Laurent LESPEZ, Univ. Paris-Est Créteil et LGP-CNRS UMR 8591, France
Geohistorical work has long demonstrated the hybrid nature and significance of legacies in today's socio-natural systems. If the multiplication of interactions between biophysical processes and anthropogenic actions is more and more assimilated in environmental research, the temporal dimensions of these interactions often remain marginal. However, long-term research, whether conducted within the framework of environmental history, geohistory or geoarchaeology, demonstrates the importance of biophysical and cultural legacies in contemporary dynamics. These works often propose to understand contemporary materiality as a mosaic of space-time fragments.
From the study of small rivers in northwestern France and the Paris Basin, we would like to return to this idea of the construction of space. First, we wish to demonstrate the complexity of the temporal dimensions of those objects and the entanglement of temporalities at work as well as legacies, remanence, reinterpretations -explicit, fortuitous or erroneous- which characterize their functioning and their contemporary management. We thus propose to underline how the past remains a determining actor of the present and also how societies and materiality recompose time permanently in complex timescapes. This entanglement of the lines of time incites us to develop research with a non-teleological objective that also highlights the roles of speeds and durations in the temporal dynamics of the systems studied.
Mots clés : Environmental history|Timelines|Timescapes|Materiality|Rivers
A104268LL