Between reclamation and restoration: the archaeology, historical ecology and future development of drained wetland landscapes

ABSTRACT

This editorial introduces the context for a special issue of the Journal of Wetland Archaeology, co-edited by Mairi Davies, Tom Gardner, Benjamin Gearey, Tymon de Haas, Mans Schepers and Michael Stratigos. The volume is a result of a session of the 2021 Annual Meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists hosted virtually by Kiel University entitled ‘The Historical Ecology of Reclamation Landscapes: Towards a Cross-Cultural Comparative Perspective’. The papers explore the archaeology and historical ecology of wetland environments which have been reclaimed and thus take on unique and important characteristics. This includes ever increasing importance as calls grow for wetland environments globally to be restored in order to combat two of the key challenges of the Anthropocene – climate change and biodiversity declines.

KEYWORDS:

• Reclamation
• drainage
• wetland restoration
• wetland degradation
• landscape archaeology

Rapid climate change and catastrophic biodiversity collapse have thrown the importance and condition of wetland environments globally into the spotlight (Convention on Wetlands 2021). Wetlands are being targeted through restoration and rehabilitation programmes to improve a variety of ‘ecosystem services’ including carbon sequestration, hydrology, flood mitigation and biodiversity. Frequently, the scientific and public policy narrative of the condition of wetlands, and thus the benefits they bring, focus on recent deterioration, with continuing declines across a range of ecological and economic indicators (e.g. Davidson and Finlayson 2019). On this basis, there are increasingly many national and international programmes and policy drives to restore degraded and drained wetlands (Convention on Wetlands 2021, 45). These aim to halt declines in ecosystem services and to restore/rehabilitate these environments, securing their functioning for the long-term and helping to, among other things, mitigate the effects of climate change and biodiversity declines (Figure 1; Bonn et al. 2016; Taylor 2021).

Figure 1. The Ramsar Convention on Wetlands (2021) views wetlands as centrally important to the provision and sustainability of a wide array of ecosystem services and these same services are commonly discussed with respect to historically drained wetlands. Image adapted from Convention on Wetlands (2021, 5).

The deep history of wetlands

What has often been missed in the drive for recognizing the importance and calling for the restoration of wetland environments is the articulation of the long-term anthropogenic histories of these places. Normally a relatively simple narrative of environmental destruction via reclamation, drainage, agriculture and other modifications and impacts is presented. There is no question major environmental degradation of many of these wetlands has taken place, but it is often without substantial context. From most environmental perspectives, consideration of human impacts to the form and character of wetland environments from before the mid-20th century is rarely examined (e.g. Dixon et al. 2016) or included in major policy-driven publications (e.g. IPBES 2019). Where earlier conditions of wetland environments are addressed, they often suggest a relatively sustainable or desirable state of affairs, sometimes glossing over the profound role of human cultural activities in those wetland landscapes or becoming formalized into ‘natural’ or ‘normal’ baselines for comparison (e.g. Finlayson et al. 2016). Historical development of wetland environments are usually also portrayed in a very linear fashion in environmental science; from wet to dry, diverse to homogenous, wild to peopled (e.g. Fluet-Chouinard et al. 2023).

Yet, there is a more nuanced story. This includes the complex co-creation between human and non-humans of these key environments, their ecosystem services and how those services have changed through time. It is not simply a linear story of the loss of net carbon sequestration, biodiversity and important hydrological functions up to the present, nor are past states across any of these axes necessarily any more desirable. There is a deep and dynamic narrative of human/environment interaction in these ‘marginal’ places, which provided extremely rich, often centrally important, resources to societies in the past and present. Thanks to the unique insight of exceptionally well-preserved archaeological contexts and artefacts, and associated palaeoenvironmental records, wetlands can illuminate both fine-grained and broad scale changes in cultural practices and environment (and how they are co-created) through time (cf. Balbo, Martinez-Fernández, and Esteve-Selma 2017).

Perhaps chief among these changes in the past, has been the decision to reclaim or drain wetlands. Reclamation is a cultural activity in which people actively modify a landscape to enable a change of functions, to their real or perceived benefit. Reclamation has most often pursued agricultural expansion, but many other changes in function have also been sought, sometimes with less than strictly utilitarian motivations (e.g. Stratigos 2018). Moreover, historically the outcomes of reclamation are rather diverse: not all reclamation attempts were successful, and many reclamation attempts that were initially successful, would face challenges after some time, either because of declining landscape maintenance or changing environmental conditions.

To bring into focus this more varied history of reclaimed wetlands, we here use the term ‘reclamation landscape’, which encompasses all landscapes in which at least one, but often several, reclamation phases took place throughout time (see below, De Haas & Schepers this volume). This deeper, non-linear, history of reclamation is a major phenomenon in wetland environments globally, but often overlooked as a subject of study in its own right for archaeologists (although see Rippon 2001 for an exception). Further emphasizing the importance of understanding the reclamation process is that such transformations not only formed key phases in the long-term development of these landscapes, but have also influenced the archaeological record which survives from periods before, during and after the drainage or reclamation activity. This record stands out from terrestrial archaeology or fully submerged archaeology in important ways, taking on different characteristics in the way the archaeological and palaeoenvironmental records from such environments are formed, and how and why those records are then interrogated and interpreted.

