Historical Geography of fire and its causality in the Cantabrian Mountain and Pyrenees. Comparative study from palaeoenvironmental and documentary sources

Subproject 1. The use of fire and the formation of the landscape on the Cantabrian mountains and the eastern Pyrenees: comparative study of its historical development and current trends (2013-15). Spanish National Plan for R+D+i CSO2012-39680-C02-01.

Subproject 2. Environmental geohistory fire in the Holocene. Cultural patterns and land management since the start of livestock and agriculture in the Cantabrian Mountains and Pyrenees (2013-15). Spanish National Plan for R+D+i CSO2012-39680-C02-02.

SUMMARY

As the most western mountain areas, the mountain landscapes of the Cantabrian Mountains and Eastern Pyrenees are the result of a complex interaction system between the rural society and the environment where the fire plays an essential role. In an a priori environment unfavorable to fire because of climatic and biogeographic causes, fire has been continually used by successive groups of people as a tool either for land roturation and maintenance of pastures or as a way to pressure during the conflicts to become, due to their repetition, a determining factor in the genesis of landscapes and ecosystems in both regions.

This project aims to reconstruct and explain the historical evolution of the causes, the spatio-temporal distribution and the relationship between human activities and fires that occur in mountain areas of the northern Iberian Peninsula through a comparative study of two areas of similar characteristics and history. They are located in the Pallars Sobirá and Valle de Arán (Lleida) and in the upper parts of the Nansa, Saja and Besaya valleys in Cantabria.

The initial plan is based in the postulation that the environment affects the patterns of cultural behaviors related to the recurrence of forest fire. We propose to analyze an combined studied of environmental sources (different sedimentary deposits of peat bogs) with historical sources (documentary written and graphics). In this way, we intend a combined environmental study of sources of information (sedimentary charcoals, palynology, plant macroremains, diatoms, isotopes and heavy metals) to provide data for the last 7000 years cal BP as weel as file documentation (from Midle Age), periodicals library documents, (from XIXth century) and different types of historical databases of forest fires (from the middle of the XIXth century). The tests will be carry out from a multiple perspective taking into account the behavior of both regions since the Middle Ages to the present and they will be contrasted with specific cultural periods of particular interest: the Neolithic, Bronze/Iron Age and Romanization.

The comparison of the two areas, where human processes are close but not always synchronous, facilitates the interpretation of results and the discrimination among general processes and trends and those that have been theresult of local anthropic actions.