de la Soudière 2010). Precise in its location, defined in its temporality (the “place” can also be the convenient moment), and—for these reasons—having a name, the place is often personified as concealing a “spirit” or a “genius” (genius loci); the spirit of a “place” is not attached to a “space,” which has flexible outlines and a moldable morphology. Places (or topoi) are thus assimilated to beings and are our “social body”: an extension of ourselves in the environment (Leroi-Gourhan 1943). This beautiful metaphor reminds us of the ceaseless comings and goings between reality and per- ception—the perpetual interaction between the physical territory and its felt, historic, social, and patrimonial contexts. This complex process ends by developing local cultures, which are made and unmade in groups and periods. Each of these stages or concrete moments corresponds to a time/space, combining the objective space with the material, ideal, and sensory elements of each instant into a concretude (Chouquer 2001). All these instants are different and succeed each other with the complicity of the land users.

15.3Country Planning: Lifestyles

Implementing terraced lands mobilizes the concepts and mechanisms we have described above. Terracing participates in global country planning, prioritizing rural lands and, most of all, those having an agro-sylvo-pastoral production. Their spread can be considerable, and though other operations are necessary for their creation, the most visible technique used is dry-stone walling. This technique absorbs a large part of the materials excavated from freshly turned soils and supports the drainage and aeration of terraced plots. It maintains the place’s unity and coherence because it is largely manual and craft (few operators, no special tools, empirical apprenticeship despite theoretical books that have circulated since the nineteenth century and are multiplied today). The material (the stone) and the technique (building with no mortar) call up to performance, and this factor encourages the use of terraces and dry-stone construction. Additionally, dry-stone walling, just as land terracing, shows—beyond knowledge, skill, and ingenuity—the sensibility of the body and of the spirit via adaptation to contexts and milieus.

Finally, expressed by drawings and artifacts largely executed in dry stone, the “writing” of terraces arranges and orders space by showing usage rules (cultures, irrigation, storages, passages, etc.) and by inciting relevant behaviors (cyclic presence/absence of users, joint arrangements and help for productions, development of leisure activities and user-friendliness, etc.). These functions strengthen every link: inter-spatial (matching land location to the plans of traffic, etc.); inter-seasonal (matching cultures, wood cuts, animals’ passes, hunting calendars, etc.); intergenerational (transmission of land ownership, uses, features of the soil, water circulation, climate, etc.); and inter-community (drainages, road networks, trade, fairs and other festivities, etc.). There is a whole set of relationships concerning family, neighborhood, production, and cooperation that structures societies, property, and technical systems.

Fig. 15.4 Terraced high mountain around Arés, Maestrat, Spain (Photo ASER Association)

streaming, storage, and rest are in this class. Even important constructions, such as huts for laborers, are not always recognizable in the overviews, which display “staged” spaces, the shown images being conditioned to impress (Fig. 15.4). Walking through these spaces allows people to discover their “secrets.” These are often revealed to be treasures of ingenuity, demonstrating that places, functions, and building techniques fuse to one another and are attached to social points and imaginary items to create personalized spatial unities.

15.4What Is Important? The System

Carefully examining terraced lands and dry-stone settings shows their complexity and diversity. The smallest details reveal lifestyles and bear witness to the builders’ intelligence. Global country planning presupposes many operations and realizations, all essential and complementary: the breaking-up and drainage of lands; the shaping of plots; water courses and distribution; the partition and demarcation of cultivated, free, and wooded land; the implementation of roads and paths; the construction of utilitarian premises for peasants and foresters; and the establishment of pastoral parks and buildings. Access ramps and flying staircases through terraces, specific places for fruit trees such as olive trees (Fig. 15.5), a sun-bathed wall in front of which the dessert grapes mature, a “niche” to keep provisions cool or a hollow in the wall to tidy up tools, ropes, and flocks’ bells are all elements indispensable for the system.

Fig. 15.5 Olive trees’ protections in Lesvos, Greece (Photo ASER Association)

Fig. 15.6 Detailed country planning of a modest slope, Var, Provence, France (Photo ASER Association)

The planning affecting a hillside in the Var department’s hinterland (Provence, France) shows the complicity and complementarity between the voluminous and the restricted, the mass and the detail. The set consists of terraces, stone heaps, and enclosure walls, and it covers the whole slope and the little plateau forming its summit (Fig. 15.6).

It is bare, thankless land, where stone appears everywhere and where one wonders if culture, even minor, is possible. However, the little, local farming community made this area fruitful, cultivating it annually and driving flocks to pasture, without neglecting the leisurely but also food-supplying activities of hunting and gathering. Functional since at least the middle of the nineteenth century, the area was gradually abandoned after World War II. Modest hunting and the grazing of small family herds subsisted until the early 2000s. Some years ago, the area became public, and the municipality intends to preserve all land accommodations, even if there is no precise plan of action yet.

Preliminary studies (topographies, ethnographical surveys, and archival research) are now finished, and the district periodically accepts guided visits, which discuss dry-stone walling and the lives of former rural people, whose hard labor is illustrated by built devices. Hunters and gatherers continue crossing the hillside. Despite the banality of the constructions (or, perhaps, because of it), the feeling of owning an exceptional patrimonial place makes its way among the state’s and inhabitants’ representatives. The concept of “lands of stone” and of “food giving stones” (Godefroid 2014) insinuates itself in the community’s agricultural and forest heritage. If the researchers and the authorities have a real responsibility for this evolution, this insinuation would not be possible without the sense (the spirit maybe?) of the place itself, which, apparently, awakens recollections of lifestyles practiced by well-known and intimate ancestors. Because memory can take hold of this sense, the place becomes part of the cultural heritage in a credible and practicable way.

The case presented above is generalizable for most of the terraced territories that are being recovered. For instance, recovering cultivation in several terraced areas of Majorca (Baleares, Spain) is intended to support alternative tourism touching the hinterland and the autumn/winter season and absorbing traditional agro-pastoral products, which are transformed and packaged in an innovative way (proposed forms and quantities, packaging types, various lots for tasting, etc.). This initiative also maintains farmers on these lands who, without such measures, would have abandoned them. So, numerous vernacular arrangements on the hillsides are rebuilt and reused, either because they welcome and supply circuits of agritourism or because the desire to develop internal wealth allows (and values) maintaining or returning to rural life. In Italy, “recoveries” or “stubborn forms of return” to rural life on terraced lands seem to have success, not due to the “fétichisation” of chosen places, but from their rehabilitating manners of living and reports to the environment that the society understands and adopts (Varotto 2008). In all contexts where innovations remain attentive to their heritages and are moderately achieved, social (new populations) and economic (new productions) transformations that accompany them do not upset the traditional vocations of places (dominant activities suitable to each land unit) or all people/territories (networks of traffic, mutual aid, and exchanges). These conditions are indispensable for the survival of terraced territories; the high level of symbiosis between inhabitants/users and time/spaces defines, not only the quality, but also the proper essence of their being. For this reason, “putting in place” and “putting in memory” terraced lands are processes