Annette Haug – författare

Places of Memory takes a new look at spatialised practices of remembrance and its role in reshaping societies from prehistory to today, gathering researchers representing diverse but complementary fields of expertise. This diachronic outlook provides important insights into the great variety of human and social reactions examining memory, encompassing aspects of remembering, the loss of memory, reclaiming memories, and remembering things that may not have happened. The contributions to this volume expand upon Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux des memoire (places of memory) and the notion that memory is not just stored in these places but activated through human engagement. The volume presents a reflection on the creation of memories through the organisation and use of landscapes and spaces that explicitly considers the multiplicity of meanings of the past. Thus, social identities were created, reaffirmed, strengthened, and transformed through the founding, change, and reorganization of places and spaces of memory in the cultural landscape.

Although Antiquity itself has been intensively researched, together with its reception, to date this has largely happened in a compartmentalized fashion. This series presents for the first time an interdisciplinary contextualization of the productive acquisitions and transformations of the arts and sciences of Antiquity in the slow process of the European societies constructing a scientific system and their own cultural identity, a process which started in the Middle Ages and has continued up to the Modern Age.The series is a product of work in the Collaborative Research Centre “Transformations of Antiquity” and the “August Boeckh Centre of Antiquity” at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Their individual projects examine transformational processes on three levels in particular ‒ the constitutive function of Antiquity in the formation of the European knowledge society, the role of Antiquity in the genesis of modern cultural identities and self-constructions, and the forms of reception in art, literature, translation and media.

Past Landscapes presents theoretical and practical attempts of scholars and scientists, who were and are active within the Kiel Graduate School “Human Development in Landscapes” (GSHDL), in order to disentangle a wide scope of research efforts on past landscapes. Landscapes are understood as products of human-environmental interaction. At the same time, they are arenas, in which societal and cultural activities as well as receptions of environments and human developments take place. Thus, environmental processes are interwoven into human constraints and advances.  This book presents theories, concepts, approaches and case studies dealing with human development in landscapes. On the one hand, it becomes evident that only an interdisciplinary approach can cover the manifold aspects of the topic. On the other hand, this also implies that the very different approaches cannot be reduced to a simplistic uniform definition of landscape. This shortcoming proves nevertheless to be an important strength. The umbrella term ‘landscape’ proves to be highly stimulating for a large variety of different approaches. The first part of our book deals with a number of theories and concepts, the second part is concerned with approaches to landscapes, whereas the third part introduces case studies for human development in landscapes. As intended by the GSHDL, the reader might follow our approach to delve into the multi-faceted theories, concepts and practices on past landscapes: from events, processes and structures in environmental and produced spaces to theories, concepts and practices concerning past societies.