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landscape by social and economic historians
W.G. Hoskins and Maurice Beresford, but it
was distinguished by its emphasis oncartog-
raphyas a means to both interrogate and
display the archive: by the use of historical
sources to construct visually impressive and
typically thematicmaps. According to Darby,
historical geography was a fundamentally geo-
graphical endeavour, one of the ‘twin pillars’
of the larger discipline, alongside geomorph-
ology (Darby, 2002). Geomorphology and
historical geography were both concerned
with landscape formation and evolution,
Darby argued, the former based primarily on
field evidence derived directly from the natural
environment and the latter on historical
evidence gleaned indirectly from archival
sources. Darby placed a special emphasis on
the reconstruction of geographical patterns as
cartographic cross-sections, exemplified by his
seven-volume reconstruction of the human
geography of medieval England, published
with a series of collaborators and based on
tabulations in the Domesday Book (Darby,
1977). He sought to link such cross-sections
into larger sequences of landscape change
(vertical themes), encapsulated in his work
on the changing fenland landscapes of eastern
England (Darby, 1940).
Darby’s version of historical geography
spread to other parts of the English-speaking
world, but the study of regional landscape
change in the USA developed along distinctive
lines under the influence of Carl Ortwin
Sauer, doyen of theberkeley schoolofcul-
tural geography. Sauer wrote enthusiastic-
ally about historical geography, but his own
work is more commonly described as cultural
or cultural–historical geography, in accord-
ance with his interest in anthropological and
archaeological evidence, following in some
part the German tradition of Landschaft
research. In Sauer’s view, this was a more
appropriate model for the study of long-term
landscape change in the New World, where
thescaleof analysis was necessarily larger
(so he claimed) and where written evidence
was non-existent before European colonization.
It isimportanttonote,however,thatsomeofthe
most successful ‘big-picture’ accounts of US
history since Columbus have been written by
American historical geographers working out-
side the Sauerian tradition (notably Earle,
2003; Meinig, 1986–2004), and that a number
of historical geographers studying the interrela-
tions between European conquest and native
peoples have excavated archaeological and
palaeo-environmental records and attended tooral traditions in ways that could not have been
anticipated by Sauer.
The diffusion ofspatial science in the
1960s and 1970s challenged many of the
assumptions and practices of traditional his-
torical geography, particularly the source-
determined, cross-sectional studies that,
through their disregard of social theory and
their inattention to social process, seemed to
have little purchase on the analysis of subse-
quent geographical structures. A lively debate
ensued, some of it conducted in the pages of
theJournal of Historical Geography, which was
established in 1975. Several different kinds of
historical enquiry emerged within human
geography as a consequence of this period of
rethinking and reformulation.
The first was advocated by those historical
geographers who had become critical of their
field’s source-bound empiricism, and who
now welcomed amethodologythat allowed
historical data to be incorporated into more
complex models of geographical change
(Baker, 2003, pp. 37–71). The result was a
more quantitative historical geography that
had been anticipated by Torsten Ha ̈gerstrand’s
early studies ofdiffusionand of ‘population
archaeology’ that issued in his time-
geography; both left enduring legacies
(Pred, 1973; Dodgshon, 1998). Statistically
minded historical geographers also became
centrally involved in the field ofhistorical
demography, particularly in Britain, where
E.A. Wrigley was a dominant influence (Wrig-
ley and Schofield, 1989 [1981]). In Wrigley’s
case, this involved an institutional move from
geography to economic and social history, a
well-trodden and often two-way career path.
These interdisciplinary exchanges explain why
some of the most important research on Brit-
ain’s agricultural history has been published
by scholars trained as historical geographers
(Campbell and Bartley, 2006; Overton, 1996:
see alsoagricultural revolution; field sys-
tems). The significance of quantitative histor-
ical research within human geography is also
attested by highly sophisticated studies of his-
toricalepidemiologyanddisease diffusion,
consistently identified by their authors as his-
torical geography (e.g. Smallman-Raynor and
Cliff, 2004). The emerging field of historical
geographical information scienceconfirms
the continuing strength of the enumerative
tendency within historical geography (Gregory
and Ell, 2007).
Other historical geographers, particularly
those who had familiarized themselves with
previously unexplored literatures incriticalGregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_H Final Proof page 333 1.4.2009 3:18pmHISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY