The cultural landscape can only he

understood by its antithesis: untouched,

unspoilt nature. The realization of this
dualism is the basis for understanding and
appreciating either. (Fgri 1988)

Virtually all landscapes have cultural

associations, because virtually all landscapes
have been affected in some way by human
action or perception.
Cultural landscapes also reveal much about our evolving relationship with
the natural world, and often derive their character from a human response
to natural features and natural systems. These systems can include
geology or plant and animal habitats. Cultural landscapes contain
invaluable information about our history and our relationship with the
landscape around us.
Cultural landscapes give us a sense of place. They are part of our regional heritage,
and part of each of our lives. They reveal our relationship with the land over time.
Cultural landscapes are special places that reveal aspects of our origin and
development through their forms, features, and history of use.

To Medieval man nature was hostile, forbidding. His world

was the belch of friendly cultivated ground, isolated in a
fearful, dangerous matrix on the whole. This sentiment also
prevailed during the following centuries only to be changed by
Rousseau and his romanticist followers
The realization of nature as a positive factor, indeed so much
so that it should be protected against the depredations of man,
most remarkably did not originate in densely built-up Europe,
where nature really is, endangered but in USA, which at this
time had plenty of it. Nature became something to be
cherished and protected. Later, the idea was also adopted in
Europe. Where the Linnaean philosophic tradition home
country, Rutger Sernandcr protected Swedish landscapes as
memories of idyllic pastoral periods of the past.

The concept of cultivation landscape was born as a

landscape in apparent equilibrium where mans influence
was only one of several forces. But mans influence was
more than originally thought. When natural successions
started inside protected and fenced areas and turned them
into wildernesses as cultivation was abandoned, one
realized that landscape was far from being unaltered nature.
In the end it was realized that even in Scandinavia virgin
landscape was generally a fiction. The emphasis finally
shifted from the alternative cultivated/ uncultivated concept
to the idea of a gradient of human impact. The task of
defining and preserving this gradient is a challenge to
modern nature conservation (Fgri 1954, 1962, 1988).

Cultural landscape concept

Exactly when the term cultural landscape
was first coined one do not know, nor is it
very important: it came by itself (Fgri
1988). It certainly was not common before the
Second World War, but it is found in, for
example, a Swedish dictionary of 1939 as a
term with predominant scientific use. In postwar dictionaries it is frequent. According to
information from the Norwegian language
council it was first recognized as a Norwegian
word in 1960.

The Cultural Landscape concept first appeared

among geographers for whom geography was
divided into physical and social geography and who
needed a conceptual tool to describe land including
man-made land and objects such as houses, lines of
communication, and cities. Norbert Krebs (1923)
used the term Oikumene (ancient Greek for the
inhabited world) to denote regions that have been
trans-formed by human activity i.e. cultural
landscapes, and Anoikumene (a neologism) to
denote natural landscapes in the sense of regions
where human life is completely subordinate to
t

From the early 1990th, the concept of the

cultural landscape became common
property, a positive word for researchers,
planners, administrators and a catchword
used in the media and every-day life.
But as in the case of other scientific
concepts, like ecology, transplanted from
one field to another its conceptual
content varies.

Cultural landscape concept

Cultural landscape as a concept denoting land

under human influence is not only gaining in
acceptance among scientists and laymen, but is also
coming into more and more common use among
administrators and policy makers. Professional
techniques for identifying, documenting, and
managing cultural landscapes have evolved rapidly
in the past 30 years, and the results have reached
the general public.

The concept denotes a landscape where man

has left his marks and altered in some way or
a landscape about which man has perceptions.
Cultural landscapes can be characterized both
by mans activities (agriculture forestry or
settlement and buildings or by its
geographical place (forest, the mountain or
coast). Most often, however, the term is used
in relation to traditional land use.

Cultural landscapes are superimposed on natural

ones. Seen in a horizontal dimension, human
impact forms the cultural landscape upon the
underlying natural base, which again, are formed
by geological, climatic, and bio-logical factors.
A chronological tree dimensional view implies that
the cultural landscape is a total landscape in time
and space including its historical dimension.
Cultural landscape is thus heritage of values
handed down from the generations of the past,
mirrored within people and cultural traditions.

All landscapes are created or modified to varying

degrees by humans. A difficulty therefore emerges
when studying the transition from natural to cultural
landscapes because humans influence both,
sometimes in unknown ways. The transition
between nature and culture is determined arbitrary.
The cultural landscape is a pure and abstract
concept. Every epoch and culture makes its own
material impact on the landscape; there is,
notwithstanding, a gradient of human impact that is
important. If human influence were to be removed,
a pseudo-natural landscape would develop

Cultural landscape is a syndrome containing

numerous aspects, but most of all cultural landscape
highlights the life values of the people who act in it
and for whom it is their homeland. To them the
landscape is not only a physical entity; it also has
an intellectual content. Memories, myths, and ideas
relating to the land are linked both to the culture
and to the land as a physical entity. Preserving the
landscape within a transformed or new cultural
context may be compared to artificial life-support.

