Mission & Goals
Our projects investigate, describe and enumerate landscapes from a historical, archaeological, biological and digital perspective. We integrate cutting-edge technology and established historic and archaeological research methods to explore the entangled relationships between people, places, flora and fauna. Our tools incorporate, blend and integrate historic archival studies, material culture, digital humanities, UAV-based remote sensing, geochemical and vegetation analysis to describe ephemeral archaeological landscapes. Our research queries how trans-Atlantic movements of peoples have long term implications for landscapes on both sides of the Atlantic coast in the recent past.
Why Historic Landscape Research Matters…
“It is only by fully understanding our past that we can comprehend our own context in the present.”
Many of our familiar landscapes which appear wild are in fact anything but. Human activity from centuries ago has altered countless landscapes, sometimes subtly but often less so. Once abandoned, vegetation quickly reclaims these places in the process of rewilding. How ephemeral anthropogenic landscapes influence subsequent natural environments remains unclear. Do centuries of rewilding return all original flora and fauna to their previous state or are underlying environmental processes permanently altered? We know that post-industrial activity certainly alters abandoned landscapes. But do similar permanent anthropogenic signatures also remain at abandoned places of pre-industrial activity? If so, such anthropogenic signatures could be used to detect extremely ephemeral pre-industrial historic archaeological sites which would otherwise go undetected and therefore risk being lost to the human record. Moreover, if pre-industrial activity such as the resource extraction of the historic fishery are sufficient to generate permanent anthropgenic changes in landscapes in which the fisheries were prosecuted, it allows us to measure, catalogue and estimate their ecological impact. In the context of modern climate change and pollution, we can draw important parallels to post-industrial landscape disruption. We can demonstrate how even modest pre-industrial impact has lasting and permanent effects on wild landscapes.
