Paul Wordsworth
Proceedings of the Workshop held at 10th ICAANE in Vienna, April 2016
“The modern town of Bərdə at the heart of the Kura Plain in the Republic of Azerbaijan betrays almost no evidence of its historical political significance. This lowland area, a strategic frontier zone of the early Islamic world, has the potential to reveal a great deal about the structure of borderlands under the Abbasid caliphate (AD 750–1258) and its successors. In order to unravel the deep history of Bərdə, however, it is necessary to understand the long processes of change that have created the current landscape. This paper proposes the adaptation of techniques commonly used for landscape analysis in Western Europe to undertake a multi-scalar reconstruction of Bərdə (medieval Bardhaʿa) and its hinterland. Historic Landscape Characterisation (HLC) offers the opportunity to identify the traces of past spatial organisation through remote sensing and comprehensive aerial mapping. Furthermore, the method can be used to study towns, villages and rural structure in a comparable manner, rather than focussing solely on the configuration of extra-urban areas. While the intensive agricultural policies and urban redevelopment of the late Soviet Union present different challenges to those confronted by the numerous UK HLC projects, this case study demonstrates the value of this approach in understanding landscapes of the former USSR and in ecological zones where nomadic pastoralist economies played a significant role in the past.”
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National Symposium on the implementation of the European Landscape Convention in Georgia