Diego Moreno

Pollen, herds, jasper and copper mines: economic and environmental changes during the 4th and 3rd millennia BC in Liguria (NW Italy)

Abstract This paper reviews the interdisciplinary projects carried out during the last 25 years in eastern Liguria (NW Italy). These have brought together archaeologists, geographers, palaeobotanists and historians in a series of research exercises based upon many different types of evidence: archaeological excavation and survey, ecological analysis of existing landscapes, geoarchaeological, anthracological and palynological analyses. Taken together, the results of this research provide a rich source of material for developing an understanding of how humans in eastern Liguria have interacted with the landscape through time. The influence of human activity on the vegetation of Liguria, in the Late Neolithic, Copper Age (Chalcolithic) and Bronze Age, is part of a complex system of agricultural activity mainly involving transhumant pastoralism. Several peat sites and buried soils have supplied the palaeoecological data that indicate the considerable effect of this economic activity on the landscape: a reduction in fir woodland, a decrease in arboreal species and an increase in the diversity of light demanding herbaceous and fern taxa. The environmental and economic changes during the 4th and 3rd millennia BC in eastern Liguria are also testified to by the starting of quarrying and mining activities to obtain both red jasper and copper.

Rural Landscapes: The Historical Roots of Biodiversity

From the point of view of historical ecology, the biodiversity of rural landscapes is revealed especially when their individual historical dimension is explored directly in the field (Rackham, Ancient woodland. Its history, vegetation and uses in England, 1980, Rackham, The History of the Countryside, 1986; Moreno, Dal documento al terreno. Storia e archeologia dei sistemi agro-silvo-pastorali, 1990). A historical perspective can recognize the environmental systems and processes that shape each rural landscape as true functional nodes—or, rather, “areas”—in a more general historical process of “environmental biodiversification” (Ingold et al., Nature knowledge: ethnoscience, cognition and utility, 2003; Cevasco, Memoria verde. Nuovi spazi per la geografia, 2007). Obviously, under adequate conditions of efficiency, agrarian landscapes can play a direct role in the preservation of “agricultural biodiversity”. It is less well-known, however, that by reconstructing the historical role of agricultural, silvicultural and zootechnic practices in local processes of biodiversification we can, even today, mobilize an even vaster resource-pool of “Rural Landscapes of Historical Interest” (RLHI), which constitute a potential resource for the providing of new services in the field of biodiversity. Today RLHIs are largely fragmented and their productive efficiency is only partial, they have been deprived of their scenic qualities and are confined within local systems often regarded as economically marginal. Such is the situation for RLHIs in several Italian regions. They hence require specific agricultural policies (Agnoletti, Cultural Heritage and Sustainable Forest Management: the role of traditional knowledge, 2006)—which so far have been lacking—recognizing and promoting the “positive externality” or “added value” coupled with local production systems, as well as the practices and contextual knowledge of the producers who are presently managing them (Magnaghi, Memoria verde. Nuovi spazi per la geografia, 2007).

Biodiversification as an historical process: an appeal for the application of historical ecology to bio-cultural diversity research

In the context of recent appeals for the adoption of historical perspectives emerging in environmental and conservation studies, ‘biodiversification processes’ would be considered as specific historical and historiographical topics. However, as highlighted in this paper, a broader discussion of the biodiversification processes as historical processes is needed. This paper discusses some consequences that are presented during the study of biodiversification processes when focusing on the links between cultural and biological diversity at the individual landscape level rather than on an overview of the current literature on the subject. In this discussion, we briefly underline dissimilarities in the methods adopted in historical ecology to those in the conventional historical approach nurtured in global environmental history where biodiversification processes, as subjects of historical study, are largely ignored or subsumed into general observations concerning global change or embedded in presumed ahistorical ‘traditional’ economies and practice systems. Such a broad reassessment is required before multi- or inter-disciplinary applications seek to answer ‘common questions’ (Szabó, Environ Conserv 37:380–387, 2010) in the field of environmental and cultural conservation studies. This paper comments on field and documentary evidence collected during multidisciplinary historical ecology approaches to research in the Northern Apennines (Italy) and Pyrenees (Franco-Spanish) sites. These site-level investigations suggest that medieval and post-medieval changes in local practices and systems of environmental resource production and activation appear to have been key drivers in co-related variations observed in the past biodiversity dynamics of the sites. In order to corroborate the sedimentary evidence (or traces of evidence) concerning taxonomic and habitat changes, historical ecology has proposed the adoption of a local approach in which a specific historical analysis and use of documentary and archival sources—as well as the archaeological and sedimentary evidence—has posed a number of new questions to the traditional use of archival and textual sources by professional historians. In doing so, it becomes clear that when observed at a local, topographical site-scale or on an individual landscape-scale, the links between biological and cultural diversity appear more clearly as historical products, rather than broad co-evolutionary issues relating to the ‘co-evolution of nature and culture’. These historically produced links between biological and cultural diversity—identified as biodiversification processes that can be uncovered and explored through the adoption of approaches from historical ecology—are the driving forces that ‘generate’ processes of circulation in local ecological knowledge and its related practices.

Fra utopie ed eterotopie: quale spazio per una ‘storia territorialista’ della montagna?

Il contributo propone l’approccio dell’ecologia storica quale necessario arricchimento della ‘scienza territorialista’, e in particolare della definizione di una storia territorialista delle risorse ambientali applicata al tema della possibile ricolonizzazione delle ‘terre alte’ abbandonate; questo anche al fine di rendere piu sicura la popolazione urbana che, vivendo nelle ‘terre basse’, e sempre piu spesso vittima dei dissesti causati dall’abbandono dei sistemi storici di controllo e gestione delle risorse ambientali, per lo piu allocati in quota. A partire dal caso studio della montagna litoranea genovese, la cui crescente esposizione a rischi idrogeologici mostra quanto insufficienti siano gli strumenti analitici normalmente applicati allo studio dei processi storici di biodiversificazione degli ambienti montani, l’obiettivo e quindi quello di renderli piu acuti anche al fine di individuare nuove politiche della montagna e di rafforzare la ‘resistenza’ delle societa locali a quelle nazionali ed europee quando incompatibili con il ‘progetto locale’ di cui sono portatrici. Questi nessi sono evidenziabili solo alla scala micro-storica, che si e venuta ridefinendo nel fecondo contatto tra le ricerche di geografia storica e la micro-storia sociale; che, di passaggio, rimette in discussione l’eccessiva genericita di categorie correnti nella pianificazione territoriale e ambientale, quali ‘uso del suolo’, beni ambientali, patrimonio, naturalizzazione e ri-naturalizzazione.