Chapter 15

Terraced Lands: From Put in Place to Put in Memory

Ada Acovitsióti-Hameau

Abstract The terracing of sloping, rocky, and hilly land is man’s answer to the physical environment’s potentialities and constraints. It sets up singular territories where nature and culture are tightly linked. The places of action and life thus created report a high level of symbiosis between inhabitants/users and used time/ spaces. This symbiosis defines the quality of the areas where humans live, the écoumène as explained by Augustin Berque (Berque in Écoumène, Introduction à l’étude des milieux humains. Belin, Paris, 2000). Acquainted to a put in writing of the relief, these arrangements tangibly mark the way users—permanent, seasonal, or passers-by—perceive the territory. Expressed by tracing and by artifacts widely executed in dry stone, this “writing on the soil” conforms and orders space and establishes a network of relationships concerning family; neighborhood; production; cooperation; and structuring societies, land property, and technical systems. Functional efficiency and aesthetics create another register of shared perceptions, which gives meaning to forms of the landscape, to constructed works, and to modes of building, conferring an identity recorded by the collective memoirs. These perpetual comings and goings established between the territory’s reality and its representation, this fertile trajectivity—to paraphrase Gérard Chouquer—between the material and the mental, justify and legitimize attention to and care for terraced lands because, beyond the universe of forms and production of goods, these sets help us appreciate lifestyles and think about man’s way of being in the world.

15.1“Marks” on the Lands

The terracing of sloping, rocky, and hilly land is man’s answer to the natural environment’s potentialities and constraints for earning a profitable living. These arrangements matter among the objective evidences of the adaptation reactions

A. Acovitsióti-Hameau (&)

Société Scientifique Internationale Pour L’étude Pluridisciplinaire de La Pierre Sèche, Brignoles, France

e-mail: aser2@wanadoo.fr; contact@pierreseche-international.org

M. Varotto et al. (eds.), World Terraced Landscapes: History, Environment, Quality of Life, Environmental History 9, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96815-5_15

between a given territory and its permanent, seasonal, or passing-by users. If terracing hillsides is a model of the relief, this action also mirrors writing. As with all graphic acts, terracing is seen by results that “leave traces” on or “mark out” the ground that insert forms and affix signs in the physical environment. The latter, in its turn, is not simply a medium for expressing oneself. The existing space is an active, dynamic entity, which influences the choice of disposals and brings about the intervention of the scripters. So, combined tightly with the ground, land terracing participates in the constitution and maintenance of viable, fertile, and sustainable spaces, while simultaneously clearing up and spreading information on the statuses and functioning of lands. In the long term, land terracing becomes familiar, is a representative element of lifestyles, and reveals group and individual identities. For these reasons, the value of terraces are founded on explicitly perceptible motivations, but also on implicitly felt ones. It is through this double aspect, material and symbolic, that we propose to analyze the strong, current tendency in favor of the preservation and development of this territorial equipment.

15.2Terraces, Landscapes, Societies

Several mechanisms are at work during territorial arrangement and, consequently, during the implementation of terraces. They correspond to a “taking of possession of the territory” (Ambrosi 1990), this “conquest” being made gradually and respecting the place’s physical, social, and economic particularities. This process requires consciousness of the place’s filiation: good knowledge of the succession of aspects and statuses, which link together to include the past in the realizations of the present and the perspectives for the future. The clarity and acceptance of this filiation protect the quality (for local products or for links among groups and among individuals) of new disposals brought by economic and social changes (Acovitsióti-Hameau 2002). The case of Vilafranca (València province, Spain) is a good example (Fig. 15.1).

The town is as much industrious (spinning and cloth factories) as tourist (mountain holidays), and since about 2005, it has increasingly promoted and cared for its territory’s peasant features. The urban core rises in the middle, framed by cultivated lowland and grazed highland, both of which are compartmented and terraced. This landscape is looked after by the will to maintain a modest agro-pastoral economy that stimulates hiking and agritourism while taking advantage of the market thus created. This development plan allows partial preservation of vernacular territorial arrangements. The project is forward-looking, and its realization is still in progress despite disagreements on its contents. At Vilafranca (and in all other similar cases), natural land and built works compose in fine a “whole,” a single inseparable set. This vision gives sense to the concerned

Fig. 15.1 Town of Vilafranca (València Region, Spain) between its mountain and its countryside (Photo ASER Association)

space and makes it a self-identity landscape for people who occupy and use it and a cultural landscape (asking for attention and care) for all outer observers.

Passing from the concept of space to the concept of landscape is an evolution dependent on human intervention. This intervention requires in-depth knowledge of the territory via diligent attendance and in the long term, followed by a detailed transmission of collected information and proven sensations. In this approach, the individual and collective feeling remains decisive. Landscape is based on perceptions. In other words: “the transformation of the physical environment by man is the expression of his cultural representation of this environment” (Blanchemanche 1990). To the geographical, primary notion, are added factors issuing from history, sociology/ethnology, art, and aesthetics. To physical, temporal, and social realities are added their representations: images and concepts based on these realities. The geographer Gerard Chouquer (Chouquer 2001) believes the realities and their representations to be equal, each of them depending on the other to be conceived, achieved, and explained. This equality shows itself especially in terms of dynamics. There is a continual interpenetration between these groups of powers, giving landscapes a “fuzzy and evolutionary” character.

Perpetually transformed, landscapes thus appear always new in themselves but also already known because of the multiple inheritances that they incorporate and