Grenville Astill: Professor at the Department of Archaeology at the University of Reading. He teaches the archaeology of medieval Britain and Europe. His research interests centre on medieval urban and rural issues, technology, industry and landscape archaeology. He has two long-term, landscape oriented fieldwork projects, one on the precinct and estates of Bordesley Abbey, a medieval Cistercian monastery in Worcestershire. The other is designed to investigate the evolution of the landscape in eastern Brittany from late prehistoric to modern times with interdisciplinary methods.

László Bartosiewicz: Head of the Department of Medieval and Post-Medieval Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology at the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. His field of interest is archaeozoology. He has published extensively on animal remains in prehistory and later times alongside with the wider perspective of the role of animals in human life.

Rudolf Brázdil: Professor at the Department of Geography at the Masaryk University, Brno. He is the leading scholar of Central European historical climatology. He has published many studies on the history of weather and climate in the Czech Lands from the Middle Ages onwards, and also on the social context of climatic changes in Central Europe. He has also edited numerous books on the subject.

John C. Chapman: Reader in archaeology at the Department of Archaeology at the University of Durham. His research interests are the prehistory of central and eastern Europe, archaeological theory, and field survey techniques. He has published on the development of the landscape of Central Europe, and especially that of the Balkans.

Richard C. Hoffmann: Professor at the Department of History at York University, Canada. His research interests include the history of long-term environmental change, medieval fishing, medieval agrarian history, and the history of the interactions between different ecosystems. He has published numerous books and articles on global issues and on medieval East-Central Europe as well.

Zsolt Molnár: Researcher at the Institute of Ecology and Botany of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Vácrátót. His research interests include historical landscape ecology in general and of the Great Hungarian Plain, actual vegetation of Hungary, coarse scale patterns, phytoindication, vegetation and habitat mapping methods, and habitat classifications. He has published a number of articles on the interpretation of modern landscapes with historical methods.

Lajos Rácz: Professor at the Department of History at the University of Szeged. His research focuses on climate history of the Carpathian Basin in a narrower and that of Central Europe in a wider sense. He participates in several international projects that investigate long-term climatic changes in Europe.

Richard W. Unger: Professor at the History Department at the University of British Columbia. He teaches medieval and early modern economic history and the history of technology. He also researches how production, trade, and land use influence each other and the environment.

Verena Winiwarter: holds a Hertha Firnberg Postgraduate Fellowship at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Vienna and is President of the European Society for Environmental History. In her current research she tries to develop an interdisciplinary theoretical framework for environmental history. She is interested in long-term and cross- cultural comparative environmental history. She has published on diverse issues in environmental history, from the agricultural textbooks of Roman Antiquity to medieval land-use and from perceptions of nature in Picture postcards to the long-term history of waste.

The course is intended to explore the ever-changing relationship between people and the nature that surrounds them.

Environmental history and landscape history are among the most topical issues of present-day historical research; they aim aims at finding solutions to current problems (global warming, nature conservation, etc) by analysing historical data with interdisciplinary methods. While environmental history is predicated on the construction of sequences and explanations which privilege natural processes and data, landscape history tends to favour cultural, social, and economic data, explanations, interpretations and processes. The two interpretations, however, are not mutually exclusive, but rather intimately related to each other, and only together are able to form a coherent overall picture. One of the significant contributions of the course is that it intends to study the human environment in its entirety, thus conforming to the overall scientific trend in which the division line between natural and cultural heritage gradually disappears. One of our principal goals is to introduce the wide range of research possibilities connected to this field of study. Therefore the course will be more of a presentation of the different techniques that can be applied to study the history of our environment than a compact unit focusing on one narrowly defined object or method.

The methodology of environmental history has been developed in Western Europe; the ECE countries have just started to establish the scientific and academic background to apply these methods. Therefore the dissemination of current teaching and research methodologies is essential, for which the SUN course will provide an excellent basis. The network built between Western European countries, alongside with those from the ECE region with a more advanced knowledge in the subject, and the ECE countries will largely facilitate future co-operation and will ensure that landscape history be one of those subjects in which the whole of the European scientific community work together towards a deeper understanding of our common past.

This course is designed essentially for participants with some prior knowledge of East-Central European cultural, historical, and environmental processes. It is not intended as either a strictly postgraduate or a professional upgrade course. The interdisciplinary nature of the whole research area will most likely result in a diverse student-body, from university researchers through heritage specialists to local historians. In other words, participants will have some background knowledge in different topics, and will certainly benefit from acquiring data and methodology from related fields of the interdisciplinary spectrum of the course.

(round-table discussion)

János Bak (Central European University, Budapest), Richard C. Hoffmann, Gerhard Jaritz (Central European University, Budapest), Verena Winiwarter (University of Vienna, Austria; President of European Society for Environmental History)

(lectures and seminars)

(lectures and seminars)

Rudolf Brázdil

Topics and discussion points: Historical climatology – data, methods, results, impacts. Historical climatology as a science. Data used in historical climatological research. Methods of historical-climatological analyses. Climate fluctuations in the last millennium. Meteorological extremes in the last millennium. Impacts of weather and climate. Perspectives of future research.

Lajos Rácz

Topics and discussion points: Historical climatology of the Carpathian Basin. Sources, methods, and data types in East-Central Europe.

 

presentations - on royal and monastic landscapes (Visegrád royal castle and palace, Pauline and Cistercian monasteries in Pilis)

- on woodland history (Pilis Royal Forest and UNESCO Biosphere Reserve)

 

(lectures and seminars)

Grenville Astill

Topics and discussion points: Methods of British landscape history. The development of a monastic landscape: Bordesley Abbey. The landscape of Brittany.

John C. Chapman

Topics and discussion points: Interaction between people and nature in prehistory. Central and Eastern Europe in prehistory. Application of new methodologies: social power, social space, landscape archaeology.

Zsolt Molnár

Topics and discussion points: Historical landscape ecology in Hungary. Traditional and new methods in

studying past vegetation in lowland landscapes. The vegetation and land-use

history of the Hungarian Great Plain in the last 250 years.

 

Applicants are required to send a maximum two-page research topic proposal. This proposal has to be taken from their own study areas but must be compatible with the topics of the course. The proposals will be discussed and elaborated during the course, and the participants will finally produce posters, which will be made available on the internet.