Abstract
Studies of past forest use traditions are crucial in both understanding the present state of the oldest European forests, and in guiding decisions on future forest conservation and management. Current management of Poland’s Białowieża Forest (BF), one of the best-preserved forests of the European lowlands, is heavily influenced by anecdotal knowledge on forest history. Therefore, it is important to gain knowledge of the forest’s past in order to answer questions about its historical administration, utilisation, and associated anthropogenic changes. Such understanding can then inform future management. This study, based on surveys in Belarussian and Russian archives and a preliminary field survey in ten forest compartments of Białowieża National Park, focuses on culturally-modified trees (CMTs), which in this case are by-products of different forms of traditional forest use. Information about the formation of the CMTs can then be used to provide insight into former forest usage. Two types of CMTs were discovered to be still present in the contemporary BF. One type found in two forms was of 1) pine trees scorched and chopped in the bottom part of the trunk and 2) pine trees with carved beehives. A second type based on written accounts, and therefore known to be present in the past (what we call a ‘ghost CMT’), was of 3) lime-trees with strips of bark peeled from the trunk. Written accounts cover the period of transition between the traditional forest management (BF as a Polish royal hunting ground, until the end of the eighteenth century) and modern, “scientific” forestry (in most European countries introduced in the second half of the nineteenth century). These accounts document that both types of CMTs and the traditional forest uses responsible for their creation were considered harmful to “rational forestry” by the nineteenth-century forest administration. Thus the practices which created CMTs were banned and the trees gradually removed from the forest. Indeed, these activities drew the attention of forest administrators for several decades, and in our view delayed the introduction of new, timber-oriented, forest management in the BF.
Highlights
One of the main requirements for understanding the currently observed state of any natural environment is the knowledge of its history, and especially of past anthropogenic activities
In many of these studies, the subject of single tree specimens affected by people historically has emerged and this provides important insights into historical and often undocumented forest use. This present study focuses on culturally-modified trees (CMTs) i.e. trees that bear anthropogenic scars or modifications that are an effect of deliberate marking or a by-product of different forms of traditional forest use
Australian CMTs were analysed as evidence of Aboriginal use of bark for canoe, shield and bark shelter-making [19], and CMTs connected with the procurement of wild honey and wax allowed for analysis of indigenous patterns of landscape use before and after European colonization [20]
Summary
One of the main requirements for understanding the currently observed state of any natural environment is the knowledge of its history, and especially of past anthropogenic activities. Up to the present time, different approaches were used and these include: quantification of the impact of traditional forest use, both singular, e.g. cattle pasturing [3] and cumulative [4] land-use changes in the forest in the last two centuries [5], history of anthropogenic fires in the last four centuries [6], studies on cultural landscapes created by traditional forest use [7], and the impacts of past use of individual tree species [8,9] In many of these studies, the subject of single tree specimens affected by people historically has emerged and this provides important insights into historical and often undocumented forest use. In North America, ancient bark-peeled trees are considered an important link to the culture of Native Americans and living artefacts of past traditional uses of the forest (traditional crafts, peeling the inner bark as an emergency food) from the mid-1600s until the early nineteenth century [21,22,23]
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