Typology of historical cultural landscapes based on their cultural elements

Abstract

Historical cultural landscapes represent numerous values and meanings that are important for today’s society. These cultural landscapes document the specific development of local communities and may reflect their approaches or attitudes toward the environment. Man-made landscape elements are created for special purposes and represent specific values (historical, cultural, environmental, economic, etc.). The analysis of these landscape elements allows us to find out for what purposes the society decided to use the landscape, respectively what functions the landscape performs and what historical or cultural values it represents. The following text presents a typology of historical cultural landscapes based on a cluster analysis of cultural landscape features. Using this method, a typology of landscapes is created that reflects the functional use and values of landscapes based on the analysis of cultural-historical elements and differentiates the rates and methods of land use by human beings. The output of the cluster analysis is visualized in a dendrogram, based on which seven basic landscape categories were defined and described.