Post-Medieval Archaeology Congress 2017; poster: FORMER SETTLEMENT OF 19TH CENTURY LUMBERJACKS IN BORDER MOUNTAIN REGION OF BOHEMIA
Abstract
In the 19th century Bohemia as a part of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire has undergone great development. Process of industrialisation affected and changed not only space of major cities and tradicional industrial regions, but also regions at first glance remote.
Several years of landscape research deals with one of these regions, the Šumava mountains in the SW border of present-day Czech Republic. This region became a source of firewood for large industrial companies primarily in Prague and Vienna on the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries.
In these yet almost uninhabited mountain regions with pristine woodlands aristocratic families bought cheap grounds and created a great water timber-floating canal systems to move timbers from there to hundreds of miles distant markets thanks to rivers Vltava and Danube. Besides a large impact of wood cutting on the landscape and habitats, also lumberjacks colonization happened there.
Current villages spread, new were settled. But beside permanently inhabited lumberjacks villages formed also seasonal ones in remote areas of the mountain forests.
Research focuses on search for former seasonal settlements of lumberjacks of the 19th century last two years and it is topic of the paper.