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The term “palimpsest” was used from ancient times to denote a tablet or sheet of parchment, which was scraped to remove earlier text prior to reuse. From the Renaissance on, chemical techniques were used to read the undertext of palimpsest manuscripts; these techniques became increasingly sophisticated, reaching their height in the 18th century (Larousse 1898, p. 628; Gaffiot 1981, p. 1105). The metaphor began to be applied to landscape in the 19th century; the first recorded instance is found in the work of F.W. Maitland (Lucas 2012), who studied dispersed habitat of presumably Celtic origins “from the ordnance map (that marvellous palimpsest, which under Dr Meitzen’s guidance we are beginning to decipher)” (Maitland 1987, pp. 15–16). Maitland belonged to a school of thought in which landscape was compared to text, and elements in a landscape were analyzed using semiological techniques. In 1934, the historian H.J. Randall again used the palimpsest metaphor, indicating that elements in a landscape should be seen as signs, and that their assembly constitutes a historical document in the same way as written documents. For Randall, maps provided a record of history, inscribed into the landscape:

The face of the country is the most important historical document that we possess. Upon the map of England – “that marvellous palimpsest” – is written much of English history: written in letters of earth and stone, of bank and ditch, of foliage and crop. As is the case with every map, the writing is not such as he that runs may read. It needs patience to discover, knowledge to decipher, insight, sometimes amounting to genius, to interpret. But the writing is there, all else awaits the competence of the reader. (Randall 1934, p. 5)

For Maitland and Randall, this written past was not concealed or erased by more recent “writings”. Ancient forms are present in the current landscape, and can be accessed by anyone who knows how to read them. One must simply look for clues in the image, as in an Épinal print⁵, where the most important points are not necessarily the most obvious. The villages which Maitland studied, using maps, were still part of the contemporary landscape, but they had retained elements betraying their ancient origins: groupings of elements, road layouts, housing patterns etc., which “never have been thoroughly effaced” (Maitland 1987, p. 15).

Carl Sauer (1889–1975), a contemporary of Maitland, professor of geography at the University of Berkeley and one of the leading figures in the development of historical geography, further disseminated Meitzen’s work and promoted the idea of “a picture of the former cultural landscape concealed behind the present one”, which could be read by anyone with the right keys (Sauer and Leighly 1963, p. 367).

The idea of the palimpsest is helpful as a metaphor for understanding the coexistence of new and ancient forms in a landscape. The French geographer Paul Vidal de La Blache used the term in the sense of an accumulation:

Big industry has upset conditions in central and western Europe during the last century. A thousand years of history had made […] erasures on the record of population⁶ [original: Ce peuplement s’offrait déjà comme un palimpseste sur lequel dix siècles d’histoire avaient inscrit bien des ratures]. Draining of marshes and clearing of forests were continually adding new touches to the original background. […] But when the industrial age began, it gave birth to a whole new set of human establishments. And yet, the primitive core of the population can still be discovered. On positive evidence it can be stated that men, here as elsewhere, persisted in assembling in certain places rather than in others. (Vidal de La Blache 1926, pp. 61–62, our italics)

Despite the transformations brought about by industrialization, medieval settlements remain evident on maps, with an accumulation of different forms of habitation on the same ground footprint (Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2. Palimpsest as accumulation. The palimpsest came to be used as a metaphor in landscape studies in the late 19th to early 20th centuries, communicating a notion of an accumulation of forms, rather than erasure and replacement (S. Robert 2019)

The palimpsest metaphor has not only been applied to habitat distribution, but also to agrarian structures and to landforms. In 1934, the historian Marc Bloch, using the same notions of reading and deciphering as the English authors cited above, wrote:

Field layout, perhaps to a greater extent than even the grouping or form of houses, is the book in which rural societies inscribed, line by line, the vicissitudes of their past. Alas, a paleography of this great territorial palimpsest has yet to emerge. Nevertheless, several authors, in recent years, have attempted to decipher a few pages⁷. (Bloch 1934, p. 483)

In the early years of the 20th century, geomorphologists used what they called “palimpsest theory”⁸ to describe natural cirques which bear the imprint of successive phases of glacier coverage, even after the glaciers in question have retreated (Jorré 1933, p. 365). In 1934, describing the wind direction recorded in the morphology of sand dunes in the Sahara, the geographer Léon Aufrère spoke of “deciphering the writing on this sandy palimpsest⁹“ (Aufrère 1934, p. 130). Jean Demangeot used the palimpsest metaphor in a similar way in relation to the direction of geological folds and the hydrographic network:

That these ancient, favored lines have survived beyond orogeny, like the hidden letters of a palimpsest, is clear; this is the key fact retained by morphologists, notably in terms of the tyrannical action of these lines on present features. (Demangeot 1943, p. 571)¹⁰

The use of the word “tyrannical” implies a negative judgment on the part of the geographer; this critical regard with respect to persistence was a salient feature of discussion in the decades following the Second World War (see Chapter 2). During the first half of the 20th century, however, the palimpsest concept was essentially used to understand observations: the past survives in the present, in the ground footprint of certain forms, orientations, directions, etc., even in cases where the initial reasons for this footprint (populations, land administration systems, winds glaciers, etc.) are long departed.