More than five thousand years ago, the Neolithic communities of Northern Europe began to expand the open heather-based ecosystem that we know as heathlands. Through a combination of fire and grazing their livestock, humans cleared the post-glacial forests and expanded the niche for Calluna vulgaris (heather) and other heathland plants. Heather, an evergreen shrub, served as a vital resource – for winter grazing, for fuel, for tools, for thatch, for byre-bedding, and as fertiliser. The multiple affordances of heather meant that the Calluna heathlands, over time, became deeply embedded in the evolving domestic and funerary architecture. In these heathland landscapes, wide networks of mobility, transhumance and exchange developed.
The evidence available to us – palaeoecological, archaeological, and historical – suggests a complex dynamic of heathland persistence or recurrence in some areas over the last five millennia. At times humans favoured and promoted the heathlands; at others, they exhausted and abandoned them.
However, with the European revolution in agricultural land use from the eighteenth century, everything changed. Since then, the heathlands have been ravaged by agricultural modernization. Now in Northern Europe they are poised on the edge of extinction.
Our purpose with this publication is to explore the shifting relationships between humans and heathland across the ages, from the Holocene to the Anthropocene. We present an extensive range of perspectives and case studies, from pastoral practices and intricate stories of humans in landscapes, to artistic impressions, to the tension between nature management and rewilding. In placing these many and various perspectives before you, we aim to chart the diversity of what heathlands have been – and what they yet could be – in a deep time perspective.
We were able to make this publication – A Place for the Heathlands? – happen thanks to the Anthropogenic Heathlands project (ANTHEA), kindly funded by the European Research Council. ANTHEA is based at Aarhus University and runs for a period of five years, starting in 2020. It covers the period 2800 BC to AD 1000, with a particular focus on the historical trajectories of heathland establishment and survival. A series of case-study areas in an arc from southwest Norway to Denmark to southwest Britain form geographical focal points for the project, addressing the underlying ecological, spatial, sociocultural, and temporal fabric of past heathland regimes. To accomplish this, we involved scholars from an unprecedentedly diverse range of backgrounds, including ecology, geology, anthropology, archaeology, geography, and the historical sciences.
The key results of the ANTHEA project have and continue to be published in international academic journals (such as Annual Review of Anthropology, Antiquity, and JRAI), field reports, and wider channels of informed public opinion (such as 'Mutual entrapment' on Aeon and 'Hededrømme' on Baggrund).
Because the project is so deeply interdisciplinary, we felt we should use the occasion of this digital publication to spark a broad conversation about the past, present, and future of heath landscapes. The advantage of publishing digitally is that it allows a multiplicity of voices from different backgrounds to speak and be in conversation: in the following pages we gather perspectives from academia, the museum world, and beyond. Collectively, their contributions shed light on the cultural traditions, economic practices, and forms of interspecies sociality that have organized anthropogenic heathlands in the past and, in a few exceptional locations, the present.
The digital format has allowed our contributors to explore and experiment with different genres. In addition to traditional academic essays, the publication includes interviews, field notes, fiction, poetry, art, and video and photo essays. The publication can be experienced online or printed and read as a book.
Speaking with these many and various voices and styles, the question we want to ask is this: How have humans and other species come to mutual accommodation in the past, and is there still a place in our world for the heathlands? If so, what constellations of nature and culture will allow heaths to persist?
In our contemporary moment, heathlands sit at the crossroads of global environmental challenges, including biodiversity loss, climate change, industrial agriculture, and shifting ideas about human-landscape relationships. Heathlands, as culturally co-created ecosystems, challenge us to rethink the balance between conservation and contemporary forms of development. Can heathland histories provide insights into sustainable land-use practices for the future? How can their unique biodiversity and historical depth inform modern approaches to ecological stewardship? These questions resonate in ongoing debates about rewilding, heritage preservation, sustainable land use, and the broader interplay of human and more-than-human agency in shaping the future.
Mette Løvschal, Zachary E. Caple, Michelle Farrell and Mark Haughton