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Paper short abstract:

Landscape is more than just material accumulations of the past. In this paper I present a collaborative landscape history project that has worked on futures as much as the past.

Paper long abstract:

Landscape is more than just material accumulations of the past. The stratigraphic reckoning of landscape imagines that time passed in periods reaching backwards, and downwards, from the present, creating a succession of pasts that can be uncovered as archaeological layers. How, then, can we conceive of ecological futures in landscapes? One starting point could be to explore how people in the past and in the present may have thought about and acted in relation to the future.

In Scotland as in many nations, the rural landscape is often a repository of history, with competing visions of the past and values of place, nature and culture. In this paper I present a collaborative landscape history project in Aberdeenshire that explores futures of the landscape as much as the past. We came to think of the 19th century crofting inhabitants not as subsisting only day-by-day, but with hopes and plans for the future that they were trying to enact in the landscape. Our own work in the landscape – gardening and tree-planting – now recreates aspects of their futures that they were cut off from themselves.

Although we cannot assume that an object called ‘the future’ necessarily existed in the past in the way it can today, we should be open to the possibility of future-oriented temporalities. Activities in the landscape often generate certain kinds of future, some of which come to fruition and some of which do not. Landscape from this perspective is a historical ecology of future-making.