Historical Geography in the 21st century
Historical Geography in the 21st century

Summary/Abstract: Historical geography as part of the spectrum of auxiliary historic disciplines plays an indispensable role in the study of state, changes, and development of a specific region in the past, along with causes of such changes, their consequences, and the related laws. It reconstruct the already-extinct medieval and modern-age landscape (region), considering the mutual relationship between man and nature. Through its natural (geoecological) parameters (limits), landscape influences the activities and behavior of human individuals/society within a given time and space. Historic and geographical aspects suggest we need to know which human activities have always been present in the landscape and how they were, and still are, impacting the studied structure. It is only natural that such perceived analysis of historic (or pre-historic) landscape calls not only for the application of “classic” methods (e.g. historic, cartographic methods), but also for approaches of the related disciplines. (geoecology, cultural geography, landscape archaeology, etc.) In fact, their combination provides a more complex view on the assessment of historic-geographical systems and their development, as well as social and natural driving forces behind the society-environment development trends or, more exactly, human-landscape (space)-culture-time relationship. Such designed platform helps to form an environmental-cultural-geographical strategy of historical geography, which we refer to as post-positivistic to post-modern historical geography. This article offers a closer perspective on some dimensions of the studied discipline; it outlines selected dimensions of the interdisciplinary approaches within the context of three basic historical geography strategies that have profiled themselves over the last decades.

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