Unprotected Forest Landscapes and Their Threatened Examples. Extinct Medieval Villages with Field systems, Their Legibility and Significance

The article summarizes the evaluation of the economic background of the vanished medieval villages, mainly in western Bohemia, where the field systems was documented on the basis of detailed airborne laser scanning data. In the first part, it briefly discusses the context of the survey in regards to the research development and with a justification of why it is still a methodologically minimally fixed issue, with different possible focuses and roles in archaeological conservation in forest environments. Furthermore, the status of their registration in the State Archaeological List and protection as cultural heritage is discussed on the example of about sixty sites, which is related to the presence or absence of significant objects – fortresses. These, like the buildings of today‘s freestanding churches, tend to concentrate not only protection but also area records purely on themselves. In a broader context, it is subsequently shown that the location, and thus the settlement role of fortresses in relation to the urban area of the villages, used to be very different, and the significance of individual sites is often only revealed by a larger comparative survey. It is only in a broader documentary and analytical context that it is then possible to correctly attribute the surviving parts of their non-urban areas to some sites and to better assess their settlement-historical as well as heritage significance.

Keywords: LiDAR; landscape archaeology; settlement development; extinct medieval villages; fortresses