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

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. However, suggested distinctions between ‘unconscious selection’ and ‘conscious selection’—the latter of which reflects intentional choices—in classifying ‘human cultivation practices’ might appear inconsistent with the observed effects of historical activation practices and placed knowledge on environmental resources in the ecology of a specific/individual place, rather than a reference to a precise historical model in general human ecology.

  2. Discussions at the International Congress ‘Saperi naturalistici/nature knowledge’ (Venice, 4–6th December 1997) are shortly reported in Sanga and Ortalli (eds) (2003). Agnoletti’s (2014) references to Ingold’s contribution concerning biodiversification processes could be potentially misleading having been derived from an incorrect quotation in Cevasco and Moreno (2013, p. 151).

  3. The authors wish to acknowledge Professor Osvaldo Raggio (Dipartimento di Antichità, Filosofia e Storia (DAFIST), Università degli Studi di Genova) for suggesting this text and for discussing Ingold’s position relating to the local approach to the history of environmental resources.

  4. It is important to note that in studies of historical ecology applied to site conservation, the use of the ‘historical range of variability’ concept in assessing what changes are acceptable in ecosystem and landscape management has been debated since the early 1990s (Rackham 1998; Szabó 2010). As briefly commented upon in this paper, methodological debates stemming from and concerning the ‘crisis’ of the model of unimpeded natural processes have been investigated in multidisciplinary studies carried out at GEODE (Toulouse) amongst French geographers and palaeoecologists looking for a ‘référentiel partagé’ in field sources derived from a number of mountain sites in the Pyrenees.

  5. The term ‘terre alberate’ was used in post-medieval documents regarding the seigniorial system and was still used in official forestry administration sources in 1822. The shredding of turkey oak (Quercus cerris) in multiple intensive systems including the temporary sowing of minor cereals were part of this type of land use. Descriptions of 1305 plots of land in the parish containing the studied sites permitted the identification of different population patterns of turkey oak and forming many different vegetation patterns distinguishable with a detailed local system of land use taxonomy (Bosco alberato, Terra alberata, bosco alberato di costi, terra prativa, pascolativa e coltiva, pascolo alberato, terra con costi, cespugli, arbusti). Oaks also appeared in a plot co-planted with alder and beech (Bertolotto and Cevasco 2000).

  6. The plea for historical ecology perspectives were clearly proposed by Professor Oliver Rackham (1939–2015) to British environmental archaeologists during the infancy of the field in the early 1980s, however with seemingly little success (Rackham 1998).

  7. A regressive history of local common-land use and practice in this section of the NW Apennines was established through the combination of archival and field evidence collected since 2010 as part of a scientific collaboration between departments at the Università degli Studi di Genova and the Università del Piemonte Orientale "A. Avogadro"(Cevasco 2013a, b; Beltrametti et al. 2014).

  8. Professor Edoardo Grendi (1932–1999) was one of the creators of the longstanding Permanent Seminar on Local History (SEMPER) in the early 1990s. The activities of this seminar are central in the research themes of the Laboratorio di Archeologia e Storia Ambientale (LASA) and of the doctoral school the Università degli Studi di Genova. Further information concerning the activities of the Permanent Seminar on Local History 2014–2015 (SEMPER) dedicated to discussions relating to the history and archaeology of environmental resources can be found at: http://www.dafist.unige.it/?page_id=1297 (Website in Italian).

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Acknowledgments

The authors are indebted to the participants of the Seminario Permanente di Storia Locale (LASA–DAFIST–DISTAV) at the Università degli Studi di Genova for their diverse contributions to thematic and methodological discussions pertaining to the subject of this article, particularly prof. Osvaldo Raggio, Prof. Carlo Montanari, Prof. Roberto Maggi and Prof. Massimo Quaini. The authors also wish to thank Didier Galop and Chiara Molinari for providing the figures. We appreciated the constructive comments of the anonymous referees, which greatly improved the paper.

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  1. Università degli Studi di Scienze Gastronomiche, Pollenzo, Bra, CN, Italy

    Roberta Cevasco

  2. Laboratorio di Archeologia e Storia Ambientale (LASA), Dipartimento di Antichità, Filosofia e Storia (DAFIST) & Dipartimento di Scienze della Terra, dell’Ambiente e della Vita (DISTAV), Università degli Studi di Genova, Genoa, Italy

    Diego Moreno & Robert Hearn

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Correspondence to Roberta Cevasco.

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Communicated by Mauro Agnoletti.

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Cevasco, R., Moreno, D. & Hearn, R. Biodiversification as an historical process: an appeal for the application of historical ecology to bio-cultural diversity research. Biodivers Conserv 24, 3167–3183 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-015-0943-3

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