TerraSAgE: Terraces as Sustainable Agricultural Environments

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Across the world terraced landscapes have been created to produce diverse crops, to improve soils and to manage water resources - historically, they have been critical in many areas for dry-land agriculture. Despite this widespread occurrence, the history of agricultural terraces has remained poorly understood, largely due to problems in dating their construction, modification and use. This failure to understand the history of terraces has hampered broader research on the histories of landscapes, limiting knowledge of how settlements operated within their wider landscapes and of how terraces reflect the long-term investment choices made by rural communities. A new technique for dating soil profiles developed by members of the project team has recently demonstrated unique potential to unravel the formation and development of terraces through time (Kinnaird et al. 2017). Applied in parallel with geoarchaeological techniques, including chemical and micromorphological analysis, and broader landscape survey, these methods presents an opportunity to revolutionise understanding of past terrace systems and their landscapes - and to reveal and evaluate the societal, economic and environmental strategies that underpinned their construction, evolution and abandonment. Our project will answer research questions in four key areas about the history of terraces:- When and how were terraces constructed, maintained and managed in different periods and regions?- What were the triggers for terracing, and why were they sometimes abandoned?- Has terracing proved an environmentally sustainable land-use strategy for rural communities?- Did terraces enable greater resilience to economic or ecological instability, and did they help mitigate the impacts of past climate change?TerraSAgE is geared towards uncovering knowledge of past landscapes and using it to model scenarios of change and thereby inform sustainable strategies for the future of land-management. Terraces provide a unique case for understanding long-term environmental impacts of land-use and evaluating long-term sustainability in agricultural practice and policy. For example, studies have demonstrated how the EU Common Agricultural Policy led to more intensive farming, mechanisation and new terracing techniques in the Mediterranean, including land-levelling, the introduction of new crops like vines and almonds, and less stable, bulldozed 'bench' terraces. This shift from pre-20th century 'traditional' terracing had major environmental consequences, causing widespread erosion and impacting soil health and drainage. Better understanding of how historic periods of transformation in farming impacted the land are essential to provide better information with which to underpin future sustainable land-use and create informed policies for future resilience, particularly in the face of increasing demand for food and climatic instability. Such needs are not limited to Europe and can be identified around the world. TerraSAgE's research, though conducted in Europe, will have relevance for global terrace conservation and management. In this sense, the project will contribute to progress towards the UN Sustainable Development Goals (for example Goal 2 'Zero Hunger' and Goal 15 'Life on Land', which are both concerned with the sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems). Because the approach of TerraSAgE will examine the relationships between environmental concerns about soil, water and management and cultural heritage issues, the project will also contribute towards the implementation of the European Landscape Convention (which has been signed and ratified by all the countries where the project will work), whose revolutionary definition of landscape emphasises the indivisibility of its natural and cultural aspects.