ABSTRACT

Florence and Faro (the European Landscape Convention and the Framework Convention on the Value of Cultural Heritage for Society) offer new lines of vision into archaeological heritage management. Unlike the Valletta Convention, neither of these two young conventions is specifically focused on archaeology and in fact the differences are much more fundamental. In conjunction with a more long-standing but recently maturing landscape dimension within heritage management and archaeologically/historically informed spatial planning, they offer a new context for archaeology and related disciplines. They open new channels into other landscape disciplines and into the integrated practice of landscape management. They suggest different approaches to understanding and responding to the past within the present. They expand the scale of theory and practice to the wider and more fluid concept of landscape itself, with a considerable impact therefore on conceptual frames. In three sections that look backwards, at current trends and at the future, and through the mirror of the PDL/BBO programme, this chapter explores the many faces that the ELC and the Faro Convention offer to archaeological practice, leading towards the introduction of a new European research agenda for ESF/COST focusing on landscape studies balanced between the humanities, the social sciences and the physical sciences.

KEY WORDS

Archaeology, heritage practice, landscape; ELC, social relevance, Faro; future

LANDSCAPES OF THOUGHT AND ACTION

Metaphorical landscapes: disciplinary contexts and changing situations.

Landscape can be object and subject, material as well as perceptual, metaphor as well as reality. Rather than dividing the field of research and practice, however, this diversity and multiplicity helps to provide a broad field of common ground. Landscape is above all a shared idea and creates an unparalleled nexus for debate, dialectic and difference within humanities and sciences. It is a place for researchers and practitioners from many varied fields to meet and discuss, using the idea of landscape as a virtual agora, thing or parlement, within which landscape meanings and significances can be contested as well as agreed. Landscape is an integrative force. It offers a way to dissolve some of the many divisions which have arisen in science, research, policy and practice over the past couple of centuries. This allows archaeologicalhistorical knowledge and policy to be set within wider social contexts through which they will reach new levels of relevance.

ABSTRACT

The subject of this paper is the study of the wetland Oer-IJ area northwest of Amsterdam. The application of ‘action research’ and the cultural biography are outlined and followed by two specific aspects of water, the religious meaning and the relevance for degradation.

The analysis of the context of the action illustrates that the ‘conventional’ activities fit into Hoppe's ‘engineers’ model with policy ‘on top’ and researchers ‘on tap’ creating tensions between policy and research. The ‘unconventional’ activities complied more with the policy-oriented learning models based on equal partnership.

The cultural biography of the Oer-IJ has been named ‘the forgotten delta’ and presents a case to explore this concept in the context of planning. Before implementing the narrative definition, methods and context of use are explained. By its geological transformation, present-day landscape structure and the long-term development of landscape patterns, the buried delta itself offers the strongest regional identity possible. People's relationship with water while living on the ‘wet’ land has been dominant and determined by the principles behind the long-term development of the estuary.

A specific research topic was to make predictive maps of ritual activities in the pre- and protohistoric period. It was assumed that in the Oer-IJ ritual activities took place within the wet low-lying parts of the landscape. All 499 known archaeological sites from the pre- and protohistoric period were re-evaluated. A total of 22 sites in wet low-lying parts of the landscape were interpreted as offering sites. From these findings a model was made in which the time, place and find complex of offering sites were combined for the predictive modelling of the offering sites.

Another specific project focused on the degradation of archaeological sites in the Oer-IJ wetland. On selected sites the position and condition of the cultural layer was noted and sampled. The groundwater level was studied by divers, dataloggers and in dipwells. Furthermore, the redox potential was fixed as a measure of the presence of oxidizing substances. In addition the soil pH was sampled at several depths at each monitoring location. An important conclusion is that a rise in the groundwater level is not always favourable for the archaeological remains. Depending on the local hydrology, this can lead to the reversal of a seepage situation to an infiltration environment.