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PART 1
Landscape: Continuity and Transformation

Introduction to Part 1

Morphological analysis, the science or study of forms, first emerged in the 19th century. First used in biology, with respect to the external form and structure of living beings, and in linguistics, with respect to the different forms and rules governing the internal structure of words¹, it is later used in the social sciences to describe functional structures and groups. In geography, history and architecture, the development of new representations of landscape, using planimetry, gave rise to a school of research based on morphological analysis. This approach was used across the domains of human geography, history and archeology, based on the shared idea that material or spatial realizations – or artifacts – cast light on social organizations.

The term form, derived from the Latin forma, which refers to both the “mold” and the “molded object”, concerns both the visible appearance of an object and that which gives it its shape. In this sense, it also relates to a “model to imitate” and may be understood as an “organization in accordance with a norm” (Rey 1993, p. 814). Form, thus, relates both to the appearance of organizations and to the organizing principle that underpins them (Chesneau and Roncayolo 2011, p. 156). The same ambiguity with respect to knowledge and ontology is also found in the word morphology, a term coined by Goethe in 1790. Originally used to refer to the study of the external configuration of an organ or living being, the term came to be used to refer to the actual form of living organisms (Rey 1993, p. 1275). Studying the prevailing practices in morphological analysis can tell us much about the way a society perceives a landscape and understands the way in which it marks this landscape, and consequently about the relationship between the society and its environment; the landscape is the result of this relationship. The nature of the relationship varies depending on the historical context, but also on the media used to perceive the landscape. Developments such as topographic cartography, in the late 19th century, aerial photography, in the wake of the First World War, and widespread archeological campaigns from the 1990s onwards all played a decisive role in the way in which researchers perceive and understand landscape forms.

The earliest studies of landscape forms adopted a diachronic approach, considering past and present in parallel; in the decades following the Second World War, however, a synchronic approach came to dominate the field. This approach is built around a strata-based framework where the present buries, and effectively cancels out, the past. Observations made in the course of rescue archaeology in the 1990s challenged this stratified vision of landscapes, highlighting the true complexity of temporalities, while increasingly strong cross-disciplinary connections between historians, archeologists and environmental specialists changed perceptions of the relationships between societies and environments. These developments formed the backdrop for a resurgence of interest in morphological analysis of historical landscapes, culminating in the emergence of a whole new discipline: archeogeography². This approach promotes a vision of landscape in which the links between man and milieu play a key role, moving beyond the simple nature/culture division. In this first part, we shall consider the way in which past authors, from the late 19th century onward, envisioned the relationship between space and time in a landscape. We shall also explain why modern archeogeographers must move beyond the morphological analysis methods developed during this earlier period, demonstrating the need for a new and innovative theoretical framework.

1 1 https://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/morphologie, accessed July 24, 2020.

2 2 The French term is archeogeographie; in English, the term “landscape archeology” is also widespread.