Decoding the past and present for the future: Empowering communities in the Duero River Borderlands for rural development and resource management
Authors:   , Hearn Kyle Patrick 
Published: September 2022

The Duero River borderland region between Portugal and Spain is a landscape abundant in cultural and natural heritage. Although internationally recognized for its biodiversity and natural distinctiveness, both historic isolation and socioeconomic marginalization have had a negative impact on the sustainable development and economic stimulation of the region for the local inhabitants. Compounding the problem is a growing disconnection of the collective memory with many of the cultural resources that form the landscape. This has resulted in a lack of awareness of value for the archaeological and historic singularity of the region. More efforts are required to recompose an interpretation that incorporates the natural and the tangible and intangible cultural heritage aspects of this rural landscape. This recomposition can only be completed through the aid of the people of the region. This thesis addresses the need of valorization through the development of a multi-perspective approach to diachronically analyze the evolution of this cultural landscape. With this integrated approach, this research incorporates both bottom up and top down methodologies of Participatory Mapping of local spatial knowledge, Historic Landscape Characterization (HLC), and the use of remote sensing with spectral analysis to temporally characterize the Zamora, Spain and Miranda do Douro, Portugal portion of this borderland landscape from the Protohistoric period to the present. The attributes of the landscape characterized were both tangible and intangible. Collectively the three approaches characterized the temporal anthropic effects on the agrosilvopastoral landscape through the attributes of: settlements, enclosure types, shrublands, pasturelands, croplands, woodlands, terrace construction, grain milling zones, significant communication and power infrastructure and the toponomy used locally to describe these human influenced areas. For these three approaches Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and an accompanying database were used as a tool for knowledge creation and transfer. This diachronic landscape characterization has demonstrated the evolution of the aforementioned attributes of this agrosilvopastoral landscape and its organization and management from a regional to a local scale as a result of historic processes through the centuries. The combined approaches of this study have created new cartography of nearly forgotten never before mapped settlements originating in the Medieval or Modern periods that were known only in archival records and a fading collective memory. It has temporally mapped for the first time the tangible and intangible historic landscape attributes related to village organization and the management of agrosilvopastoralism. Moreover, it has shown not only their formation in time but with the regional population decline and field abandonment, this study has shown, at both a regional and local scale, the decline or disappearance of these attributes over time as well. Finally, it has qualitatively and quantitatively determined the land cover change at both regional and local scales as a result of historic socioeconomic and political drivers of population decline, abandonment, agrarian reform, and park creation with a detected increase of vegetation measured in hectares. With the increase in vegetation, wildfires have become more frequent in the since the beginning of this century. This research has shown that despite the loss of vegetation from wildfires, there has been a significant continued increase in shrubland and woodland vegetative growth in the greater region in the present day. This study adds to temporal landscape knowledge with its diachronic analysis of this region that began with earlier landscape research of the Iron Age to the early Medieval period. Thus, it helps to construct the needed landscape historical analysis by placing previous research with this study into one unified spatial dataset. With GIS and an accompanying database, this information is in a format which is flexible and adaptable for other researchers today. The data and findings can be displayed for stakeholders and they can be added to in the future for an improved understanding of the temporal and ongoing evolution of the Duero River borderland landscape. Additionally important, this new spatial dataset is not country specific, it incorporates both nations that compose the borderland region. This thesis also poses new questions for future research using archaeology to establish more accurate dates from the High Medieval period regarding settlement continuity and abandonment as well as landscape use. In conducting this integrated diachronic landscape analysis, the final outcome of this research is the transference of the knowledge attained to contribute to the revalorization efforts and ultimately an improved management and sustainability of the region's cultural and natural resources.