Fólk og firnindi: Um fornar rætur almenninga

Mette Løvschal, prófessor við Aarhus Universitet & Moesgaard Museum, flytur erindi í fyrirlestraröðinni Nýjar rannsóknir í fornleifafræði sem Félag fornleifafræðinga og námsbraut í fornleifafræði við Háskóla Íslands standa að. Fyrirlesturinn nefnist „Humans and heathlands: The deep time emergence of landscapes held in common“ og fer fram á ensku. 

Fyrirlesturinn fer fram á Zoom, miðvikudaginn 29. mars kl. 12-13 og er öllum opinn. Smellið hér til að fylgjast með streymi.

HUMANS AND HEATHLANDS: THE DEEP TIME EMERGENCE OF LANDSCAPES HELD IN COMMON

In this paper, I wish to explore the wider social ties and governance that enabled long-distance travel and exchange of ideas, people, livestock, goods, and raw materials in Early Bronze Age Northern Europe. During the Corded Ware Culture, new human-provoked landscapes expanded across large parts of Northern Europe, affording grazing pastures and social opportunities: wide open stretches of Calluna heathlands. These landscapes required ongoing more-than-human maintenance such as grazing and cycles of controlled burning and turf-cutting to rejuvenate them and prevent them from reforesting. In return, Calluna offered itself for seasonal pasture and provided fuel and building material. Hence, heathlands relied on the sustained return by humans and livestock as well as networks of intercommunity connections, based on trust and collective governance, securing access and grazing rights across substantial distances, and preventing conflict and overexploitation. In this way, heathlands represented new social and pastoral niches of cyclicality, reincarnation and sustained commitment that gradually came into being. – And which formed a common governance background for a wide spectrum of inter-regional and socio-political phenomena that occurred in the following centuries.