ABSTRACT
In this chapter, two different approaches to landscape studies are contrasted: a ‘science’ approach, which seeks to explain the development of human landscapes on the basis of general ecological principles, in which the evolutionary development of agro-ecosystems is seen to explain landscape change, and a ‘social theory’ approach, which interprets human landscapes mainly as social constructs. Researchers using the ‘science’ approach have often demonstrated a lack of understanding of social processes, while some of the ‘social theorists’ have tended to downgrade landscape studies with the argument that social processes cannot be ‘read’ from the morphology of landscapes.
