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PRESERVATION

36 BRIEFS

Protecting Cultural Landscapes:

Planning, Treatment and Management of

Historic Landscapes

Charles A. Birnbaum, ASLA

U.S. Department of the Interior
National Park Service
Cultural Resources
Preservation Assistance

Cultural landscapes can range from thousands of acres of historic vernacular landscapes, and ethnographic landscapes. These
rural tracts of land to a small homestead with a front yard of are defined on the Table on page 2.1
less than one acre. Like historic buildings and districts,
Historic landscapes include residential gardens and
these special places reveal aspects of our country's origins
community parks, scenic highways, rural communities,
and development through their form and features and the
institutional grounds, cemeteries, battlefields and zoological
ways they were used. Cultural landscapes also reveal much gardens. They are composed of a number of character-
about our evolving relationship with the natural world.
defining features which individually or collectively contribute
A cultural landscape is defined as "a geographic area, to the landscape's physical appearance as they have evolved
including both cultural and natural resources and the wildlife over time. In addition to vegetation and topography, cultural
or domestic animals therein, associated with a historic event, landscapes may include water features such as ponds,
activity, or person or exhibiting other cultural or aesthetic streams, and fountains; circulation features such as roads,
values." There are four general types of cultural landscapes, paths, steps, and walls; buildings; and furnishings, including
not mutually exclusive: historic sites, historic designed landscapes, fences, benches, lights and sculptural objects.

Figure 1: The New York Peace Monument atop Lookout Mountain in the 8,100 acre Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park, Chattanooga,
Tennessee, commemorates the reconciliation of the Civil War between the North and South. The strategic high point provides panoramic views to the City of
Chattanooga and the Moccasin Bend. Today, it is recognized for its culturaL and naturaL resource vaLue. The memorial, which was added in 1910 is part of
this landscape's historic continuum. (courtesy Sam Abell and NationaL Geographic).

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