook the explanatory value of single natural features establishing important anchor points for Paleolithic hunter-gatherer groups. Rivers are good candidates constituting such important natural features. We thus explore the role of salient rivers in the construction of Upper Paleolithic cultural landscapes through time. It is argued that rivers indeed played a crucial role, either as axes of communication and displacement or as referential frontier features in space. On the other hand, it seems clear that human river engagement was never static, but highly dynamic and variable both through space and time, because it is partly shaped by cultural conceptualizations and embedded in semantic webs. We finish our survey with the observation that in the Early Upper Paleolithic, rivers were mainly used to facilitate the flow of people and information, whereas the spatial consolidation after the colonization of Europe was accompanied by a tendency of conceptualizing rivers as frontiers or even boundaries. Only the Central European Magdalenian is again characterized by the use of rivers as spatial trajectories.