B 02: Favour - Disfavour? Development of resources in Marginal Areas |
Project management: PD Dr. Thomas Knopf, Dr. Peter Kühn, Prof. Dr. Thomas Scholten |
| Scientific employees: Jan Ahlrichs, Jessica Henkner |
Summary
This project investigates the reasons for the developing and permanent use of areas today considered as unfavourable (marginal areas such as the Central German Uplands). As a collaboration of prehistory and geography this project focusses on soil as a resource and by this on the development and use of land with respect to the socio-cultural valuation of resources. The project explores the cultural dimension of the evaluation of settlement areas either as favourable or as unfavourable during the process of movements of human populations. This will be achieved by a critical comparison of settlements and their respective resources, rural land use and the history of climate in the areas of origin, as well as in the target areas of these migrations. By matching phases of intensive cultivation and the resulting colluvia with a history of settlement in the favourable as well as in the unfavourable areas, while taking climatic and technological parameters into account, it will become possible to identify the dynamics within resource-related migrations into marginal areas and back again into favoured settlement areas. A close relation between the perception and evaluation of resources, such as soil and ores on one hand and climate and other naturally determined site-related factors on the other hand is assumed. This may serve as an explanation why areas previously considered to be unfavourable because of their soil, may later be perceived as favourable because of the occurrence of mineral resources (such as ores) once the valuation of these different kinds of ResourceComplexes changes. Ultimately, at a given point in time, climate and natural conditions themselves turn into resources for prehistoric people.
Scientific Aims
The following aims are targeted:
1. On a general level the reasons for the development of resources in allegedly unfavourable areas and the resulting fluctuation of populations and settlements have to be explained. Prevailing mono-causal explanations (referring to ‘natural resources’ or ‘climate’) for this have to be scrutinised and expanded.
2. An innovative combination in the analysis of archaeological sources and geopedological evidence allows the matching of settlement patterns, phases of land use and climatic as well as technological processes. This will provide a fundament for a far-reaching interpretation of the evaluation and valorisation of the respective resources.
3. It is considered as central for the project to first determine the economic or social motivation for the development of resources in relation to the demand for resources in the areas of origin (that is the favourable areas). This will be achieved by analysing the archaeological sources as well as the geopedological evidence (colluvia) and by cross-checking the results. The variable parameters ‘settlement intensity’ and ‘intensity of land use’ will be combined with climatic data. This will facilitate the creation of different scenarios in which social, economic or climatic motivations can be critically compared. It has to be taken into account that migrations motivated by economy as well as by climate are embedded into a wide variety of social practices.
Impact for the Collaborative Research Centre
Up to now, in prehistory, medieval archaeology as well as in geopedology an ‘archaeo-pedological’ collaboration, coordinating and integrating every step of the analysis right from the beginning of the project, is completely lacking. In this respect project B 02 breaks new ground in this kind of cooperation. For the central issue of resources studied by the Collaborative Research Centre the combination of natural scientific and cultural scientific methods of B 02 will have a considerable impact. The idea to identify movements not only by tangible archaeological remains, but by the landscape and its resources itself, and the way they were directly or indirectly transformed by people, will provide a central component for the interdisciplinary work of the Collaborative Research Centre. Considering the ideational and symbolic valuation of resources by human societies, the dynamics resulting from the interrelation of movements, climatic-geographic conditions and the socio-cultural dimensions of resources will be analysed. The project provides insight into the interdependencies of the evaluation of resources and movements and into developments spanning a timeframe from prehistory and Middle Ages into present times.
Die Rechte der auf dieser Seite verwendeten Bilder liegen beim SFB 1070, Teilprojekt B 02.