Unit 4: Historical paths and patterns of settlement

(Alfred Pletsch)

One of the outstanding German geographic research paradigms in the first half of the 20th century was the 'reconstruction' of the historical process of settlement in Central Europe. Robert Gradmann and Otto Schlüter were the most prominent proponents in a debate that concentrated on the earliest beginnings of systematic land clearings and permanent settlements as well as on possible settlement cycles ever since man's hunting and gathering lifestyle changed. This change took place about 5000 B.C., once the climate in Europe had sufficiently warmed up after the final retreat of the glaciers some 4 to 5000 years earlier. People started to farm around 5000 B.C., preferring rich loess soils and open wood lands. The dispute was mainly about the question whether or not these early people were already able to clear the forests or whether they deliberately chose unforested land for settlement.

With time, these early civilizations improved their tools and skills by using metal tools that allowed them to clear the forests and cultivate land more intensively. As early as 4000 B.C., copper was already used, followed by bronze (from 2200 B.C.) and iron [1] (around 1200 B.C.). Relatively little is known about these early civilizations and their social and economic organization. But all over Germany artifacts [2] of these times can be found, such as graveyards [3], tools, etc. Much more information is available from the Roman conquest period of Central Europe in the early A.D. years. Their empire encompassed almost all of Europe west and south of the Rhine and the Danube, where they changed profoundly the cultural landscape. They built an extensive network of roads in order to control the conquered land. Cities such as Cologne, Trier [4], Mainz, Regensburg and many others were founded at this time. Agriculture was intensified by introducing new farming techniques as well as new crops including grapes from their land of origin in the Mediterranean world. Even though they did not succeed in conquering what was described by them as Germania, they gathered excellent information about it, as can be seen from the extensive writings of Tacitus.

Much of the Roman achievements were destroyed during the Dark Ages when Germanic and Asian tribes, such as the Allamans, Franks, Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Vandals, Huns and many others captured much of Europe during the 3rd to 5th centuries A.D. It was the Franks at the end of the 5th century who finally were able to consolidate political power and gradually built an Empire which covered almost all of Western and Southern Europe by the turn of the 9th century. The division of the Frankish Empire in 843 A.D. can be considered as the beginning of a German national entity which gradually evolved into what became the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation during the Middle Ages. With regard to the history of settlement, the time between the 5th and the 9th century can be labelled as the period of Frankish colonization, with many new settlements being founded within formerly scarcely occupied areas. In the late Middle Ages, when population had increased tremendously, when cities were founded and food demand increased, major colonization efforts took place all over Central Europe under the direction of different monarchs, feudal landlords, the church and other sovereigns. Consequently, between the 10th and the 12th century A.D., huge forest areas were cleared. Many new agricultural colonies were founded in areas which had never ever been cultivated before.

One of Schlüter's major scientific achievements was to classify settlements in Central Europe on the basis of their common suffixes of the place names. Even though this method has its weaknesses (e.g. settlements being renamed over time), it has been efficiently applied to establish a useful time frame for the clarification of rural settlements in Germany. According to Schlüter, four distinct settlement periods did occur:

• Early settlements (4th century B.C. to 4th century A.D), suffixes such as -lar, -mar, tar, -ingen, -ungen, -aha, -affa, -a etc. (so-called Germanic suffixes)
• Settlements of the Frankish period, (5th century to 9th century A.D.), suffixes such as -heim, -haus -hausen, -dorf, -berg, -tal etc. (so called Frankish suffixes)
• New settlements during the High Middle Age (10th to 12th century A.D.), suffixes such as -rod, -rode, -wald, -walde, -reuth, -hau-, -schlag, -kirchen, -zell etc. (the so-called Rodenamen, from the German verb "roden" (to clear) or other forest related terms).

A fourth period can be claimed for the period when the monarchs initiated new settlements in the marshlands and swamps of the river systems. They can often be identified by the suffixes or prefixes, which in many cases are the given names of members of the sovereign's family or of the sovereign himself. Examples: Friedrichsdorf, Charlottenburg, Carolinensiel, Karlsruhe, Wilhelmshöhe etc.

Besides their names, rural settlements in Germany can also be differentiated according to their physical structures and patterns. Settlements of the first and second period in Schlüter's classification are mostly irregularly shaped, a mixture of smaller or bigger farms, varying in size from little hamlets to big clustered farm villages of several hundreds if not thousands of inhabitants. Later settlements, especially those that have been the result of systematic colonization during the 10th through 12th and the 17th and 18th century, have most often very regular, planned land use patterns in the form of green villages [5], street villages, ribbon-shaped linear long-lot-villages along rivers or canals and many other forms. These regular patterns prevail mainly east of the Elbe river, where in the 12th century the Order of Teutonic Knights colonized huge areas formerly used by Slavic peoples.

Clearly, the shaping of the cultural landscape in Central Europe was not a continuous process. Interruptions occurred from earliest times on, though it is not always easy to define their extent. The Dark Ages have been mentioned as one of the development retreats after Roman colonization. An even more dramatic relapse occurred in the 14th and 15th century, whith the Black Death, which arrived in Europe first in 1348. Together with various wars it devastated the population. More than 40% of rural settlements literally disappeared from the map at that time. They were often buried under expanding forests, many of which have never been cleared again. To a somewhat lesser extend, whole villages disappeared as a consequence of the devastating destruction which occurred during wars in the following centuries. Amongst the worst in this respect were the Religious Wars in the 16th century and the Thirty Years War from 1618 to 1648. The vestiges of disappeared settlements are frequent in German forests. They contribute to a better understanding of the historical path of settlement in this part of Central Europe.

[1] http://www.dhm.de/museen/heuneburg/de/einfuehrung1.html
[2] http://www.bawue.de/~wmwerner/english/ipf.html
[3] http://www.altmuehltal.de/kinding/lehrpfad/huegelgraeber.htm (27.08.2003)
[4] http://www.trier.de/tourismus/english/sights/porta.htm (27.08.2003)
[5] http://www.herder-institut.de/index.php?lang=en&id=2591