In many modern societies, however, it has become normal

to split culture and nature apart and to view each
separately. When one does this, there can easily arise an
adversarial attitude toward nature, which sees mans proper
role as one of conquest and control. The price of conquest
and of the unwanted consequences which manifest
themselves are then perceived to be environmental
problems. These, in turn, must be solved to secure
control over nature. An intensified exploitation of the
potential of technology to enforce change solves only at
best some problems by creating others, at worst it
accumulates them. In this spiral man and his culture are on
one side, naturethe environmenton the other.

Time becomes a key parameter and limiting factor

when neither man nor nature have sufficient time to
respond and adjust to the changes they induce in
each other. With increasing technological capacity
the speed of transformation increase and the greater
the distance between those who are dependent and
have the capacity to live with nature and those who
have the capacity to change it. This is a
fundamental process and the principles that
underlie it are of importance to landscape planning
as well as landscape research.

Cultural landscape research

can be regarded as a starting point, to gain
understanding of the processes of change: the
forces that have formed the physical
surroundings, in the past as well as today.
From a historical viewpoint, cultural
landscape has values important as guides to
the actions that cause landscape change.
Studies of landscape meanings and values
lead to cultural understanding, also of the
historical dimension.

Man, as he takes into his possession nearly all

inhabitable land on the surface of the planet, seems
adapted to all conceivable and nearly inconceivable
conditions. The physical, practical and emotional
capacity gained through this process constitutes, over
time, an important part of the culture that is
developed in the landscapes in question. Cultures are
both formed by the forces of nature and by tradition
and by the transformations induced when natural
conditions change or man changes his habitat.

Natural conditions are never constant or stable or in any long-lasting

balance, but rather are caught up in a process of continual change at
varying speed. Depending on conditions the relative importance of
the factors of change will vary and be interrelated. Adaptations to
nature are therefore also adaptations to variation and change in
culture as well as in nature.
Bearing in mind the range of variation in global environments, we
might reasonably expect to encounter a similar range in cultural
diversity; but the diversity we actually encounter seems less than
expected. In fact at deeper levels of analysis indigenous populations
the world over seem to share marked cultural similarities, constants
which one can assume to be part of a more general pattern in the
relation between man and nature.

Cultures are not, then, solely formed by conditions

prevailing in their physical environments. Mans presence
in and use of land over time induces changes in nature; and
whether these changes are to his advantage or not, he is
caught up in them and must adapt himself to them. His
continued presence in the place where he finds himself at
any given time is dependent upon his ability to cope with
natural conditions there and their variability. In this way
man becomes part of nature.
Hence a dualistic view that pits man against nature is not
fruitful one should rather operate with a concept of
man-in-nature as an organic whole.

n the context of the interrelations between nature and culture, the

human component in the cultural formation of environment consists
of:

hose who dwell in a particular region and for whom it constitutes

their homeland and is the sole or primary foundation for their
survival,

those who dwell outside it but affect it as they pass through it,

those who dwell outside it but exploit it in various ways.

nto this last category fall those whose exploitation lays the
foundation for their livelihoods, and who are thus in a sense at once
both insiders and outsiders and those whose origins lie in it and

Of particular interest in this context are those

whose cultures are so intimately adapted to a
particular environment as to be sensitive to
almost any environmental change as do some
indigenous populations.
Important too on the other hand are policy
makers, planners and creators of political
religious or philosophical ideas, which are
propagated among or imposed on those who
use and live on the land.

The role of subjectivity

Academic researchers in ecological research are
concerned in ideally objectivity. Cultural landscape
defined by subjective features are for them no tool
for understanding change, and cultural landscape
studies becomes an area of special character
containing strong subjective undertones. However,
the sum of our visible surroundings, the total
complex of visually forms within a given area, both
natural and human can only be understood and
interpreted in their historically specific social and
cultural context. Within this perspective there is a
need for subjectivism.

Moreover, both the research and the researcher are fruits of

their culture; the landscape perhaps of another. Different
groups with different cultural background therefore
interpret landscapes differently. This may cause
insurmountable obstacles to cultural landscape research as
the process involves a subjective interpretation of elements
in the surroundings, which give meaning for a group of
people in their cultural or socioeconomic context, not
necessary to the researcher. Significant in the landscape are
factors such as human history, ethnic affiliation and
economic interest. Rural people in a landscape experience
their landscape differently from the way the outsiders does,
and values change over time.

