X-Archives

The project aims to create a “translation code” between historical and geoscientific research questions, archives, methods, and findings. The “unknown unknown” is the interdisciplinary collaboration and the long chronology from the Middle Ages to the present. We relate empirical data from history and geomorphology in a common database so that they can be used by the other discipline, interpret them, and thereby generate transdisciplinary knowledge about human-environmental interactions. From the congruences, we develop a transfer key to correlate geomorphological data with human actions. Our case study focusses on the upper reaches of the Eger in northeast Bavaria on the hydrological roof of Europe. Both the historical and the geomorphological archives contain traces of the multifold ways in which humans interacted with the natural resources of the area across the centuries. The spatial focus allows capturing the interconnectedness of natural dynamics and human society, but the results can be methodologically transferred to other regions. The project is not simply about making the results of each discipline usable for the other one. Instead, we interlink our research right from the start of the project design, exchange impulses through the interaction of the disciplines and thus expand the perspectives on our own material and our own cognitive processes - an iterative ping-pong game between the disciplines. The contrasting and synergistic approaches of both disciplines will be combined and closely coordinated in order to significantly increase the epistemology for human-environment research.

Project participants:

• Prof. Dr. Oliver Sass, Universität Bayreuth, Lehrstuhl für Geomorphologie
• Prof. Dr. Martin Ott, Universität Bayreuth, Institut für Fränkische Landesgeschichte
• Prof. Dr. Astrid Swenson, Universität Bayreuth, Institut für Fränkische Landesgeschichte

Project start: 1.10.2024