Landscape, labour and population in pre-modern Austria

Human societies have inhabited parts of the Central European country Austria for thousands of years. The development process of the landscape shaped by this long period of human impact remains poorly understood. The present study is an attempt to research landscape history on a local scale and compares an alpine, pre-alpine and midland-village area in Austria. We have developed an appropriate concept to describe the landscape ecology features of the study areas in several stages of the past beginning in 1733. The landscape analysis is based on the interpretation of historical data of different kinds (e.g. documents, maps) going back to the preindustrial epoch, which has - at least in terms of landscape ecology - hardly been accessible up to now. An important aim of the study is to localize the historical information in the landscape. Single plots can be traced back even to the early 14th century. Based on the quality of the available historical data the historical landscape is analyzed with regard to categories such as form and intensity of land use, distribution of nutrients and water as well as the pattern of landscape elements and their ecological functions. The comparison of present stages with former ones yields detailed knowledge on the dynamics and stability of landscape structure. This approach allows present-day land units to be identified as a result of long-term development going back to the Middle Ages. The main aim of the study is to analyze factors that bring about change or create stability. We therefore examine factors coupling landscape structure, agricultural production and population development. For this reason, labour and people have been studied over a period of 400 years (1400 - 1800). Besides demographic data of the 18th and 19th century, historical registration material has been collected, which enabled the land tenures to be reconstructed from the 15th to the 19th century. This type of data is a valuable source of information to investigate the socio-economic status of a local population or its farmsteads. The collected data reveal similarities in trends between time series of demography, land holding stability and landscape ecology features. A theoretical model shows how population, production and natural resources are connected in the investigated pre-modern communities.