The implications of perceptions and cultural knowledge loss for the management of wooded landscapes: A UK case-study

Abstract

Confirmed by an extensive international literature, forest landscapes reflect and influence community cultural history. As palimpsests of archaeology they provide evidence of former uses. Information about wooded landscapes, on the ground and in archives, relates to woodland and non-woodland activities. Ancient woodland landscapes preserve features relating to environmental factors and people's activities. Human influences include: (a) those related to woodland and its utilisation and (b) those of non-wooded periods. Present-day woods were formed and influenced by both, not always equally, each site to some extent a unique living catalogue of landscape history. Evidence includes the woodland ecology, for example, botanical ‘indicators’ of antiquity or disturbance, the ‘archaeological features or finds’, and the field evidence of tree-forms (working trees) and earthworks. Intensive UK-based studies show the depth and diversity of people/woodland interactions, and that understanding of these landscapes and their drivers has changed over recent years. There remain deep-seated problems of limited understanding of the interactions of culture and nature in these landscapes; ecologists and foresters often failing to see this. Archaeologists recognise built structures (‘monuments’) and ‘finds’ but overlook ecology and many earthworks. With Ecclesall Woods (100-ha case-study) the official archaeological information repository (The South Yorkshire Sites and Monuments Record) after visits by senior archaeologists and ecologists had four to five only ‘finds’ or ‘features’, the research described in this paper revised this to over 1000. Ecologists surveying the site considered it ‘typical inherently species-poor Coal Measures Series woodland’. However, this ‘typical’ and ‘natural’ vegetation is to a large degree an artefact of 500+ years of intensive human exploitation. Understanding these landscapes has been made more difficult by the rapid loss of local cultural knowledge about woodland management. These issues are exemplified and their consequences noted for a case-study in Sheffield, England.