Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
differing in social background, nationality, ethnicity, class, income,
gender, or age.
The shift in modern times, therefore, has been from a focus
on materiality, physical forms and artefacts, to one based on
cultural processes. There are new emphases on the symbolism
of landscape, for example, and the meanings with which it is
imbued. Historical geography has always had its own diversity,
and this is maintained in recent projects such as studies of the
plague of
AD
1665, negotiating colonialism, the architectural
history of London Bridge, and Pierre Nora's sites of memory.
However, the British historical geographer Michael Williams, in a
review of the evolution of historical landscapes, stresses the roles
of class relations and of alternative 'ways of seeing' the landscape.
His plea is for a reconciliation between contrasting approaches by
accepting that landscapes comprise both tangible and intangible
nuances and realities. As with other forms of human geography,
this is another example of the need for more traditional
approaches to vie with the new focus on symbolism, meanings,
and values.
The approach of understanding human-environmental
interaction through time provides a particularly pertinent
illustration of integrated geography. This presupposes that both
the biophysical and the cultural changes are known or can be
reconstructed over the same timescale. There is a long tradition
of reconstructing the biophysical environments associated with
successive phases of human occupancy of different parts of the
Earth's surface and of inferring how people impacted on their
environment during forest clearance, settlement, land drainage,
rural transformation, urbanization, industrialization, and trade.
Reconstructing the former natural environments of prehistoric
and later peoples often involves scientifi c expertise from physical
geography, environmental archaeology, anthropology, and other
sciences. This is nevertheless a relatively easy task compared to
the attribution of causes and, especially, understanding the human
