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Project

Environmental history of the summits of the southern Vosges (13th - 18th century).

Jean-Baptiste Ortlieb studies the environmental history of some of the higher summits of the "High Vosges" ("Hautes Vosges", Grand Est, France), between the end of the medieval period (13th century) and the revolutionary period (end of the 18th century). Environmental history's new paradigms modify the understanding of certain social phenomena, analyzing the emergence of a 'modern' relationship to nature, including the commodification of natural 'resources' and the appreciation for 'wild', or 'untamed' nature. It does so by employing transdisciplinary methods, combining historical archival research, with soil and archaeological data, and paleo-climatic and -botanical research. Such approach is an opportunity to rewrite the history of an 'old' historical object, the Vosges mountains. We will do so by focusing on the mountain pastures – the 'chaumes' of a well-defined number of Vosges summits, located on both side of the main ridge line separating the two historic regions of Alsace and Lorraine. By going beyond the only regional and local issues, the aim is to highlight the existence of complex relationships between humans and their environment, based on a survey carried out over the "long term". An original corpus is based on the crossing of written and cartographic sources with archaeology and geomorphology data. It makes it possible to concretely query the relationship between societies and summits, between human and "non-human" actors, within a so-called "social agrosystem". For his research in Antwerp, Jean-Baptiste Ortlieb will elaborate the crucial concept of 'social agrosystem', as developed by Erik Thoen and supervisor Tim Soens, and for a first time apply it on a mountainous environment – outside the core of pre-industrial settlement. Elaborating on the concept of social agro-system, with its emphasis on the different social configurations of agricultural production, Jean-Baptiste Ortlieb will incorporate the dynamics of non-human variables (including vegetation and climate), and provide a better understanding of the different models of appropriation and exploitation of the mountain chaumes. Gradually evolving over time, and also with significant contrasts between summits, a series of fundamental reconfigurations of human actors and non-human variables become visible, with 'common pool' models of human exploitation of the 'chaumes' giving away to private concessions, changes in the intensity of exploitation and the commercialization of its products and the rise of new forms of valuation of the natural altitude environments. This results directly in a chapter of the PhD-thesis, which will also be published as stand-alone article. During his stay in Antwerp he will also elaborate his historical GIS of the Vosges region, integrating the results of the archaeological excavation realized in September 2020 and allowing a spatial analysis of landscape and social evolutions. This part of the research will greatly profit from the expertise of the GIStorical Antwerp team. The result is a fundamental reassessment of human-nature interaction in the middle mountains, during a period marked by the emergence of a new relationship between Western societies and nature.
Date:1 Feb 2022 →  31 Jul 2022
Keywords:ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY, LANDSCAPE HISTORY
Disciplines:Landscape and ecological history
Project type:Collaboration project