The EARTH network aims to provide a buffer between modern agriculture and European agricultural heritage. This requires interdisciplinary research and integration; in situ experimentation and conservation; and dissemination to a broad range of interest groups.

The EARTH network crosses traditional institutional barriers, with cooperation between museums, research institutes and open-air demonstration and experimental centers. The principal partners of the EARTH network come from over 15 different countries in Europe and beyond, and cover a similarly broad range of research skills and expertise. Linked together by a shared database, we can examine contemporary issues of agricultural and technical heritage from archaeological, agronomic, ethnographic, and historical perspectives, and, just as importantly, integrate these different approaches.

Such research is accompanied by the recording and reconstruction of traditional techniques, and the experimental planting of crops now considered non-commercial. Digital film and video recording of landscapes, tools, techniques and crops ensures the survival of these images and therefore the information they contain. This extends to the conservation of older decaying documents by means of digitisation. The conservation of tools and crop-processing locales and the experimental use of reconstructed tools or traditional methods draw attention to them and help to stimulate their re-adoption.

None of this is of any use unless it is disseminated to interested academic, public and decision-making groups. Education, distribution of materials, and publication are important aims of the EARTH network. Information technology is crucial here, with images and data being made available in a user-friendly form on the Internet. Other proposed forms of publishing consist of children’s books, academic reports, popular books in relevant local languages, and the production of archive films.

Transverse Themes

Our three transverse themes are just as important to the programme’s goals as the activities of the individual teams. Each one will be the subject of a conference of all the programme’s participants. The purpose of this is to bring the different research fields of each team together to address topics of common concern, each one resulting in a fully integrated publication.

Transverse theme 1. The social and cultural dimensions of agriculture

The investigation of soils, climate, water supply and other environmental factors is essential to the study of pre-industrial agriculture, and much excellent research has been done on these topics. It is clear, however, that social and cultural factors can produce entirely different solutions in the same environmental conditions. People choose crops and foods based on their social, cultural and personal context. Agricultural practices need to be sanctioned by the community and society as well as functional for the particular job. Agricultural landscapes are created by social hierarchies, beliefs and memories just as much as by alluviation or rainfall patterns.

Transverse theme 2. Stability, change and continuity in agriculture

Agricultural societies often seem to show striking continuity and stability. This was once seen as the stasis and conservatism of a ‘traditional’ or ‘timeless’ agricultural society. Research into peasant societies and other cases of non-industrial agriculture has shown that the same tools, structures or processes can play many different roles and take on many different meanings. We aim to look behind the technological continuity and find the subtle changes, structures of community and identity, and networks of control.

Transverse theme 3. Non-industrial agriculture: crisis and tranfers, past and present

Agricultural crises can have a vast range of causes. Environmental disasters can be the result of human action as well as natural, while colonisation or state appropriation can be as devastating as large-scale warfare. Social developments can also have a huge impact, such as emigration from the countryside, or inheritance customs which cause excessive land fragmentation. In all such cases, the factors affecting agricultural crops, practices and landscapes are deeply interwoven. Only by bringing together the different perspectives and research areas of the three teams can we gain a nuanced and wide-ranging understanding of the nature of agricultural crisis and change.

Transverse research topics

As well as the three general transverse themes, programme members will focus on a series of specific topics which cut across the areas of all three teams:

·        Wild plant foods in agricultural societies

·        Uses of straw (fodder, mud brick temper, thatching, etc)

·        The social role of agricultural facilities (barns, storage pits, threshing floors, etc)

·        Cultivation on slopes

·        Colonialism and agriculture