Island landscapes: Some preliminary questions

The ESLAND Project (http://www.eslandproject.eu) seeks to investigate ‘European culture as expressed in island landscapes’. All the world’s islands, except perhaps those of the high Arctic and high Antarctic, are cultural landscapes: the product of interactions between the environment, plants and animals, and human cultures. Any cultural landscape, whether of an island or otherwise, accumulates the results of such interactions, which typically go back at least for centuries and often involve more than one culture. For example, in the eastern half of the island of Tasmania, English settlers tried, with varying success, to replicate the hedges and fields of their distant homeland, to the extent of importing hawthorn and elm trees as well as wheat and sheep. This expression of European culture, dating from the early to mid nineteenth century, is superimposed on a pre-existing savanna of scattered giant eucalyptus trees, another cultural landscape resulting from thousands of years of land management by Tasmanian Aborigines.