Читать книгу Resilience - Sandrine Robert - Страница 19

From the outset, however, the regressive analysis approach to history was confronted with a difficulty: that of studying landscapes which are in a constant state of evolution. Without a general framework for studying the evolution of human societies, it is hard to interpret plans or documents beyond their date of production. This led to a focus on planned parcel systems which marked a clear change from previous landscape patterns, for example following periods of land clearance. From a methodological perspective, a distinction was made between two types of landscape, of which A. Verhulst summarized the characteristics.

A landscape is called “primary”:

... when it has undergone no major changes since its formation at a given moment in the Middle Ages [...] In this case, as a general rule, it will have been formed over a relatively short period of time and following a pre-established plan, most often in a context of collective clearing. (Verhulst 1995, pp. 48–49)²⁴

The degree to which land systems were planned appears to have played a role in their fixation, limiting possibilities for future evolution, notably in the direction of plot inequality, since the plan covered the entirety of the townlands before they were put into agricultural use. Furthermore, the length and breadth of parcels were pre-defined from the outset. The limited scope for evolution in such cases facilitates reconstitution on the basis of later sources (Verhulst 1995, pp. 48, 52–53). In this case, the hardness (dureté) indicated by the persistence of architectural constructions (section 1.2.3) is a result of the planning process. As the historian Raymond Chevallier wrote in 1958:

In reality, centuriation is like all of the monuments which come down to us from ancient times: it passes through time unscathed; this is both its strength and its weakness, and this permanent character should be seen as a hallmark of Rome. Centuriation, born of the earth, was not a stone corset preventing it from breathing, but it did assign it a structure. The system gave it a stability, making it immune to successive recombinations and dismemberments. It only disappeared once it was no longer maintained, fragmenting much faster in regions artificially clawed back from the desert, where man’s continued survival is only attained through constant struggle.²⁵ (Chevallier 1958, p. 121)

In contrast, a “secondary” landscape is one which has undergone:

…numerous transformations [which] occurred over a period, often several centuries long, which changed the primary form to an extent which renders reconstitution necessary, laborious, difficult and, in most cases, only partially possible...²⁶ (Verhulst 1995, p. 49)

For methodological reasons, the study of secondary landscapes has been largely abandoned due to its complexity, in favor of studying planned parcel systems: medieval urban foundations, parcel systems resulting from land clearances, rural parcel systems in Eastern France, etc. These specific town and land plans are still “readable” in the present, having undergone very limited degradation due to their original coherency. In this approach, time is seen as a framework which is external to the observed object, and acts on elements in the sense of alteration.