Cultural Landscape in Geography

Abstract

A cultural landscape is the successive alteration over time of the material habitat of a sedentary human society responding with growing strength and variety to the dynamic challenges of nature, the society's own needs and desires, and the historical circumstances of different regions in different times. The origins of the concept lie in landscape as a territorial descriptor, and later as a pictorial view and representation of a scene. The scientific concept of the cultural landscape developed from debates in academic geography at the beginning of the twentieth century to provide a framework for understanding the alterations which humankind has made to the physical environment of the earth's surface. It seeks to relate the visual and material manifestations of this human contribution to the total composition of the earth's landscapes to the cultural, economic, technological, political, and psychological forces working on communities and whole societies. The concept has continued to evolve over time and has spread across linguistic boundaries in geography, and more recently has entered the lexicon of related social sciences, particularly history, archaeology, anthropology, environmental psychology, as well as some cognate fields beyond such as landscape aesthetics and landscape ecology.