Traditional agriculture as cultural heritage. Forgotten agroforestry practices recorded in textual part of 19th century tax records
Abstrakt
Agroforestry, integration of trees and agriculture, is an example of traditional European land use which became disadvantaged in the modernization. In the Czech Republic nowadays both agroforestry research and practices are virtually non-existent.
Was agroforestry ever in use here? Analysis of Franciscan cadastre (1824-1845) revealed that it was present throughout the Bohemia province irrespective of landscape type, land fertility, altitude, population density and nationality (Krčmářová and Jeleček, in prep.). The chapter will shed light on the main features of Bohemian agroforestry through content analysis of 166 cadastre evaluative protocols (Schätzung elaborate) of the aforementioned Franciscan cadastre.
It will also discuss the interesting fact that even though the agroforestry tradition was clearly still alive it was not adequately documented in this record. Results showing how common rural practices were not recorded bring better understanding of the process of active forgetting of traditional agricultural knowledge during modernization.
In previous research it was found that while nowadays the tradition of agroforestry in the Czech republic is nearly completely lost due to political, economic and demographic changes, in 1850s the agroforestry was a common practice. With the help of previous the Czech republic's-wide historical analysis the cadastres with the greatest abundance of agroforestry were identified and the historical textual tax records of management techniques used in agroforestry were analysed.