Disciplines are cultures of science

Perception of the cultural landscape in the natural sciences
diverges from that in the humanities. Science has its
interest in the way nature has been influenced by humans,
while cultural historians are interested in how culture
manifests itself in the landscape and how landscape is
culturally interpreted.
For the former, a cultural landscape requires physical traces
of human activity. For the latter, peoples mental cultural
landscapes are important.
The concept of cultural landscape can be identified either
narrowly, i.e. disciplinary, or broadly, as the total
interaction between humans and nature in a given area.

Nature and culture do not need to be seen as being

in opposition to one another, but prevailing
definitions within disciplines do, in fact, pit them
against one another so as to serve an ideological
role.
Geographers, landscape architects, botanists,
archaeologists, ethnologists, and representatives of
other disciplines describe and study landscapes
differently from one another. The cultural landscape
being both a physical reality and a social or cultural
construction explains why the perceptions vary
within different academic disciplines.

Academic disciplines are not neutral. The discipline

subjective values of the researchers determine what is
relevant knowledge for a particular study. The subjectivity
is a result of the way in which each discipline has
developed, and that determines how a landscape is
perceived, what is important to register, characterize and
understand.
In general, scientific documentation reflects; like landscape
paintings, what each discipline want to see. All the various
details in a landscape are reduced to what is regarded as
important. For each discipline also the methods remains
constant and the immediate result status quo.

In biology the cultural landscape concept is adopted as a

term to denote biotopes modified or created by human
activity. In this perspective Botany focus primarily in the
culturally (pastoral and agricultural) influenced ecosystems
of the landscape.
In landscape ecology, a cultural landscape element,
especially an agricultural or a pastoral landscape, associated
with its human-made features, is viewed as a habitat. The
landscape ecologist describes a cultural landscape in terms
of ecological patterns structure and composition. Such
fragmentation of hole landscape are often necessary in the
study of functioning ecological systems and their natural
processes regarding different plant and animal species.

Also within ecology the biological disciplines

diverge.
Botanist are interested in the Cultural Landscape
diversity, species composition and plant
performance and zoologists are interested in a
cultural landscape as environment for insects or
animals.
Further dived in sub disciplines they claim
exclusive to right and control over parts of cultural
landscape.

The words nature and scenery are synonyms.

A landscape become in a broad sense an area
perceived and observed from a certain
viewpoint. Nature is countryside, the natural
and genuine, in contrast to the town. The
degree of understanding leads to and is related
to the exercise of control over the land. The
human experience of scenery is dependent on
season, weather, emotion, or fantasy (Jones
1988,). In science it is dependent on
discipline.

Viewpoints differ with time and so do the relations of the observer to

the land described. Art historians relate cultural landscapes like other
objects of study to particular epochs.
Urbanization and later industrialization lead to a differentiation
between town and surrounding nature and induce an idealized
picture of natural scenery of rural surroundings.
One hand, landscape become an object that could be described, and,
on the other, the image of a divine nature (Jones 1988.). Aesthetic
values guide the focus of, and relationship to, the environmental
surroundings.
However, each aesthetic experience is individual and dependent on a
particular setting or is shared by a society within a particular epoch.

Landskapskologi
Vegetasjonskologi.
Utvikling og endring i dag og nyere tid
Biologisk mangfold, Populasjons dynamikk
Driftformer - Arealbruks endringer.
Skog suksesjoner, skogskifte, avskoging
Tregrense variasjoner kultur versus klima
Forvaltning av naturressurser
Vegetasjon og hydrologi
Utviklingsforskning
Biodiversitet og brekraftig utvikling
Vegetasjonskartlegging.
GIS, Fjernmling, klassifisering , endrings
analyse, modellering

Vegetasjon- og
landskapshistorie
Flora og klima historie
Landskapshistorie
Jordsmonnsutvikling
Kultur historie Beitebruk, Jordbruk
Middelalder byer
Urbanisering og endring.
Hortikultur hage historie
Pollen i kulturkontekst.
Arkeo- (etno) botanikk.
Nringsopptak og kosthold
Fiber, ved og tekstil analyser.
Pollenspredning og representativitet
Romlig modellering.

Kulturlandskap

Excursion to outer West coast of West Norway

.
Departure With Hurtigruten M/S Vesterrlen 2230 ombord
2000 ? Today 1.2 2002
To Flor.
Embarking M/S Lofoten AT 0730 Saturday 2.2 at 730
Arrival Bergen at 1430