Zprávy památkové péče 2015, 75(6):513-520

Seeking out the invisible. Historic plowfield relics of extinct medieval villages and the possibilities of detecting and interpreting them using aerial laser scanning data

Ondřej Malina

The historic cultural landscape is generally the result of ideological intentions, economic needs, and geographic conditions. The most striking traces left on the terrain are usually left by agricultural use; in Czech conditions, these are the boundaries and terrace divisions of land used for plowing or grazing. Different historical periods witnessed changes in the layouts of historic plowfields, reductions in cultivated areas, and consolidation of properties into larger tracts. Younger stages are generally more readable and recognizable than the older ones and are much more so than the original medieval locational layers.
The boundary strips of historic plowfields have been preserved in many places in a form that is often largely the one-time result of a medieval colonization scheme. Verifying the age of the layout structure in such localities is difficult, however; analyses of rural areas around extinct medieval villages provide a new opportunity. The layout of their plowfields usually provides the advantage of readability of their earliest stages without being overlain by later reorganization.
The basis of the text is a digital model of the terrain relief, generated from airborne laser scanning data for several locations of extinct medieval villages. It captures many terrain relics which, according to their topography and morphology, can be divided into two main groups. The first group is related to the definition of the central built up area, which in places is made up of a clearly evident village green while elsewhere it is merely an area with a concentration of extinct structures. The second group includes evidence of regularly oriented boundary strips forming a coherent surface; the orientation and mutual relationships to the built up area can be used to connect it with the original locational layout. These major parts of a plowfield are almost always complemented by smaller areas with different land orientation, usually on marginal or sloping areas.
A detailed analysis and vectorization has been performed on only 8 localities which differ in many respects. All have common features, however, that are useful for grouping them and interpreting with regard to the situations at other sites. The entire text is seen as a pilot file for processing other sites and for comparative analyses with other types of sources, such as Stable Cadaster maps.

Keywords: extinct village, historic plowfield, digital model of the terrain relief, archeology

Published: December 1, 2015  Show citation