Más allá de la percepción: Hacia una ecología histórica del paisaje rural en Italia

Abstract

The European Landscape Convention (ELC) uses various definitions in which the cultural and historical contents of the landscapes are reduced to their «representation» or «visual per- ception». The «perceptive» approach to the landscape obscures, in a false «natural» dimension, the living environmental features of the landscape itself. This is the case with rural landscapes which are, on the contrary, nowadays considered part of a wider European rural heritage. Specific environmental (ecological) and cultural (historical) factors have been identified, based on a «historical approach», to manage such a heritage. These factors are the historical-environmental processes that over time have shaped a variety of agrarian, pastoral and forestry landscapes, landscapes that we would like to be preserved. Current historical ecology approach enriches Emilio Sereni’s legacy on the economic side of agrarian landscape with novel tools for identi- fying single landscapes, their historical stratification and for management projects. This paper intends to illustrate few examples concerning studies already carried out and still in progress in Liguria (NW Italy). In such researches of local history, geography, archaeology and ecology have interacted, studying landscapes at the scale of the single site. In the process, an environ- mental archaeology approach has been tested, based on the methods of the historical ecology and devoted to the reconstruction of the «individual» history of agro-sylvi-pastoral landscapes, of their environmental resources and management practices.