The Special Issue

Reclaimed wetlands provide not only extremely valuable, interesting and archaeologically rich contexts to comparatively assess human engagements with the environment, they also help understand how such engagements shaped the development of landscapes through time. Such a longue-durée perspective may in turn provide crucial knowledge to inform future developments, both to preserve the archaeological heritage and to implement sustainable management strategies, including restoration or wilding projects. Thus, a session of the 27th Annual Meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists (hosted by Kiel University virtually in September 2021) was set up to bring together archaeologists working in reclamation landscapes with a view to understanding these specific landscape histories in the past and what that means for these places moving forward. P were presented exploring different aspects of reclamation landscape archaeology in a range of historical and geographic contexts (Figure 2), and these now form this Special Issue.

Figure 2. Reclamation landscapes discussed in the various papers of this special issue.

The first paper (de Haas & Schepers) sets out a definition for the concept of a ‘reclamation landscape’. The paper discusses two such landscapes in Italy and the Netherlands to comparatively explore the long-term development of these different reclamation landscapes in light of cultural, biological and physical geographical processes. Through single case studies, the following two contributions equally explore the role of drainage and reclamation in contemporary societies in reclaimed wetland landscapes in the Netherlands in the Roman period (Bakker) and in medieval northern Italy (Abballe et al.). These papers highlight how complex geological, climatic and social factors play into the formation of these landscapes in ways which are distinct from other, drier landscapes. Crucially, in neither of these cases is this a phenomenon strictly of the recent past, but rather extends to centuries and millennia of continued and repeated reclamation activity.

The subsequent two papers look at more recent historical reclamation contexts and begin to examine how these can shape, and will be shaped by, the drive to restore reclaimed landscapes to address the twenty first century’s great challenges. Narbarte and colleagues focus upon the wetlands of the Basque coast (northern Spain and southern France), which provide a good example of the profound changes made to coastal wetland areas through reclamation in early modern times. Now, as cultural landscapes, they also face great transformation through current restoration efforts which can impact the heritage of these environments. Moving to North America, McLeester and colleagues use data from late pre-contact archaeological contexts in the Grand Kankakee Marsh, USA to show how the archaeological record contains key information on biodiversity and climate change which can inform restoration efforts. Establishing baselines in different contexts highlights how the natural world is conceived in different places and what aspects of past socio-ecological systems are sought out through restoration.

The final two papers more fully shift the perspective from the reconstruction of the history of human engagements with wetlands towards the contemporary state and future development of reclamation landscapes. Stratigos uses wetland archaeology’s unique perspective on historic drainage to assess the degree to which biologically important wetlands in Scotland are often the product of historic reclamation activities. Both McLeester and colleagues and Stratigos set themselves within ecological restoration contexts which look set to become both a key driver for and user of wetland archaeological and palaeoecological studies. Similarly, but with respect to peatland restoration, Hazell and colleagues set out some of the ways in which Historic England has worked with nature government agencies to raise the profile of archaeology and the historic environment more broadly within targets for restoration in reclamation landscapes. The challenges here are numerous, and they often relate more to establishing personal and institutional relationships than any scientific question.

Reclamation and Restoration in the Anthropocene

This Special Issue examining reclamation landscapes and their archaeology and historical ecology comes at a critical time as efforts to restore wetland to secure crucial ecosystem services ramps up to meet the goals and needs of communities, countries and international agreements. It covers a wide spectrum of the issues involved from developing better archaeological understanding of human-environment relationships to the practicalities of working with non-archaeologists in restoration schemes. Reclamation landscapes and their archaeology take on unique characteristics and relevance now in the Anthropocene where twenty-first century governments, environmental NGOs and wider society seek to re-wet places that have witnessed decades, centuries or millennia of the diverse and dynamic environmental conditions of history typical of reclamation landscapes These efforts, while unequivocally required and often beneficial for the in situ preservation of archaeology and palaeoenvironmental records, can also themselves threaten these same records through changes to the burial environment. Moreover, associated changes to the landscape may also alter perception of these reclamation landscapes. Once converted to a ‘natural environment’ again, awareness of the cultural historical elements may fade or be deliberately suppressed in order to achieve a sense of ‘natural’. Our perspectives in this Special Issue also show that this is not the first time wetland environments have been targeted for transformations to improve human life and society at large and that the information contained in the archaeological and palaeoecological records of reclaimed landscapes can be useful for the restoration of wetland environments.

This potential can and should be leveraged to improve restoration efforts which are essential to sustainably secure their vital ecosystem services. This is a message that those pursuing restoration need to hear more clearly from wetland archaeologists. There is movement here in a positive direction, for example in the IUCN Peatland Code for the UK (2023) now contains requirement for considering the historic environment within peatland restoration projects. It is time for wetland archaeology to more explicitly and directly take up its critical role to meet the dual challenges of the Anthropocene: to contribute what it can to restoration while generating knowledge of the past and doing its best to preserve the exceptional wetland archaeological resources which are known around the world for the future.