Cultural and Historic Landscapes: A Selected Bibliography

Melnick, Robert

The recognition of the importance of cultural and historic landscapes is not new. Many fields of literature have for years explored various aspects of the landscape, concentrating on human control and management. It is only recently, however, that this material has been seen to embody a literature all its own, stemming from many fields, and exploring the inter-disciplinary characteristics of landscape studies. As operationally defined for this research, a cultural landscape clearly represents or reflects the patterns of settlement or use of the landscape, as well as the continuum or evolution of cultural attitudes, norms and values towards the land. Historic landscapes, as defined for this work, are strongly associated with a particular person, event, or specific period of significance. Historic landscapes, by definition, are a sub-set of the larger realm of cultural landscapes. The following selected bibliography draws literature from a number of areas: architecture, geography, historic reservation, landscape and landscape architecture, planning, and others. It is assumed that the researcher using this bibliography has a fundamental understanding of at least one of the disciplines from which the sources have been drawn. For that reason basic material describing the fields in general has been deleted. It is the purpose of this bibliography to provide the current researcher with an ample listing of citations, drawn from each of these ancillary fields. All of the material listed is either readily available in current periodic literature, still in print, or has been obtainable by this researcher. While some of the older material may be not easily available, it is nonetheless obtainable through standard library mechanisms and search procedures. Any exceedingly out of date material which, while listed in other bibliographies, but not available to this researcher, was omitted. This bibliography was prepared for the Division of Historic Architecture, National Park Service, while the author was on leave from their faculty position in the Department of Landscape Architecture at Kansas State University. It was one of many responsibilities related to the desire on the part of that Division to thoroughly and systematically approach the issue of cultural and historic landscapes within the National Parks.

Cultural and Historic Landscapes: A Selected Bibliography

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