Contribution short abstract:

The contribution aims to present the perspectives that an interdisciplinary approach and a microanalytic scale can offer in terms of rethinking the approach to historical sources, and the relationship between archival research, fieldwork, and the use of field (material, “natural”) sources.

Contribution long abstract:

Which is the relationship between written records and archives, but also local living memories, which constantly contain and return to us environmental biographies, and (non-human / more than human) objects they describe? In which way place, its very material history (human or more than human) could be related to the cultural restitution that historical sources produced? The contribution aims to present the perspectives that an interdisciplinary approach and a microanalytic scale can offer in terms of rethinking the approach to historical sources, and the relationship between archival research, fieldwork, and the use of field (material, “natural”) sources, that not only brings together the skills of the historian, the historical ecologist, the archaeologist, and the anthropologist, but also allows us to re-discuss the very epistemological status of the sources used.

Through the presentation of a multidisciplinary work on the history of a centuries-long conflict on a mountain side in northern Italy, it will be shown how the written sources, the living communities and their memories, the places that preserve it, the spaces that surround them, and the environmental artifacts subjects and objects of the dispute, are in dialogue and reconfigure each other over time, up to the present. Analyzed with a regressive approach, the human and more than human histories of a place intersect and explain themselves, and archives, local and green memories give us back dense environmental histories that otherwise cannot be drawn upon.

During the presentations will be provide different form of restitutions of this intersection.