Seasonality is so obvious that we very often forget about it when doing landscape research. Seasonality is the interface where humans and nature really interact. Seasonality is expressed both in the natural rhythms of the landscape as well as in human lifestyles. Seasonality creates varying patterns of use and appears in spatial practices, paintings, human behaviour. Also, seasonality itself changes together with societal changes - in agricultural societies, summer used to be the working season and winter the resting one; now we are more and more used to summer holidays; Landscapes are seasonal both in terms of time and space, the boundaries between seasons are celebrated; do different seasonalities influence also our mindsets? In most cases we talk about (and paint and study) summer landscapes, but there are more than that. There are times with less light, less leaves on the trees to influence visibility, times when moist or snow make places inaccessible.

This book, a compendium of 28 papers selected from two recent conferences on the topic, focuses on aspects of rural landscape, broadly related to issues of language, representation and power. These are issues that have not been addressed on a pan-European landscape level before.The aim is to offer a deeper interdisciplinary understanding of historical and contemporary processes in European landscapes.

This book has been initiated by the workshop on Cultural heritage in changing landscapes, held during the IALE (International Association for Landscape Ecology) European Conference that started in Stockholm, Sweden, in June 200 1 and continued across the Baltic to Tartu, Estonia, in JUly. The papers presented at the workshop have been supported by invited contributions that address a wider range of the cultural heritage management issues and research interfaces required to study cultural landscapes. The book focuses on landscape interfaces. Both the ones we find out there in the landscape and the ones we face while doing research. We hope that this book helps if not to make use of these interfaces, then at least to map them and bridge some of the gaps between them. The editors wish to thank those people helping us to assemble this collection. First of all our gratitude goes to the authors who contributed to the book. We would like to thank Marc Antrop, Mats Widgren, Roland Gustavsson, Marion Pots chin, Barbel Tress, Tiina Peil, Helen Soovali and Anu Printsmann for their quick and helpful advice, opinions and comments during the different stages of editing. Helen Soovali and Anu Printsmann together with Piret Pungas - thank you for technical help.

This book, a compendium of 28 papers selected from two recent conferences on the topic, focuses on aspects of rural landscape, broadly related to issues of language, representation and power. These are issues that have not been addressed on a pan-European landscape level before.The aim is to offer a deeper interdisciplinary understanding of historical and contemporary processes in European landscapes.

Seasonality is so obvious that we very often forget about it when doing landscape research. Seasonality is the interface where humans and nature really interact. Seasonality is expressed both in the natural rhythms of the landscape as well as in human lifestyles. Seasonality creates varying patterns of use and appears in spatial practices, paintings, human behaviour. Also, seasonality itself changes together with societal changes in agricultural societies, summer used to be the working season and winter the resting one; now we are more and more used to summer holidays

Landscapes are seasonal both in terms of time and space, the boundaries between seasons are celebrated do different seasonalities influence also our mindsets? In most cases we talk about (and paint and study) summer landscapes, but there are more than that. There are times with less light, less leaves on the trees to influence visibility, times when moist or snow make places inaccessible. Should seasonality be taken into account in planning, and if yes, then how?

This book studies seasonal landscape in Scandinavia and Brazil, on the Aegean islands and in European mountains, in agriculture tourism, in cities and in the countryside. "