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THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE LANDSCAPE IN THE RESEARCH OF ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES 187 the most important and suggestive concepts of this, by now classic, landscape historical approach is the “readable landscape”, which reveals itself to those “who know how to read” — that is, to researchers who can make landscape historical records speak. It logically follows that such researchers consider the landscape as “the richest historical record we possess” (W. G. Hoskins cited: Aston 2002: 12), the richest semiotic system of history. Reading the landscape is no longer the privilege of researchers alone. It is made widely accessible by easy readings which introduce — like a manual with few annotations or bibliography, but with a wealth of illustrations the landscape history of the whole or some part of the British Isles (Richard Muir's work is noteworthy in this regard; see: Muir 1984; 2000). The historian’s job in these studies is often like the detective’s and practical methodological guides are also provided for the “investigation” (see: Muir 2001). The objective approach sees the landscape as a dynamically changing, impermanent phenomenon whose systemic determinant is change, rather than constancy (Aston 2002: 12). To quote Michael Aston’s simile: “If we could see the English landscape developing over the last 6000 years in a speeded-up film, it would certainly resemble an ants’ nest, with not only the ants moving about at a great pace engaged in many jobs, but the nest itself being shifted constantly!” (Aston 2002: 12). Works of the objective approach also often use the palimpsest as metaphor. A type of documents known in diplomatics, it signifies a document with an old piece of (effaced) writing on which a new writing is superimposed. In other words, the old text was scraped out so that the paper could be reused. The old writing can be made visible again with diverse procedures. The major value of these documents is provided by the different writings from different ages, often in different lettering and styles, and the contents also differ. The historical stratification, the different qualities of the strata, and the methodological challenges of reading them provide perfect comparability between the palimpsests and the model of the readable landscape. The objective approach often puts small places under scrutiny, i.e., an aspect of one of the characteristics of the landscape (for instance, land use or settlement research). Thus, it can be linked to ethnographic and local historical elaborations (Whyte 2002: 17). As seen earlier, a landscape is not only a system of physical elements. It is a symbolic system as well. In this sense, it is a construction of the human mind. In the objective approach, we use diverse methods to make the data interpretable. For the subjective approach, we need to take a vantage point. Hoskins thought a landscape could be read like a text. Current interpretations of the landscape as text claim that it is a text of multiple layers of meaning suitable for being read differently in accordance with a wide variety of interpretations at a time (Whyte 2002: 18). Whyte illustrates the difference between the two approaches with a forest. The objective approach would be concerned with the composition of tree species, systems of forest use, and past changes on human influence and the underlying social implications. The same forest, for a subjective approach, would provide themes related to spirituality, mythology, the forest’s ecological values, differences in male and female perceptions, and other less tangible aspects. From the 1970s onwards, the change in the interpretive attitude has resulted in important changes not only in geography but also in other fields of scholarship. Landscape semiotics, landscape phenomenology, and landscape aesthetics appeared (Tilley 1994; Lindstrém — Palang — Kull 2013). A change in quality was brought
